By DECLAN WALSH

On the steamy shores of West Africa, oil seldom brings good tidings. Equatorial Guinea, the nugget-sized nation at the heart of a bungled apparent coup attempt, is no exception.

A despotic leader, his playboy-rapper son, scheming relatives and thousands of American oil men are the characters of a twisted plot that reads like Dallas set in equatorial Africa.

And although attention has focused on 67 alleged mercenaries arrested in Zimbabwe, a far greater intrigue swirls around the dictatorial regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

Obiang, who came to power by overthrowing his uncle and shooting him dead, has survived 25 years in power by stuffing the Government with relatives, torturing opponents and rigging elections. His would be a perfect banana republic, if it had bananas. Instead it has oil - lots of it.

Obiang's iron fist turned to gold in the mid-1990s when United States oil firms made huge offshore discoveries.

Overnight, the former Spanish colony shot from poverty-stricken obscurity to fabulous wealth. Large oil companies, led by ExxonMobil, invested US$6 billion ($9.2 billion) in operations that pump 350,000 barrels of oil a day.

More than 3000 US oil workers are manning the pumps, and there are direct flights from Houston, Texas, to Equatorial Guinea's capital, Malabo.


"The oil has been for us like the manna that the Jews ate in the desert," Obiang said last year.

But most Guineans have yet to taste that sweet bread.

Most of the vast state oil revenue - up to US$700 million this year - has been salted into foreign bank accounts, many controlled by Obiang.

Most of the country's 500,000 people scrape by on US$2 a day.

"There is no evidence that any of the oil wealth has gone to the people," said Sarah Wykes of the lobby group Global Witness, which this month will issue a report linking Obiang's regime to corruption and drug trafficking.

American oil companies appear unconcerned by the allegations. Last year, ExxonMobil threw a party in Washington in Obiang's honour - one year after his presidential election gave him 97 per cent of the vote.

The result suggested a slight fall in popularity over the previous poll, in which he won 99.2 per cent.

Western business has followed on the heels of the Texan oil men.

Fifteen years ago, Malabo had one hotel with no electricity, food or running water. Two cars in the street was a traffic jam, the phone directory had two pages, and the airport terminal was a tin-roofed shack.