by Adam Roberts
Mann confirmed almost everything about the coup plot, although he said he had hoped that a local uprising would somehow get rid of the old president. He admitted his failure as a leader, hoping to show that he was a harmless old fool, ill-deserving of punishment: ‘I have to carry the can for that. Really and truly, I blame myself most for simply not saying “cut” two months before we were arrested … I was bloody stupid. [laughs] Mea culpa.’ He had believed there was a ‘crying need’ for regime change, but he also wanted wonga – the money and lucrative businesses that would follow regime change. ‘Now, whether you want to think that the whole thing was a swash-buckling fuck-up, well, obviously it is. Because it failed [laughs]. You know, but that wasn’t how it seemed at the time.’ He had pushed on because he was desperate, and he had believed that the Spanish and South African governments backed him. He apologised repeatedly, although between smirks and giggles. ‘I regret all that. Terribly. You know, but you go tiger shooting and you sort of don’t expect the tiger to win … I’ve been saying how sorry I am to everybody for four years now actually. [Laughs]. I’m going to write it on my forehead [laughs]. “Sorry!”.’
That performance set the script for a show trial in June 2008, in a conference hall in Malabo, and then for many subsequent television interviews. A fair prosecution would be impossible. Amnesty International points out that, with no independent judges and a dictatorial president, no one in the country has ever had one. But Obiang had no need to mistreat his prisoner. He wanted revenge, to deter others and to squeeze Mann for information, but he also wanted to show his own munificence. Mann brought foreign media interest, letting the president show his regime and country in the best possible light.
Mann was charged with crimes against the state, the government and – most grievous – against Obiang. The president, resplendent in a dark suit and sporting a diamondencrusted gold watch, granted interviews to foreign journalists. He concluded that Mann was a ‘criminal bastard’, but others had been in charge. The inmate was being remarkably co-operative, he said, even handing over personal diaries with details of the plot. Other public relations efforts were made. Washington lobbyists spun Equatorial Guinea as a lush paradise, the ‘Costa Rica of Africa’. Obiang breezily told reporters that repression and abuse by security forces were things of the past. “We’re not on the list of countries that violate human rights” he claimed, implausibly, adding that Black Beach was now the best prison in Africa.
Just before his trial, Mann wrote politely to the president asking for a pardon. He believed that, by admitting all he had, and by incriminating others, he had done enough to earn the president’s forgiveness. He claims he received an informal response suggesting that the president agreed. For Mann prison conditions were indeed good. He lunched well with the interior minister, they shared wine (helpful for Mann’s digestion) and even swapped reading material: Mann lent his personal copy of this book to the minister. One British journalist described how Mann munched ‘steak, chicken and vegetables specially prepared by chefs at a luxury hotel’, and suggested that Mann liked to page through the Wonga Coup to relax before going to bed.
For ordinary prisoners, however, conditions in Black Beach were still grim. A local man who was due to be tried beside Mann was reportedly beaten to death during interrogation. The police said that he had killed himself by diving head first on to a concrete floor. One of Mann’s co-accused said of the jail that ‘nobody cares about your life … even the food is lethal’. Beyond those walls, too, the lot of many people remained miserable. Visitors were shown some new building work: an Italian marble foundation near the gothic cathedral in Malabo’s main square; housing developments; new colonnades of shops; the site of a new presidential palace and a second capital city, Malabo Two. But those who asked to travel on their own, to other parts of the country, were frequently blocked. At least one foreign cameraman had his equipment smashed when security men took a dislike to him. Nor was there any sense of the country emerging as a democracy. A general election a few weeks before the trial delivered a classic dictator’s result: Obiang’s party won 99 of 100 seats. A presidential election late in 2009 returned Obiang with supposedly 95 per cent of the votes.
