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LONDON. — Judging by Google’s data, search enquiries that include the name Equatorial Guinea name shot up since the beginning of last week.
Last Monday, on X, “Equatorial Guinea” was one of the top trending terms in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa — surpassing, at times, interest in the US election.
What the rest of the world sees as a sex tape scandal featuring Baltasar Ebang Mr Engonga, who is also known as “Bello” because of his good looks, could in fact be the latest episode in the real-life drama over who will become Equatorial Guinea’s next president.
Over the past fortnight, dozens of videos — estimates range from 150 to more than 400 — have been leaked of Mr Engonga, a senior civil —servant, having sex in his office and elsewhere with different women.
They have flooded social media, shocking and titillating people in the small central African country and beyond.
Many of the women filmed were wives and relatives of people close to the centre of power.
It appears some were aware they were being filmed having sex with Mr Engonga.
One theory is that the leaks were a way to discredit the man at the centre of the storm.
Mr Engonga is a nephew of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and one of those thought to be hoping to replace him.
Mr Engonga was the head of the National Financial Investigation Agency, and worked on tackling crimes such as money laundering.
But it turned out he himself was under investigation.
He was arrested on October 25, accused of embezzling a huge sum of money from state coffers and depositing it in secret accounts in the Cayman Islands.
He has not commented on the accusation.
Mr Engonga was then taken to the infamous Black Beach prison in the capital, Malabo.
His phones and computers were seized and a few days later the intimate videos started appearing online.
The first reference the BBC has found to them on Facebook is from 28 October on the page of Diario Rombe, a news site run by a journalist in exile in Spain, which said that “social networks exploded with the leaking of explicit images and videos”.
A post on X the following day referred to a “monumental scandal shaking the regime” as “pornographic videos flood social media”.
But they are believed to have originally 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 on to people’s phones and shared among WhatsApp groups in Equatorial Guinea, where they caused a storm.
Mr Engonga was quickly identified along with some of the women in the videos, including relatives of the President and wives to ministers and senior military officials.
The government was unable to ignore what was going on and on October 30, Vice-President Teodoro Obiang Mangue gave telecoms companies 24 hours to come up with ways to stop the spread of the clips.
“We cannot continue to watch families fall apart without taking any action,” he wrote on X.
“In the meantime, the origin of these publications is being investigated to find the author or authors and make them answer for their actions.” — BBC.
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter