Baltasar Ebang Engonga Videos: What Could Be Behind Leaked Sex Tapes

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

Over the past fortnight, dozens of videos – estimates vary from 150 to more than 400 – have been leaked showing a senior civil servant having sex in his office and elsewhere with different women.

They flooded social networks, shocking and titillating the inhabitants of this small country in Central Africa and elsewhere.

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

It appears some knew they were being filmed having sex with Baltasar Ebang, Mr. Engonga, also known as “Bello” because of his advantageous physique.

All this is difficult to verify, because Equatorial Guinea is a very closed society where a free press does not exist.

But one theory is that the leaks are a way to discredit the man at the center of the storm.

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

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

The 82-year-old oversaw an economic boom that turned into a debacle as oil reserves ran out.

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

Obiang’s administration is heavily criticized for its human rights record, including arbitrary killings and torture, according to a US government report.

It has also had its share of scandals, including revelations about the lavish lifestyle of one of the president’s sons, now vice president, who owned a crystal-encrusted glove worth $275,000 (210,000 pounds sterling) worn by Michael Jackson.

Despite regular elections, there is no real opposition in Equatorial Guinea, as activists have been imprisoned and others exiled, with those with designs on power closely monitored.

In this country, politics comes down to palace intrigues and it is in this context that the scandal involving Mr. Engonga takes place.

He was head of the National Financial Investigation Agency and worked on combating 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 into secret accounts in the Cayman Islands. He has not commented on this accusation.

Mr. Engonga was then taken to the notorious Black Beach prison in the capital, Malabo, where government opponents were allegedly subjected to brutal treatment.

Her phones and computers were seized and days later the intimate videos began appearing online.

The first reference the BBC found to these videos on Facebook was on October 28 on the page of Diario Rombe, a news site run by a journalist in exile in Spain, who said that “social media exploded with the leak explicit images and videos.

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But it is believed that they 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 onto phones and shared in WhatsApp groups in Equatorial Guinea, where they caused a sensation.

Mr. Engonga was quickly identified, as were some of the women in the videos, including relatives of the president and wives of ministers and senior military officials.

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

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

“In the meantime, the origin of these publications is the subject of an investigation to find the author(s) and force them to answer for their actions. »

With the computer equipment in the hands of security forces, suspicion fell on someone who, perhaps, was seeking to smear Mr. Engonga’s reputation before a trial.

Police have called on women to come forward to open a case against Mr Engonga for non-consensual sharing of intimate images. One of them has already announced that she is suing him.

What is not clear is why Mr. Engonga made these recordings.

But activists have suggested what may be other motives behind the explosive leak.

In addition to his relationship with the president, Mr. Engonga is the son of Baltasar Engonga Edjo’o, director of the Regional Economic and Monetary Union (Cemac) and very influential in the country.

“What we see is the end of an era, the end of the current president, and there is a [question] succession and this is the internal struggle we are witnessing,” said Equatoguinean activist Nsang Christia Esimi Cruz, who now lives in London.

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

The vice president, along with his mother, is suspected of removing anyone who threatens his path to the presidency, including Gabriel Obiang Lima (another son of President Obiang, born to another wife), who served as a minister oil industry for ten years before taking a secondary position in government.

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

Accusations of a coup are also common, further fueling paranoia.

But Mr. Cruz also says that the authorities want to use this scandal as an excuse to crack down on social media, which allows a lot of information to be spread about what is really happening in the country.

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

For him, the fact that a senior official has sex outside of marriage is not surprising because it is part of the decadent lifestyle of the country’s elite.

The vice-president, who was himself convicted of corruption in France and whose sumptuous assets have been seized in several countries, wants to be seen as the man who represses corruption and embezzlement in his country.

Last year, for example, he ordered the arrest of his half-brother, accused of selling a plane belonging to the national airline.

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

This week, he tried to be more resolute by calling for the installation of video surveillance cameras in government offices “to combat indecent and illicit acts”, the official news agency reported.

Claiming that the scandal had “denigrated the image of the country”, he ordered that any civil servant caught engaging in sexual acts in the workplace be suspended, as it was a “blatant violation of code of Conduct “.

He was not wrong to say that the case aroused a lot of outside interest.

Judging by Google data, searches including the name of the country have exploded since the start of the week.

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This situation has frustrated some activists who are trying to tell the world what is really happening in the country.

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

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

Additional reporting by BBC Verify’s Peter Mwai.