Mann and his latest co-accused – a rag-tag group charged with plotting against the government, some because they had been seen in a bar frequented by opposition sympathisers – were subjected to a show trial. Mann cut a pathetic figure, standing for hours of testimony, at times flanked by security guards dressed all in black. On the first day he wore ankle shackles until a judge ordered them removed. It took twenty minutes to find a key. Now clean-shaven, gaunt, peering nervously over his steel-rimmed glasses, he shuffled with the gait of an old man. Asked how he felt on the first day he offered a rictus grin and said that he was a ‘coiled spring ready to pounce into action’. His strategy, he explained, was to beg for clemency. Clutching his stomach, to indicate that he needed a hernia operation, he offered frequent and earnest apologies. Between those, however, he would smirk and stick his tongue out at local cameramen, again playing the fool. The performance little mattered. Obiang, who would determine his fate, did not bother to attend.
Mann had confessed several times and the verdict was never in doubt, only the sentence. No death penalty was sought. The prosecutor wanted thirty-one years, but the trio of judges dished out thirty-four years and two days, threw in a fine of $24 million and ordered him to stay away from Equatorial Guinea for twenty years from the end of his sentence. His co-accused got shorter sentences – six years was typical – but unlike Mann they were likely to serve out their whole terms.
Mann’s response was stoic, a near parody of a stiff-lipped Englishman. ‘Chin up’ he told his family. He said he would have to be tough: ‘If I have got to push it, I have got to push it. And at least I know now I can push it after four years in Zimbabwe.’
Release
A little more than fourteen months later, in November 2009, Mann received his presidential pardon, along with the remaining South African coup plotters locked in Black Beach prison. The timing of the releases co-incided with a state visit by South Africa’s newish president, Jacob Zuma, and payment of money by Mann’s family to Equatorial Guinea.
It was a carefully stage managed affair, with several foreign television companies, including a team from the BBC, first invited to conduct long and frank interviews with Mann about the coup plot. Again and again Mann confirmed details of what he described as ‘a nice, orderly, gentlemanly coup d’etat’ attempt. Mann conceded repeatedly that his motivation in the attack was to make ‘a lot of money’. He also admitted that he had a variety of plans, including thoughts of assassinating the president or of starting a civil war in the country. He reiterated his belief that Spain and South Africa had actively supported the plot, and that a United States official had spelled out that ‘assisted regime change’ would be acceptable, as long as American oil assets were not threatened and as long as it ‘runs into a free and fair election’ later.
Mann himself, of course, was hugely relieved to be going home. He was handed his passport before television cameras in Black Beach prison and told journalists afresh how sorry he was, and how what he had tried to do was wrong. He was also given a Gladstone bag, complete with personal effects taken from him at his arrest five years earlier in Zimbabwe. His sister and brother flew him in a small, white, private jet, back to Luton airport near London.
Scratcher and the Cardinal
At this time Mann reserved his greatest energy for the condemnation of those investors and former friends whom he considered to be ‘traitors’ who had ‘betrayed me’ and the other jailed plotters. Mann repeatedly implicated Thatcher. In March 2008, to Channel 4 News, he said that Thatcher was no blind investor but a ‘part of the team’. Thatcher retorted that Mann was going through a ‘ghastly process … and he must be frightened and acutely distressed, poor man.’ Talking to the Daily Mail Mann called Thatcher ‘a very naughty boy’ at the heart of the plot, and spoke bit
terly of his ‘intimate involvement in all this’. He suggested that Thatcher and Calil ‘should be here in shackles as well’, and described Thatcher’s long discussions with Greg Wales in Cape Town, at Christmas 2003, about how to run Equatorial Guinea with few regulations. Thatcher, he said, had cited the development of the London Docklands as a model to follow. Mann also described Thatcher’s gushing enthusiasm for the scheme: ‘By D-Day he was an intimate member of the team. He was excited by the whole thing.’
Although other plotters told me that they did not like, respect or trust Thatcher, Mann insisted that he was an active part of the ‘management’ of the project. ‘He came on board completely’, claimed Mann, saying that he frequently met Thatcher whose money was spent on the King Air plane used to fly Severo Moto – the would-be president – towards Equatorial Guinea. Mann said Thatcher already had ties with Eli Calil, and was brought to see Calil again in London during the planning of the plot. (Thatcher confirmed to me that he had gone with Mann to Calil’s home in 2003.) Mann even claimed, implausibly, that the son of the former prime minister was above him in the chain of command.
