The list of Equatorial Guinea casinos with gaming tables for blackjack,
roulette and so on is really rather short. There are none. However,
there are a number of Equatorial Guinea casinos, if we want to use that
term for them, which have gaming machines. There are some five of them
in the country.
This shouldn't really be all this surprising in one sense, this lack of
Equatorial Guinea casinos. It's a very small country (10,000 square
miles only) with a very small population, about half a million people
only. This is smaller than many counties in either the UK or the US and
it is very much the smallest country on the African continent.
Another reason it shouldn't be surprising is that the place is
absolutely dirt poor, destitute in fact. Until just a few years ago the
only export of any significance was cocoa and while at independence the
place was rich off the back of that trade the intervening years of
coups, military rulers and the general looting of the economy have taken
it from one of the richest places in Africa to one of the poorest.
There may be, as many have pointed out, a lot of ruin in a nation but
Equatorial Guinea has shown that there isn't an unlimited supply.
However, one event in 1996 meant that we would have expected the list of
Equatorial Guinea's casinos to lengthen: the first crude oil started to
be pumped and the country is now the third largest exporter in Africa.
Where there is such volumes of oil there is of course a great deal of
money and you might expect some of that to be splashing around in
casinos and such places. But here though, almost none of that oil wealth
has made it to the people, not even to the Government itself most of
the time: the dictator, Obiang, essentially treats the oil revenues and
the national Treasury as his personal check book. This means that while
the country is rich by the statistics, about as rich as Portugal or
Spain, none of this wealth is in the pocketbooks of the people or even
the public services: raw sewage runs down the main streets of the
capital.
It may in fact be true that a lot of the county's wealth does indeed
pass through casinos but that is much more likely to be done in Monaco
or other foreign places where the elite go to spend the money from the
oil.
