Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo

Teodoro Obiang has ruled Equatorial Guinea since 1979, which makes him the longest-serving head of state in the world other than monarchs. He took power by overthrowing and executing his uncle Francisco Macias Nguema, whose eleven years had killed or exiled perhaps a third of the population and emptied the country of teachers and doctors; the coup was widely welcomed. What followed was less murderous and no more accountable. Oil was found in commercial quantities in the mid-1990s and the country's measured income per head rose to among the highest in Africa while most of the population stayed without clean water, and Human Rights Watch and the IMF both documented the gap. His son Teodorin, the vice-president, was convicted in France in 2017 of laundering public money into a Paris mansion, a fleet of supercars and a Michael Jackson glove, and assets were seized in several countries. State radio described the president in 2003 as in permanent contact with the Almighty and able to kill without being called to account. He has won every election with figures above ninety per cent, most recently in 2022 with ninety-five. A 2004 coup attempt financed partly from London and involving Mark Thatcher failed at Harare airport. Equatorial Guinea is the only sovereign African state with Spanish as an official language, a legacy of a colonial period that ended in 1968. Oil output has been falling since 2005 and the state has been borrowing against it. He is in his eighties and Teodorin is the designated successor, which would make the family's rule continuous from 1979 into a second generation.

• Lived: 1942 CE – ?
• Nationality: Equatorial Guinean
• Roles: head_of_state