Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, Equatorial Guinea's vice-president
Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, Equatorial Guinea's vice-president has asked the West to stop taking advantage of Africa.
He was lamenting how the French telecom operator Orange SA had "fraudulently" giving the oil-rich country's .gq domain name to the Netherlands.
According to him, doing so had forced his country's institutions to pay to use the domain.
His views were contained in two tweets he posted on January 26, the first tweet said Equatorial Guinea had "discovered that the French from the Orange company engaged in fraudulent manipulation by ceding our domain #gq to the Dutch.
"Now, we have to pay them to use our own domain, which makes it challenging to set up an institutional website with gq for the country."
The second contained his direct accusation of the West: "What have we done to France for it to plunder African countries in this manner? We are once again hindered by their trickery. The West should stop taking advantage of Africa," he added.
Orange SA has not responded to the claims.
Obiang Mangue, a former agric minister is on record to have accused Spain, France and the US of interfering in his country's internal affairs.
In 2020, a French court fined him 30m euros ($32.9m; £26.6m) for embezzling public funds, giving him a suspended jail term and ordering the confiscation of his assets.
The .gq domain name was launched in 1997 by Equatorial Guinean mobile operator Getesa and is reported to be prone to spam, phishing and other malicious use, the BBC Africa LIVE page stated.
With additional files from the BBC
