Star Metro - Pope to visit prison on final leg of Africa tour

The pope, who arrived in the oil-rich but deeply unequal country on Tuesday after stops in Algeria, Cameroon and Angola, will meet with inmates at Bata prison, a facility criticised by rights experts for extreme overcrowding, poor sanitation and mistreatment of prisoners.

He will also meet with families and young people at Bata's stadium, and pay tribute to the victims of a deadly accident that rocked the coastal city in 2021, when a fire set off a series of explosions at a munitions depot that killed more than 100 people and wounded around 600 others.

Besides Bata, the country's largest city and economic capital, the pope will visit Mongomo, near the Gabonese border, giving mass and touring a school.

Leo began his visit on Tuesday urging Equatorial Guinea to place itself "in the service of law and justice" -- pointed remarks in an authoritarian country regularly accused of rights abuses.

However, his tone was more measured than on his previous stops, when he lambasted the "tyrants" ransacking the world, condemned "exploitation" by the rich and powerful, and clashed with Donald Trump after the US president took issue with the first American pontiff's call for an end to the Middle East war.

- 18,000 kilometres -

Leo, 70, must strike a delicate balance in Equatorial Guinea, supporting the faithful without backing the government of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has been in power since 1979 and at 83 is the world's longest-serving head of state who is not a monarch.

Eighty percent of the small coastal country's two million people are Catholics, a legacy of Spanish colonisation.

Hydrocarbon production accounts for 46 percent of Equatorial Guinea's economy and more than 90 percent of exports, according to African Development Bank figures.

But according to Human Rights Watch, "vast oil revenues fund lavish lifestyles for the small elite surrounding the president, while a large proportion of the population continues to live in poverty".

The pope was welcomed on Tuesday by the president, and spoke out against the "dramatically" widening wealth gap in the country at an event attended by Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorin, who is the president's son and also vice president.

Teodorin, who was convicted in France in 2019 for money laundering and embezzlement of public funds, is known for his luxurious lifestyle that he flaunts on social media, in a country where the majority of the population lives below the poverty line.

The pope will wrap up his 11-day, 18,000-kilometre (11,200-mile) Africa trip on Thursday with an open-air mass in the capital, Malabo, then return to Rome.

O.Poirier--SMC