In sub-Saharan Africa's third largest oil producer, it is getting increasingly difficult to have a drink of pure water, wash, cook or flush the toilet in the tiny nation's island capital. Despite the windfall of oil revenues, there has been little improvement in the living standards of most of this west African country's more than 500,000 inhabitants, who have been ruled since independence from fascist-era Spain in 1968 by the same family.
The chaos each morning around the few public fountains and wells is undescribable. Jostling, elbowing and scrummaging, a huge crowd of housewives, schoolchildren and office-workers armed with buckets, bottles and basins take the city's few working sources of water by assault.
Malabo and its 150,000 inhabitants have regularly suffered regular water shortages that last for weeks if not months, although the situation has considerably worsened since 2001 when the authorities began but never finished a campaign to repair the supply infrastructure. This time, there has been no water in the pipes for a month.
This has not had much impact on the government elite, the diplomatic community and the foreign oil companies, which have drilled their own wells.
But Maria-Cristina, a mother who lives in the residential district of Los Angeles, has no such luxury. "I haven't had a single drop of water for three or four days," she said. "I'm ashamed to let anyone come into the house because of the stench from the toilet, but I don't have enough money to buy a container of water." Although President Obiang Nguem Mbasogo - who overthrew his uncle in a coup in 1979 and later had him executed - has had 25 years to deal with the problem, and has increasingly large sums of money at his disposal, officials diplomatically blame the former Spanish colonial administration rather than the present regime for the penury. "The problem is due to the drought that strikes our capital, above all in the dry season," one municipal official told AFP. He blamed "the disrepair of the pipes that bring water to the town and which date from 1967" - a year before independence, when Spanish strongman Generalissimo Francisco Franco still had eight years to rule in Spain.
According to the US embassy in Malabo, the country's gross domestic product has increased substantially in the decade since the oil began flowing, with per capital annual income of about 5,000 dollars (3,800 euros). But the income from 350,000 barrels of oil pumped every day "appears to be concentrated in the hands of top government officials," the embassy says, while the majority of the population remains poor.
Foreign assistance that could help end the water penury has been suspended because of lack of economic reform and the government's poor human rights record.
For the fortunate few with their own car, the solution is to drive miles out of town in search of a water supply. The water shortage is good business for the street sellers who criss-cross the city with carts laden with containers. But the price of between 4,000 and 6,000 CFA francs (six and nine euros) is too much for many families.
Bata, Equatorial Guinea's economic capital on the mainland, is even worse off than Malabo. Its 300,000 inhabitants have no water supply at all. They have to rely on malodorous and brownish water from wells.
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