Old boys in a fine African mess

A week ago, South African prosecutors tied the son of Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, to an improbable, botched coup in Equatorial Guinea, a minuscule, humid, African dictatorship.

It was not democratic idealism, however, but Equatorial Guinea’s oil production – Africa’s third-largest, netting an estimated $700 million in profit for Obiang each year – that probably lured the soldiers of fortune.

Herald Tribune