Business
Equatorial Guinea to Invest $1Billion to Diversify Economy
“Equatorial Guinea is a secure and profitable destination for your money, it is your gateway to Central Africa,” Edu advised business executives at the conference. He also presented his country as a potential base for cross-border investments into the CEMAC Central African regional grouping that includes other oil producers Gabon, Congo Republic and Chad. At present, the CEMAC region uses the CFA franc, which is pegged to the euro.
Call for more transparency
Despite rapid economic growth rates over the last two decades that has seen ports, airports and roads built across the country, primarily by Chinese companies, rights groups and transparency advocates say Equatorial Guinea’s government has failed to match these infrastructure advances with social investments, anti-corruption measures and improved governance.
Calling for more spending in areas such as education and health, former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Rodrigo Rato, one of the invited speakers at the Malabo conference, also urged the government to improve its public accounting. He went on to add, “Equatorial Guinea needs to make transparency efforts.”
The finance minister indicated that 35 percent of the government’s 2014 budget was being earmarked for social spending, compared to 13 percent in 2013. He, along with other government ministers, complained that international bodies such as the IMF had failed to fully recognize all of the country’s improvements over the last decade because they used outdated statistics and information.
“Our biggest mistake is that our statistics, and what we’ve been doing on the health front, have not been well publicised,” Gabriel Mbega Obiang Lima, Mining, Industry and Energy Minister and one of the president’s sons, told reporters in a briefing. Earlier, he had outlined opportunities for investors in the potential production of petrochemicals as well as in the mining and processing of deposits of bauxite, iron ore and coltan, the latter to be used in electronics manufacturing.
Mining Minister Obiang went on to say Equatorial Guinea was ready to build processing zones and provide cheap electricity from its ample gas reserves to support foreign mining ventures. “We are not going to let the investor take all the risks,” he said.
Source: The Africa Report
