by Adam Roberts
It was also reported that Obiang’s illness – cancer – was becoming more acute by 2006. He was rumoured to weigh just 50 kilos (110 pounds) and he reportedly contacted Angola’s government asking for peacekeeping troops to keep order in Equatorial Guinea, for the moment when he expected to hand power over to his elder son, Teodorin.
Spain was suddenly friendly. In March 2005, a year after the failed coup, Spain’s new foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, visited Equatorial Guinea and vowed to help prevent any more troublesome plots. Relations cooled towards Moto. The exiled opposition leader said Spain had sold out so its oil company, Repsol, could get concessions in Equatorial Guinea. Spain’s rulers retorted that the exile would lose his refugee status if he caused any more mischief. Then, in April 2005, Moto disappeared. Some said he had been assassinated, perhaps by an agent working for Obiang. His wife feared he was dead. Others thought he was plotting a new scheme, or sulking in an effort to get more attention. One rumour held he had gone on a religious retreat in Italy. Johann Smith produced a speculative report saying Moto met Wales and Ely Calil in London, moved on to Croatia where he saw a team of military men, then scuttled to west Africa to collect a $2-million shipment of weapons. These he planned to use to invade Equatorial Guinea, perhaps in league with a mysterious group called the Southern Cameroonian Liberation Front.
Several weeks later, Moto resurfaced in Croatia with a tale that was equally bizarre. He told a Croatian newspaper that the Spanish secret service had planned to kill him in order to placate Obiang: ‘As opposition leader … I have become an obstacle to the deals with Obiang and that is why they want to eliminate me.’ He held a press conference back in Madrid and spun another yarn. He was seeking asylum in Croatia when villains forced him aboard a luxury yacht in the Adriatic Sea. There he was to be drowned. But a supposed $10-million payment from Obiang did not appear and the kidnappers – who were good Catholics – decided not to murder him. When they learned Moto was a priest, they repented and let him go. He scoffed at suggestions he was in Croatia to recruit more mercenaries or to buy guns for a new coup attempt.
The exile grew more isolated. Other opposition men, notably those who dared stay in Equatorial Guinea, were recognised by many observers as more serious leaders. To Obiang’s pleasure, Spanish relations with Moto soured further. When Moto supporters protested outside Equatorial Guinea’s embassy in Madrid they were criticised by Spain. In 2006 Moto lost his refugee status in Spain and seemed to be on the verge of being expelled by the Spanish government.
Silver lining
The failed plotters of the Wonga Coup might possibly have done the people of Equatorial Guinea a small favour. As international relations warmed, Obiang’s new friends – notably Spain and South Africa – argued that coup attempts and instability would be discouraged if the nature of government changed. Obiang made some efforts to show that oil money would benefit a wider circle of people, though the standard of living of ordinary Equatorial Guineans continued to slide as the oil income rose. He also spoke of Equatorial Guinea as a ‘fledgling democracy’. But to hatch into one, Obiang and the ruling clan need to be persuaded that their privileged life depends on the well-being of ordinary Equatorial Guineans. That means spending a serious portion of their oil wealth on schools, hospitals and other basic necessities for their people. Equatorial Guinea must establish the basics of a decent state: create a set of laws to forbid torture; allow freedom of speech and other democratic norms. Interested outsiders should be allowed to visit the country and talk openly to Equatorial Guineans. If efforts are made there, the chance of any future plotters getting outside support will decline.
Sadly, there is little sign that the rulers in Equatorial Guinea are ready to change. A poisonous atmosphere of suspicion lingers. Factions in government jostle for power, waiting for Obiang’s cancer to force him out of office. As if this were a kingdom, Obiang’s two sons may well scrap over who succeeds. Few doubt that the obnoxious elder son, Teodorin, is in the stronger position. He has the backing of many in Obiang’s family. But the younger one (by a different mother), Gabriel, appeals more to investors and reformers. If Teodorin assumes office, it will be tricky to promote a better image of the country. In September 2005, Amnesty International again condemned Equatorial Guinea for ill-treating prisoners. That month twenty-three Equatorial Guineans were handed long jail terms, up to thirty years each, for plotting yet another coup a year earlier. Almost no outsiders had noticed that one. All but two of the defendants told the court they had been tortured.
