President Uhuru Kenyatta and his delegation arrived in Malabo on Sunday evening for a two-day visit.
He will hold talks with President Teodoro Nguema on “trade and knowledge-sharing in oil and gas”.
Equatorial Guinea is often described as “a textbook case of the oil curse” with billions lost to corruption.
Oil, trade and Ebola are the major topics on the agenda of an official visit by President Uhuru Kenyatta to Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea.
President Kenyatta and his delegation arrived in Malabo on Sunday evening for a two-day visit meant to “cement relations with the Central African country”.
According to the president’s communication unit (PSCU), he will hold one-on-one talks with his host, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, on “trade and knowledge-sharing in oil and gas”.
However, there are doubts as to what Uhuru will learn from Nguema, a dictator who has held power for more than three decades and presided over the looting and squandering of his country’s oil wealth.
Equatorial Guinea is often described as “a textbook case of the oil curse”. Despite the country’s Gross Domestic Product shooting up more than 125-fold since the 1990s on the back of oil money, two thirds of the country’s half a million people still live in absolute poverty. The country is one of those recently accused of failing to account for billions in oil income.
According to one media report, “(Nguema)'s eldest son allegedly spent more on houses and cars in the United States and South Africa between 2004 and 2006 than the government did on the entire education sector in 2005.”
Kenya expects to begin commercial production of oil and gas within the next few years, following the discovery of viable resources in the Lokichar basin in the country’s north. Last week, a PSCU report said Kenya was looking to learn from Norway, home to the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, on how to manage the sudden wealth and avoid the “resource curse”.
During the visit to Malabo, President Kenyatta will also attend an awards ceremony for the 2014 UNESCO-Equatorial Guinea international prize for research in the life sciences. He will also be involved in a scientific round table to discuss issues such as the Ebola epidemic, and the HIV and Aids pandemic ravaging the continent.Others in the round table talks include UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova and presidents Nguema, Paul Kagame (Rwanda) and Thomas Boni Yayi (Benin).-- Reporting by James Mwambai, PSCU.
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