The story behind the Baltasar Ebang Engonga leak

What the rest of the world sees as a sex tape scandal may in fact be the latest episode in the real-life drama of who will become the next president of Equatorial Guinea.

Over the past two weeks, dozens of videos – estimates range from 150 to more than 400 – have been leaked of a senior civil servant having sex in his office and elsewhere with various women.

They have flooded social media, shocking and exciting people in this small Central African country and beyond.

Many of the women filmed were wives and relatives of people near the centers of power.

It seems some people were aware that they were being filmed having sex with Baltasar Ebang Engonga, who is also known as “Bello” because of his good looks.

All of this is difficult to verify because Equatorial Guinea is a highly restricted society where press freedom does not exist.

But there is a theory that the information leak is a way to discredit the man at the center of the storm.

Mr Engonga is President Teodoro Obiang Nguema’s nephew and one of those said to be hoping to replace him.

Obiang is the world’s longest-serving president, in power since 1979.

The 82-year-old has oversaw an economic boom that has led to a bust as oil reserves are now depleted.

There is a small, extremely wealthy class, but many of the country’s 1.7 million people live in poverty.

Obiang’s administration was heavily criticized for its human rights record, which included arbitrary killings and torture, according to a US government report.

It’s also had its fair share of scandals – including revelations about the lavish lifestyle of one of the president’s sons, now vice president, who once owned a $275,000 crystal-encrusted glove (210,000 pounds) that Michael Jackson wore.

Despite regular elections, there has been no real opposition in Equatorial Guinea because activists have been jailed and exiled and those attempting to stay in office are closely monitored.

Domestic politics really revolves around palace intrigues and this is where the scandal involving Mr Engonga occurred.

He is the head of the National Financial Investigation Agency and works on solving crimes such as money laundering.

But it turns out he himself is under investigation.

He was arrested on October 25 on charges of embezzling a huge sum of money from the state treasury and depositing it in a secret account in the Cayman Islands. He has not commented on the accusation.

Mr Engonga was then taken to the notorious Black Beach prison in the capital Malabo, where government opponents are said to have been subjected to brutal treatment.

His phone and computer were confiscated and a few days later, intimate videos began appearing online.

The first reference the BBC found to them on Facebook was from 28 October onwards. Diario Rombe’s pageA news site run by an exiled journalist in Spain said “social media exploded with leaks of obscene images and videos.”

A post on X the next day called a “huge scandal that shook the regime” as “pornographic videos flooded social networks.”

But it is believed that they initially appeared one by one a few days earlier on Telegram, on one of the platform’s channels known for publishing pornographic images.

They were then downloaded to people’s phones and shared among WhatsApp groups in Equatorial Guinea, where they caused a storm.

Mr. Engonga was quickly identified along with several women in the video, including relatives of the president and his wife, ministers and senior military officials.

The government could not ignore what was going on and on October 30, Vice President Teodoro Obiang Mangue (once the owner of Michael Jackson’s glove) ordered telecommunications companies 24 hours to find figure out how to prevent the clip from spreading.

“We cannot continue to see families falling apart without taking any action” he wrote on X.

“Meanwhile, the origin of these publications is being investigated to find the author or authors and force them to answer for their actions.”

Because the computer equipment was in the hands of the security forces, suspicion fell on someone there, who may have sought to tarnish Mr. Engonga’s reputation before the trial.

Police have called on the women to appear in court to open a case against Mr. Engonga for sharing intimate images without consent. One person announced that she was suing him.

What is unclear is why Mr. Engonga made this recording.

But activists have suggested other possible motives behind the explosives leak.

In addition to being related to the president, Mr. Engonga is also the son of Baltasar Engonga Edjo’o, who heads the regional economic and monetary union, Cemac, and is very influential in the country.

“What we are seeing is the end of an era, the end of the current president and there is a succession. [question] and this is the internal struggle that we are witnessing,” said Equatoguinean activist Nsang Christia Esimi Cruz, who lives in London.

Speaking to the BBC Focus on Africa podcast, he alleged that Vice President Obiang was trying to politically eliminate “anyone who could challenge his succession”.

The vice president along with his mother are suspected of repelling anyone who threatens his path to becoming president, including Gabriel Obiang Lima (another son of President Obiang by another wife). , who served as Minister of Petroleum for 10 years and thereafter. move to a secondary government role.

Elites are said to know things about each other that they don’t want made public, and the videos have previously been used to humiliate and discredit a political opponent.

There are also frequent accusations of coup plots, which add to the paranoia.

But Mr. Cruz also alleges that the administration wants to use the scandal as an excuse to crack down on social media, which is why so much information about what is really going on in the country is leaking out. outside.

In July, authorities temporarily suspended the Internet after protests broke out on Annobón island.

To him, the fact that a high-ranking official had sex outside of marriage was not surprising because it was part of the decadent lifestyle of the country’s elite.

The vice president, who has been convicted of corruption in France and had lavish assets confiscated in various countries, wants to be seen as a crackdown on corruption and wrongdoing at home.

For example last year, he ordered the arrest of his half-brother over allegations he sold a plane owned by a state-owned airline.

But in this case, despite the vice president’s efforts to stop the clips from spreading, they continued to be viewed.

This week, he tried to be more resolute, calling for the installation of CCTV cameras in government offices “to combat indecent and illegal acts”. official news agency reported.

Saying that the scandal had “smeared the country’s image”, he ordered the suspension of any officials found to have engaged in sexual acts at work as this was a “flagrant violation of the code of conduct”. .

He is not wrong as the story has attracted a lot of interest from outside.

Judging by Google data, search requests including country names have skyrocketed since the beginning of this week.

On Monday, on X, “Equatorial Guinea” was one of the top trending terms in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa — sometimes even surpassing interest in the US election.

This has frustrated some activists who are trying to tell the world what is really going on in this country.

“Equatorial Guinea has much bigger problems than this sex scandal,” said Mr. Cruz, who works for the human rights organization GE Nuestra.

“This sex scandal for us is just a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. It just shows how corrupt the system is.”

Additional reporting by BBC Verify’s Peter Mwai.