Mann and du Toit were left with nothing to do but wait in their respective prison cells on either side of Africa. Mann’s outlook was probably the more hopeful, unless he were extradited to Equatorial Guinea. He expected to know his fate by May 2007. If, somehow, he landed in South Africa, he could face arrest and a costly plea bargain, perhaps a trial. But he would do his best to avoid that by returning to Britain instead. Du Toit and the others in Malabo might be allowed to finish their sentences in South African prisons. The alleged financiers in Britain – Calil, Wales, Mann and Mann’s companies – expected no prosecution after the failure of the civil case. It seemed unlikely that South Africa would try to extradite them, or that Britain would be notably co-operative. Early in 2006 Thatcher understood that the government of Equatorial Guinea might attempt to prosecute him in a British court. But nothing of substance emerged.
Thatcher as a convicted felon is barred from the United States. His wife Diane has divorced him. He continues some trade in Africa and has found a home back in Europe, though he was asked to leave Monaco early in 2006. He believes he may be pardoned by the South African government. Asked how he felt about Simon Mann he replied, ‘Simon is my friend, not was my friend. Of course I’ll give him a bloody good kicking when he gets out and ask him what he thought he was doing.’
The rag-and-bone intelligence men continue to ply their trade in Africa, despite death threats from thugs. In March 2005 the government of Equatorial Guinea rewarded Smith, naming him ‘Johann Smith, Hero of the Nation’. At a ceremony in Malabo he was granted the ‘freedom’ of the island part of the country and handed a cross encrusted with rubies, tanzanite and diamonds.
What of the oil firms? There has been talk of prosecution in the United States. Some plans have been put forward for promoting better ways of doing business in poor parts of the world. One idea is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative: mining and oil firms would have to state what they pay African governments, and governments would have to say what they get. Others could see where money went, and countries could see when they got a bad deal from the firms. The trouble? Oil firms say they cannot open up their accounts for rivals to look at. It would be business suicide. Even if every American and European oil company became transparent, rival oil firms from China, India, Malaysia and Africa itself would steal their business.
Other efforts have been made. In Chad, the World Bank has some influence on how oil funds are spent. But corruption has not been reduced. In 2005 Chad was named the most corrupt country in Africa. In Sao Tome and Principe, experts tried to set up an oil fund to collect revenues and release them slowly, to be spent wisely. Such funds exist in Norway, Alaska and in other better-run oil producing economies. It may work in Sao Tome, too. Almost anything would be better than Equatorial Guinea, where nobody knows how to spend wisely revenues of some $60 million a month.
In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe continues happily in office. In 2005 he told this author, with a large grin, that he would stay in power until he was a ‘century old’. Zimbabwe’s economy continues to collapse and its people pour over the borders to better run bits of Africa, like Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa. Chikurubi prison in Harare continues to be one of the most unpleasant spots on earth, where prisoners die daily from AIDS and malnourishment. Local media report that Mugabe was given $20 million by a grateful Obiang.
The Wonga Coup was a spectacular effort by outsiders to overthrow an African government.
It failed. Of ten coups attempted around the world in 2004, none succeeded. The rate of coup attempts – let alone successful ones – has declined everywhere. An Oxford University study suggests most forms of violent conflict are becoming less common, and coups are especially rare. Between 1963 and 2004 the average number of coup attempts seen each year in the world has dropped by nearly two-thirds. Though a domestic coup did succeed in 2005, in Mauritania, it was quiet, localised and barely noticed by outsiders. Not a single British novelist, old Etonian or grizzled hired gun took part.
