[BRIEF NOTE] We're safe, people

[rfmcdonald]

Jonathan Edelstein is right when he says that Equatorial Guinea's PPP-adjusted GDP per capita is not in the same range as Atlantic Canada. Equatorial Guinea, for those of you who don't know, is a country resulting from Spain's last efforts at imperialism (PDF format) and is the only Hispanophone country in Africa (PDF format), ruled after its decolonization by Francisco Mací­as Nguema, a man whose dictatorship killed or exiled one-third of the population in an auto-genocide rather more complete than that achieved by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and all the more impressive because of the lack of any coherent ideology, Macias being overthrown in a 1979 coup by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema and executed by Moroccan soldiers, Equatorial Guinea's second ruler then going on to maintain a repressive kleptocracy (PDF format) ruling an atomized society and impoverished economy, said kleptocracy being enormously strengthened (like kleptocracies elsewhere) by massively profitable oil exports.

It is true that Atlantic Canada has been surpassed by post-Communist countries, post-war countries, and post-war countries. We have not also been surpassed by a post/quasi-genocidal kleptocracies. Why, at Equatorial Guinea's current double-digit rate of economic growth, it will take at least another decade for it to surpass Atlantic Canada!