Thatcher had remarried and was spending time in Spain. (He infuriated one landlord, allegedly, through a failure to pay bills. ‘If you see Mark Thatcher’, the landlord was quoted as saying, ‘punch him in the face for me’). Mann’s blunt contradiction of his claims of innocence was awkward. The government of Equatorial Guinea said it would issue an international arrest warrant for him and Calil. The attorney general said that ‘all legal means’ would be used to bring Thatcher to trial. British tabloid journalists were delighted, sneaking up to his Spanish villa to photograph him in unflattering red swimming trunks, supposedly demonstrating how easily his enemies could pounce.
Mann continued to attack Thatcher and Calil on his release late in 2009, telling journalists in Equatorial Guinea that ‘I am very anxious that Calil, Thatcher and one or two of the others should face justice’. Mann told a BBC interview team that Thatcher was brought in easily because he was ‘in awe of the Executive Outcomes story’. Mann said that he enjoyed Thatcher’s company – ‘I found him very amusing actually because he is so fantastically rude’ – and that he had spent time at dinners and on holiday in South Africa with Baroness Thatcher. And he spelled out that Mark Thatcher was welcomed because ‘I wanted an investor’ and that there was ‘no doubt’ that Thatcher knew about the details of the coup plot because Mann had made them clear. Nick du Toit, by now home in South Africa, also repeated that he had ‘no doubt in my mind’ that Thatcher ‘was involved in the coup plot’.
Short of a kidnapping – a crime said to be rife in the Costa del Sol – it was almost impossible for Thatcher to end up in Malabo. But prospects rose that he could face questions elsewhere. Mann’s public confessions had (aided by requests passed on by the British government) nudged Britain’s counterterrorism police at Scotland Yard to breathe new life into investigations – dubbed Operation Antara – into the financing of the coup plot. Officials from Equatorial Guinea flew to London in 2008 to provide documents, emails, bank records and other details. Scotland Yard detectives went several times to Equatorial Guinea, interviewing Mann on four occasions. Mann said that he would willingly testify against those who he felt had abandoned the plotters on the ground in Africa.
Thatcher kept quiet, apart from welcoming the news of Mann’s release and having previous denials reiterated, suggesting that he knew nothing of the plot. The investigators’ main target, however, appeared not to be Thatcher but Eli Calil. Mann repeatedly accused Calil of being the mastermind of the whole plot. He said that Calil had been given the nickname ‘The Cardinal’ as an indication of his senior position. Mann described how the businessman had instructed him, and how Calil had held meetings about the scheme in Lebanon without bothering to invite Mann. He also said that Calil had ordered him to bring Thatcher to see him in London.
Calil had long avoided queries about the Wonga Coup, issuing flat denials that he had been involved and otherwise letting sympathisers speak on his behalf. The satirical British magazine, Private Eye, suggested there was a ‘vendetta’ against him. Calil once put out his own version of what had happened, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. He said he had absolutely nothing to do with any coup plot, but that he had supported regime change in Equatorial Guinea (for humanitarian reasons) and that he had directly assisted Severo Moto, providing him with funds for political activities. He also admitted that he had introduced Mann to Moto ‘because of his background in security’. Moto later confirmed this. Calil said that in 2004, however, he believed Mann’s job was merely to provide bodyguards for Moto, who would return to Equatorial Guinea to wait ‘a few days’ for a ‘political storm … that would sweep away the present regime’.
Nobody with knowledge of Equatorial Guinea could believe that Mann and his army of hired guns would meekly be allowed to stroll into the country to guard Moto. Equally implausible is the idea that Moto could enjoy such popular support to sweep away Obiang in a peaceful, democratic uprising. So Calil added in his interview that he no longer believed that such a plan was serious. In the years since Mann’s arrest, Calil said, he had learned that Moto and the mercenaries were planning to fly to neighbouring Gabon, from where they would cross by land. ‘I now believe they were going to spend some time somewhere else, train and recce the place and meet up eventually with Moto in Gabon. From there, they would go over the border to [Moto’s] village, gather his people who would start screaming and demonstrating.’ Calil took care to say that he did not know any of this at the time, ‘but since my name has been dragged into this I have made it my business to find these things out’.
