What the rest of the world sees as a sex tape scandal may actually be the latest installment in the real-life drama over the future president of Equatorial Guinea.

Over the past fortnight, dozens of videos – estimates range from 150 to more than 400 – have been leaked showing a senior civil servant having sex in his office and elsewhere with different women.

They flooded social media, shocking and exciting the population of this small Central African country and beyond.

Most of the women filmed were wives and relatives of people close to power.

It appears some knew they were being filmed having sex with Baltasar Ebang Engonga, also known as “Bello” because of his beauty.

All this is difficult to verify because Equatorial Guinea is a very restricted society in which there is no free press.

But one theory is that the leaks are a way to discredit the man at the center of the storm.

Mr. Engonga is the nephew of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and one of those hoping to replace him.

Obiang is the world’s longest-serving president, having been in power since 1979.

The 82-year-old oversaw an economic boom that turned into bust due to dwindling oil reserves.

There is a small, extremely wealthy elite, but many of the country’s 1.7 million people live in poverty.

Obiang’s administration is heavily criticized for its human rights record, including arbitrary killings and torture, according to a US government report.

It has also had its share of scandals, including revelations about the lavish lifestyle of one of the president’s sons, now vice president, who once owned a crystal-encrusted glove worth $275,000 (£210,000) worn by Michael Jackson.

Despite regular elections, there is no real opposition in Equatorial Guinea, as activists have been jailed and exiled and those with plans for power are closely monitored.

The country’s politics is actually a matter of palace intrigue and this is where the scandal involving Mr Engonga comes into play.

He was head of the National Financial Investigation Agency and worked on combating crimes such as money laundering.

But it turned out that he himself was under investigation.

He was arrested on October 25, accused of embezzling a huge sum of money from state coffers and depositing it into secret accounts in the Cayman Islands. He has not commented on the accusation.

Mr Engonga was then taken to the notorious Black Beach prison in the capital Malabo, where government opponents were allegedly subjected to brutal treatment.

His phones and computers were seized and days later, intimate videos began appearing online.

The first reference the BBC found on Facebook was dated October 28. the page of Diario Rombe, a news site run by a journalist exiled in Spain, which claims that “social networks have exploded with the leak of explicit images and videos”.

A post on X the next day spoke of a “monumental scandal shaking the regime” while “pornographic videos flood social networks”.

But they would have initially appeared one by one a few days earlier on Telegram, one of the platform’s channels known for publishing pornographic images.

They were then downloaded onto people’s phones and shared among WhatsApp groups in Equatorial Guinea, where they caused a storm.

Mr. Engonga was quickly identified with some of the women in the videos, including relatives of the president and wives of ministers and senior military officials.

The government could not ignore what was happening, and on October 30, Vice President Teodoro Obiang Mangue (former owner of Michael Jackson’s glove) gave telecommunications companies 24 hours to find ways to stop the broadcast of clips.

“We cannot continue to see families fall apart without taking action. » he wrote about X.

“In the meantime, an investigation is being carried out into the origin of these publications in order to find the author(s) and hold them accountable for their actions.”

With the computer equipment in the hands of the security forces, suspicion falls on someone who, perhaps, sought to sully Mr. Engonga’s reputation before a trial.

Police have called on women to come forward to open proceedings against Mr Engonga for non-consensual sharing of intimate images. It has already been announced that she is suing him.

What is not clear is why Mr. Engonga made these recordings.

But activists have put forward other reasons that could explain this explosive leak.

In addition to being related to the president, Mr. Engonga is the son of Baltasar Engonga Edjo’o, the head of the regional economic and monetary union, Cemac, and very influential in the country.

“What we are witnessing is the end of an era, the end of the current president, and there is a (question) of succession and these are the internal fights that we are witnessing,” declared the Equatorial activist. Guinean Nsang Christia Esimi Cruz, who now lives in London. .

Speaking to the BBC’s Focus on Africa podcast, he claimed Vice President Obiang was trying to politically eliminate “anyone who might challenge his succession”.

The vice-president and his mother are suspected of removing all those who threaten his access to the presidency, notably Gabriel Obiang Lima (another son of President Obiang from another wife), who was Minister of Oil for 10 years , then moved to a secondary government role.

Members of the elite are believed to know things about each other that they would prefer not to make public, and videos have been used in the past to humiliate and discredit a political opponent.

Accusations of coup plots are also common, further fueling paranoia.

But Mr. Cruz also says that authorities want to use the scandal as a pretext to crack down on social media, which spreads a lot of information about what is really happening in the country.

In July, authorities temporarily suspended the internet after protests erupted on the island of Annobón.

For him, the fact that a senior official had sex outside of marriage was not surprising because it was part of the decadent lifestyle of the country’s elite.

The vice president, who himself has been convicted of corruption in France and has had major assets seized in various countries, wants to be seen as the man cracking down on corruption and wrongdoing in his country.

Last year, for example, he ordered the arrest of his half-brother following allegations that he sold a plane belonging to the national airline.

But in this case, despite the vice president’s efforts to stop the clips from being broadcast, they continue to be viewed.

This week he tried to appear more resolute by calling for the installation of CCTV cameras in government offices “to combat indecent and unlawful acts”. the official news agency reported.

Declaring that the scandal had “denigrated the image of the country”, he ordered that any civil servant caught engaging in sexual acts at work would be suspended, as it was a “blatant violation of the code of conduct “.

He was not wrong to say that the story generated a lot of outside interest.

Judging by Google data, search queries including the country name have exploded since the start of this week.

On Monday on

This has frustrated some activists who were trying to tell the world what is really happening in the country.

“Equatorial Guinea has much bigger problems than this sex scandal,” said Mr. Cruz, who works for a rights organization called GE Nuestra.

“For us, this sex scandal is only a symptom of the disease, it is not the disease itself. This shows how corrupt the system is.

Additional reporting by Peter Mwai of BBC Verify.