Optimists draw hopeful lessons from the Wonga Coup. They point to successful co-operation in Africa. Four African countries – South Africa, Angola, Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea – shared intelligence and co-ordinated responses. For a continent long split between warring countries this is a rare example of a few of them working together. South Africa shows a readiness to crack down on its mercenaries, even if its legislation is clumsy and ineffective.
Ultimately Simon Mann has joined Mike Hoare and Bob Denard as a buccaneer of world renown who ended up in jail. Like them, he made an early fortune by fighting in Africa, then hired a team of soldiers to overthrow the government of a small island country in Africa. Denard pushed it too often in the Comoros; Hoare flopped in the Seychelles; Mann bungled it over Equatorial Guinea. They had much in common with a fourth man, Frederick Forsyth, who dreamt up the first ‘Dogs of War’ coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea in 1973.
The Wonga Coup is a remarkable epilogue to a story that Forsyth began three decades before. It looks very much as if Forsyth was involved in plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea, especially given documents released by the National Archives in Britain and his own admissions in interviews for this book. After that coup attempt failed, Forsyth wrote up the experience as a novel, The Dogs of War. In turn that inspired other mercenaries. But what Forsyth began, Mann did not necessarily end. It seems likely that someone, one day, will try a rent-a-coup again. Most likely the target will be small and oil-rich, probably an island state with few foreign friends. It may yet be Equatorial Guinea once more. Bored buccaneers, perhaps men who tasted war in Iraq and who are looking for new places to fight in, will dream up another Wonga Coup. Some involved in this one – despite trials, prison, lost earnings and hunger – say they joined the adventure for the kicks and would be ready, given the right plan, to do it all over again.
POSTSCRIPT
Malabo Sunset
‘I’ve been saying how sorry I am to everybody for four years now actually. I’m going to write it on my forehead. “Sorry!”’
Simon Mann, 2008
‘… a nice, orderly, gentlemanly coup d’etat’
Simon Mann, 2009
In the three years or so since this book was first published in 2006, more details of the Wonga Coup have emerged and Simon Mann himself has repeatedly confirmed precisely what he attempted to do, with whom and why.
He endured four years in prison in Zimbabwe, where he exercised, studied Shona, taught his guards English and passed the time with books brought by the British consul and warm food provided by his lawyer. In that time his wife Amanda gave birth and Mann, via his lawyer, told her to name their son Arthur. In letters home he said that he dreamed of the moment when he would read the words ‘Welcome to Heathrow’.
His possible routes back were few. He might have fantasised of a mercenary-led break out, or that he would be given his freedom at the end of his term. On finishing their sentences the men arrested with him at the airport in Harare had been driven to the border with South Africa and sent away. But his fate depended on the ageing Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe. I returned to Zimbabwe, near the end of Mann’s prison term there, hoping to get a sense of Mann’s prospects. One meeting at least gave an insight into how the celebrity prisoner was seen by his captors. Mid-morning, with a friend, we drove to a sprawling house behind a concrete wall near the edge of Harare. Jonathan Moyo had long been one of Mugabe’s closest advisers and his information minister at the time of the plot. I asked how Mugabe and others had responded when Mann showed up, tried to buy a planeload of weapons and kicked off an extraordinary political fuss. Moyo described confusion and some anxiety over the baffling Englishman. They first saw the mercenary as a threat, and then as an opportunity. In the days after his arrest Zimbabwe’s government feared that foreign forces – ‘we thought it would be the CIA’ – would break out the Briton. They assumed that they were holding an important spy, perhaps somebody really sent to topple Mugabe.
The government of Equatorial Guinea did dangle the chance of an early route out of Zimbabwe. In 2005 an official flew to Harare to offer to drop the extradition request if Mann named his financiers and provided incriminating evidence. Mann was trained by the SAS to withstand interrogation, but any sense of duty to his co-conspirators had long since evaporated. He had, in any case, produced a long and detailed confession within days of his arrest.