Calil’s version of events sounded less than convincing and Mann repeatedly contradicted it. It failed to explain why those involved endured the enormous logistical inconvenience, twice, of having some one hundred people travel at the same time, separately from the Canary Islands and from southern Africa, in secret, if the intention was merely to gather somewhere safe for more training and preparation. Nor did it explain why rumours of a coup were rife in Malabo itself and why Moto had boasted that his takeover was imminent. Nor was it clear why du Toit had planned to be at Malabo airport on the night when Mann and the others were on the move.
The future
With Mann back in Britain and the South African plotters also back home, a few questions remained about the Wonga Coup. For those interested in international politics, a burning question is whether more light might be shed by Mann and others on the role of various countries – notably Spain, the United States, South Africa and Britain – in supporting Mann’s coup attempt. The Spanish seemed most active in support of the plot: Mann said that he expected that, if the coup succeeded, the Spanish would offer de facto diplomatic recognition to the new government within twenty-four hours and 3,000 Spanish Guardia Civil would be placed at his disposal. The South Africans, too, says Mann, knew about his plot and led him to believe that they supported it.
Next was the question of whether Scotland Yard had enough evidence for an anti-terrorism prosecution to be launched in Britain against those who backed Mann. Although Mann had repeatedly said in Equatorial Guinea that he would serve as a witness, it remained to be seen whether he would stick to that line back in Britain. In any case, Mann’s testimony alone would probably not be sufficient for such a case to succeed, so prosecutions would depend on what other compelling evidence could be shown in court.
Last was the question of what Mann would do next. In the month after his return, aside from issuing a few pictures and anodyne statements, he kept quiet. Rumours swirled that he was writing a book, working on a film script, that he had accepted hush money from powerful sources or that he feared for his life. In one interview just before his release he had admitted that ‘there are probably some people around who would be quite happy to hear that I’d died. And so security is an issue.’
Does Mann regret the whole affair? He has said that he was wrong to push ahea
d in March 2004, once he realised that it was almost certainly compromised. He thought that there was a good chance that he, and presumably many others, would be killed. But he says that he lacked the ‘moral courage’ or the ‘strength’ to call off the plot at the last minute. He has also sounded, at times, like a spokesman for Obiang, saying that the old despot is ‘benevolent’ and that he is sorry now for trying to depose or kill him. Yet, in all, he sounds like a man who is sorry that he failed, and he regrets the pain that followed. But that is not quite the same as conceding that it was wrong to try in the first place.
Many would continue to sympathise with Mann and the coup-plotters, because they welcomed the idea of overthrowing Obiang – or other despotic rulers, such as Mugabe in Zimbabwe. When I speak in public about the Wonga Coup it is often put to me that the plotters should have been praised for what they tried to do. Even well-respected academics, notably the development economist Paul Collier, have come out in favour of the occasional coup as means to improve the lives of ordinary people in repressive countries. Collier suggested that in Zimbabwe, Burma and the like ‘coups should be encouraged because they are likely to lead to improved governance. (It’s hard to imagine things getting much worse.)’
The Collier argument is deeply flawed, however. It does not recognise a host of problems with coups. If they are attempted but fail, as in the Wonga Coup, they provide dictators with even more excuses to crack down on any opposition and to resist peaceful criticism at home or abroad. If they succeed they are as likely to lead to further repression by a new regime, successive changes of power through military means or, worst of all, full-scale internal conflict. Africa is peppered with dreadful examples – many much worse than Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea – where military attempts to seize power produced wars and state collapse, for example in Somalia, Congo or Sierra Leone. The weakness and illegitimacy of state institutions (courts, laws and the like) go a long way to explain why so many ordinary Africans remain poor and weak. Bad national leaders, such as Obiang, are certainly much to blame for this. But using violence to kick them out is no solution: coups simply weaken those institutions even more and make it more likely that more violence and upheaval will follow later.