The story behind the Baltasar Ebang Engonga leak

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

Over the past two weeks, dozens of videos — estimated between 150 and more than 400 — have been leaked showing a high-ranking official having sex with various women in his office and elsewhere.

They have flooded social media, shocking and upsetting people in the small central African country and beyond.

Many of the women filmed were wives and relatives of people close to the center of power.

It seems some knew they were being filmed having sex with Baltasar Ebang Engonga, also known as “Bello” for his good looks.

All of this is difficult to verify because Equatorial Guinea is a highly restricted society where there is no free press.

However, one theory is that the leaks were intended to discredit the man at the center of the storm.

Mr Engonga is a nephew of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and one of those believed to be hoping to replace him.

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

The 82-year-old was responsible for an economic boom that turned into bankruptcy due to dwindling oil reserves.

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

Obiang’s government has been heavily criticized for its human rights abuses, including arbitrary killings and torture. according to a US government report.

There have also been some scandals – including revelations about the lavish lifestyle of one of the president’s sons, who is now vice-president and who once owned a $275,000 (£210,000) crystal-encrusted glove worn by Michael Jackson.

Despite regular elections, there is no real opposition in Equatorial Guinea, with activists jailed and exiled and those seeking office closely monitored.

The country’s politics are primarily about palace intrigues, and this is where Mr Engonga’s scandal comes into play.

He was head of the National Financial Investigation Agency and worked to combat crimes such as money laundering.

However, it turned out that he himself was under investigation.

He was arrested on October 25 and accused of embezzling a huge sum of money from government 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 notorious Black Beach prison in the capital Malabo, where government opponents are said to be subjected to brutal treatment.

His phones and computers were confiscated and a few days later the intimate videos surfaced online.

The first reference to her the BBC found on Facebook dates back to October 28th the Diario Rombe sitea news site run by a journalist living in exile in Spain said that “social networks exploded with the spread of explicit images and videos.”

A post on X the next day referred to a “monumental scandal that is shaking the regime” as “pornographic videos flood social media.”

However, they are believed to have originally appeared individually several days earlier on Telegram, one of the platform’s channels known for posting pornographic images.

They were then downloaded to people’s mobile phones and shared in 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 of ministers and senior military officials.

The government couldn’t ignore what was happening, and on October 30, Vice President Teodoro Obiang Mangue (once the owner of the Michael Jackson glove) gave telecommunications companies 24 hours to find ways to stop the clips from spreading.

“We cannot continue to watch families fall apart without taking action.” he wrote on X.

“The origins of these publications are now being investigated in order to find the author or authors and hold them accountable for their actions.”

Because the computer equipment was in the hands of security forces, suspicion fell there on someone who may have been trying to destroy Mr Engonga’s reputation ahead of a trial.

Police have appealed for women to come forward and file a case against Mr Engonga for non-consensual sharing of intimate images. It has already been announced that she is suing him.

It is unclear why Mr Engonga took the recordings.

But activists have cited possible other motives for the explosive leak.

Mr Engonga is not only related to the president, but also the son of Baltasar Engonga Edjo’o, the head of the Cemac regional economic and monetary union and very influential in the country.

“What we are witnessing is the end of an era, the end of the current president, and there is a successor [question] and these are the internal struggles we are seeing,” said Equatoguine activist Nsang Christia Esimi Cruz, now based in London.

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

The vice president, along with his mother, is suspected of brushing aside anyone who threatens his path to the presidency, including Gabriel Obiang Lima (another son of President Obiang with a different wife), who was oil minister for ten years and moved to a lower-level government role.

Members of the elite are believed to know things about each other that they would prefer not to make public, and videos have historically been used to humiliate and discredit a political opponent.

There are also frequent allegations of a coup attempt, which further fuels paranoia.

But Mr. Cruz also claims that authorities want to use the scandal as an excuse to crack down on social media, which is revealing a lot of information about what is really going on in the country.

In July, authorities temporarily blocked the internet after protests broke out on the island of Annobón.

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

The vice president, who himself has been convicted of corruption in France and has seized lavish assets in various countries, wants to be seen as the man who takes action against bribery and injustice at home.

Last year, for example he ordered the arrest of his half-brother over allegations that he sold a plane belonging to the state airline.

But in this case, the clips continue to be viewed despite the vice president’s efforts to stop the distribution.

This week he tried to appear more forceful, calling for surveillance cameras to be installed in government offices “to combat indecent and illegal acts.” the official news agency reported.

He said the scandal had “denigrated the country’s image” and ordered that any civil servants caught engaging in sexual acts in the workplace would be suspended as it constituted a “flagrant breach of the code of conduct”.

He was not wrong that the story aroused great outside interest.

According to Google data, searches containing the country’s name have skyrocketed since the beginning of this week.

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This has left some activists who have tried to tell the world what is really going on in the country frustrated.

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

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

Additional reporting by Peter Mwai of BBC Verify.