I have not returned to my home country of Equatorial Guinea for twenty years, for fear of violent reprisal. I live in the U.S now and I do not dare go back, particularly after that country’s president called me a traitor during a public speech, all because I advocated for human rights and against the rampant corruption that plagues the country.
The Environmental Investigation Agency, a global environmental organization, recently issued a report alleging that Home Depot has sold products made with illegally sourced okoume wood from Equatorial Guinea.
Home Depot is an American corporation worth more than $363 billion, with stores throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and China. It is considered a do-it-yourselfer’s paradise. But for the people in my community, Home Depot represents not paradise but rather the last link in a chain of unsustainable business practices and grand corruption that has afflicted my home country and impoverished our people.
For decades, log trucks have crisscrossed Equatorial Guinea to load timber onto ships in port cities like Cogo, in the southwest of the country’s continental portion. They come from small, rural towns in the area of the Muni River Estuary. In these places, the surrounding forest long provided sustenance to the villagers’ way of life. The trees were used to build homes, fishing canoes, and furniture. Some had medicinal uses and others had a spiritual meaning to our people. The forest provided a habitat for the animals and a place where locals hunt for food and contributed to the health of the environment. Farms in those places provided bountiful harvests of cassava, plantains, peanuts and other essential crops.
Today, life in such villages has changed dramatically. Hunters now struggle to find game, and the ground is less fertile for farmed crops because of the deforestation around the villages. To understand why, one must first understand how the political elite operate in Equatorial Guinea, one of the most corrupt nations in the world.
Equatorial Guinea’s national resources — oil, gas, and timber — are at the heart of this corruption. When oil was found in the country in the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea’s economy further opened up to westerners, who were more than willing to invest in the country in exchange for cheap oil.
Unfortunately, this investment chiefly allowed Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodoro Obiang, to further enrich himself and his family by selling off the country’s natural resources. The president’s son — current vice president Teodoro Nguema, known universally as “Teodorin” — has carried on the family business. He has in fact been convicted in French court for embezzlement and laundering of public funds.
Teodorin was named Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in the 1990s after he had created two timber companies, Grupo Sofana and Somagui Forestal. His father, the president, gave Teodorin’s companies exclusive rights to harvest timber in Equatorial Guinea. Teodorin started to amass enormous wealth by pocketing a 10 percent cut on all timber exports.
In exchange for exclusive access to the forests, Teodorin’s logging companies were supposed to give back by building schools, hospitals, or other community property. I am not familiar with any such buildings ever being built, nor are the activist friends of mine who remain in country, in some cases operating quietly and anonymously.
More than 70 percent of Equatoguineans live in poverty. They largely lack running potable water and electricity at home. They can barely afford to pay school tuitions. Many villages do not even have health clinics.
Many activist friends of mine who have spoken out against corruption, inequality, and human rights violations in Equatorial Guinea have been jailed, beaten, and forced to flee the country. Teodorin, meanwhile, has been pocketing an average of $24.6 million per year from 2015 to 2021 from bribes paid to him by Chinese timber exporters.
As for the wood, it is sent into a black box of shell companies and processing plants in Asia. This is where Home Depot comes back into the story. At the end of this system of environmental degradation and corruption, Equatoguinean okoume wood ends up in doors that are shipped to the U.S.A. and, according to the report mentioned above, sold by Home Depot.
This would be a direct violation of the company’s own rules, which state that Home Depot “will not purchase wood and wood products from regions around the world at greatest risk of deforestation unless responsible sourcing conditions are met.” The Congo Basin, where the okoume wood from my country is harvested, is listed by Home Depot as one of these regions.
According to its own policy, Home Depot is not supposed to buy wood from the Congo Basin unless the harvester is Forest Stewardship Council-certified. Note that there are no council-certified harvesters of okoume in Equatorial Guinea. There aren’t any in the Republic of Congo either, which is where manufacturers often claim that Equatoguinean okoume comes from in order to escape suspicion.
If there is okoume wood at Home Depot at all, then the company has ignored not only its own policy, but also a U.S. law — the Lacey Act, adopted in 1900 to combat the trafficking of illegally harvested and traded wildlife, fish, and plants.
Home Depot sounds like a wonderful place to go when something needs repaired. But its company officials need to be scrutinized over whether they are violating their own policies and conservation law, all the while benefiting from rampant corruption in my home country, thus contributing to poverty and inequality there.
Until Home Depot implements transparency and traceability measures that allow the company to know where its wood comes from, people in forest communities will suffer for it.
Tutu Alicante is an exiled human rights and anti-corruption activist from Equatorial Guinea living in the U.S.
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