Mann was ready to deal, but his lawyers in Britain and Zimbabwe advised against. Twice more, in 2006, he sought the same bargain, contacting officials in Equatorial Guinea. Again his lawyers were opposed. Mann says that he does not know why, and that he is furious with Jonathan Samkange in Harare and with Anthony Kerman in London. Most likely they did not trust the official from Equatorial Guinea. Kerman may also have been keen to protect another of his clients, Eli Calil, the Lebanese businessman based in London, who was the main target for Equatorial Guinea. Remarkably, Mann claims that he had no idea at the time that Kerman was representing both men (although Anthony Kerman says he was well aware of the true position).
In May 2007 Zimbabwe’s government agreed to extradite Mann if a court ordered it. He completed his term – reduced for good behaviour – but remained locked up for the prolonged extradition hearings. Delays followed as Mugabe squeezed more political backing and cash from Equatorial Guinea. Mugabe’s government reportedly got $25 million from Equatorial Guinea in exchange for the prisoner, although Obiang said that he had merely helped out a fellow African leader whose economy was short of supplies of energy.
Late in January 2008 Mann vanished from Zimbabwe. His lawyer first said that he was mystified; then he claimed that Mann had been abducted from his cell in the middle of the night after a stand-off between prison officials and presidential security men. Mann later lamented that he was kidnapped ‘with gratuitous violence’. He had been ‘pushed and shoved around, thrown into the back of a truck, smacked with an AK’. He was kept in tight handcuffs, his arms twisted behind his back. It sounds unpleasant, but he is unconvincing when he laments that he became ‘a victim of a far more serious crime than crime I have committed’.
Obiang said that the removal of Mann had been carefully coordinated with Zimbabwe’s government and ‘he was moved in the presidential plane in the best of conditions’. I was told that he was taken through another west African state, again amid fears that attempts might be made to free him. At last he touched down in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, four years late and in chains rather than at the head of a mercenary invasion force.
He would have been anxious, but it was soon clear that he would be treated better than any other prisoner in the history of the country. Although he went to Black Beach, where Nick du Toit and other plotters remained, and where local prisoners have suffered horribly, he was led to an especially-built wing with air-conditioning, an exercise machine and meals supplied by a Malabo hotel. He was even allowed to make regular phone calls to his family in Britain. The president likened Mann’s gilded cage to a ‘five star hotel’, somewhat overstating it.
Amanda Mann briefly broke her silence. She gave a melodramatic account of the misery of being married to a failed mercenary (it was the failed bit that she disliked, apparently; being a mercenary is not ‘a bad thing … It is not a dirty word’). Hearing of Mann’s rendition, she said, ‘was like a dagger to my heart’, and she speculated that he had either been drugged or taken ‘screaming and shouting’. She feared that guards would ‘beat the liv
ing daylights out of him’, as they had killed Merz. She had never visited her husband, she explained, as they both worried about her safety. Other wives and girlfriends (WAGs in the language of British tabloid newspapers) of the plotters had made it to jails in Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea unmolested, but Amanda, as the prime WAG, may have been at greater risk given Mann’s senior role in the scheme.
Then Mann spoke. Nick du Toit had spilled the beans before local television cameras soon after his own arrest, but he later claimed that he did so at gunpoint. This time, a well-respected British television news company, Channel 4 News, among others, was brought to interview Mann. The prisoner looked more bookish than ever, sporting round glasses and a beard speckled with grey. He said that he spoke freely. Long haired, he wore a thin, grey prison uniform and shoes with no laces. Around his ankles were leg irons wrapped with cloth, his wrists bore deep grooves from years in handcuffs. He rubbed one thumb nervously over the other, occasionally smiling and cocking his head in a conciliatory gesture, conceding that the plot had been ‘a fuck up’. Armed prison guards sat nearby.
