The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and the Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa (review)

An old saw among overseas oil field workers goes: "What is such a nice resource like oil doing in such nasty countries?" In a similar vein, Adam Roberts asks why such a nice resource like oil attracts so many rogues. In this thoroughly readable, fast-paced investigative report, Roberts introduces a constellation of colorful characters. One of these is Simon Mann ("Captain F"), formerly of Eton and Britain's elite SAS military service, who decides to launch a coup by applying his business and military skills and his past connections to recruit soldiers of the former South African apartheid regime. His target is Equatorial Guinea's President Obiang, the corrupt authoritarian ruler of a tiny country that happens to sit atop a giant lake of oil. The president's calculating political and personal nemesis, Severo Moto ("SM") signs on to conceal the white faces, though he has his own ideas about who would come out on top. Shady financiers appear, most notably Sir Mark Thatcher ("Scratcher"), the none-too-bright son of the former British prime minister.

Followers of such skullduggery will recollect that in March 2004 the coup failed and many of the participants subsequently landed in jails in Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe. Still, this reader had to remind himself that Roberts's characters really behaved as he says they did, despite widening cracks in the plan. While launching a coup to seize a country (and its resources) is not a new idea, it is now a stupid one. Roberts points out that Nigeria's government moved to reverse a much more mundane coup in neighboring São Tomé in 2003. More generally, other African states and the international community make life for successful coup plotters—and their business partners—more difficult than in years past. The idea that some white South African and British businessmen could just take over a country with the help of fighters recycled from the armed forces of apartheid and without attracting serious international condemnation requires quite a stretch of the imagination. As oilmen say: Don't they realize that their country is sitting atop our oil?

Roberts tells a great story that highlights how much Africa has changed and how his characters operated out of their time. Even if Equatorial Guinea remains a nasty place and its leader more reminiscent of the Big Men of the decades immediately after independence, the coup plotters confronted changing laws and attitudes. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to fight and bribe one's way across Africa to do as one pleases. They encountered regional diplomacy, antimercenary legislation, and business rules that make legitimate corporations at least mindful of the increasingly troublesome consequences of dealing with shady operators. Since then, South Africa in particular has used this case as a catalyst to tighten its scrutiny and regulation of potential adventurers.

Why did these coup plotters think that they could succeed? Roberts's superb research, including interviews, on-the-ground research, and access to documents, indicates that they limited their analysis to the facts and expectations that fit their designs and just ignored the rest. Moreover, they lacked basic common sense. Even after the plot's failure, Thatcher consented to talk with the author, joking that "unflattering comments published about him would lead to this author needing 'a new dental surgeon,' and that if I dared identify him with the Equatorial Guinea plot I would end up 'as Mr Stumpy,' that is, walking around on stumps for legs" (113). But more recent events remind one that such miscalculation and misreading of capabilities are not that unusual. If the United States government, with all of the power and information at its disposal, could base its policies in Iraq on unrealistic assumptions, it is reasonable to expect that Roberts's much less sophisticated characters could suffer from a...