Your neighbors in Dallas and Houston are making business decisions for shareholders that also have profound consequences for Africans.

Equatorial Guinea was a ruined West African country of half a million poor and malaria-ridden people when Texas oilmen arrived in the 1990s.

Today, it ranks second in the world (behind Luxemburg) in per capita income — $52,000 for every man, woman and child.

But the average Equatoguinean sees hardly any of that money.

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo takes the billions from the country's oil and natural gas fields and parks it in offshore banks.

The president's family spends extravagantly, but the vast majority of the money sits in vaults.

It is watched over by French-supervised bankers, while President Obiang mulls how best to spend it.

Two years ago, South African mercenaries financed by a shadowy network that included Mark Thatcher (sometime Dallas resident and son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) tried to overthrow Mr. Obiang.

The plot fizzled as word leaked out, and many of the mercenaries were jailed.

Mr. Obiang has a coterie of Moroccan bodyguards but "sleeps with his eyes open" while pondering his vulnerability, as one African scholar put it.

He sought advice from the oilmen — men like Jim Musselman, president of Kosmos Energy LLC in Dallas, and others from Exxon Mobil Corp. in Irving and Houston-based Marathon Oil Co. and Hess Corp.

SEC probe

Some of that help is under investigation at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which is checking whether the companies' ties to Mr. Obiang's relatives violated U.S. anti-corruption laws.

The companies have promised to cooperate.

Yet, in April, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hailed Mr. Obiang as a good friend of the United States.

The Bush administration regards him as a well-intentioned, if authoritarian, leader who leads a nation that is now the third-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa.

Whatever happened in the past, the Bush administration and the oil companies are now working with Mr. Obiang to help him build a country that can absorb the wealth pouring in from oil.

The oilmen joined forces to sponsor a study by Business for Social Responsibility, a corporate philanthropy based in San Francisco.

Social scientists sent to see what could be done were dismayed by what they found.

Mr. Obiang's predecessor as president, who was also his uncle, savaged the Equatoguinean people between 1968 and 1979.

Opponents were crucified on the road from the airport to the capital. Others were executed in a soccer stadium while a band played "Those Were the Days."

Schools, clinics, hospitals, roads, virtually every government service was abandoned.

Twenty years after Mr. Obiang overthrew his uncle and had him executed, there were no bookstores or newsstands in Equatorial Guinea.

The few public schools had no restrooms.

Clinics run by international aid agencies were abandoned, because Equatorial Guinea made too much money from oil to be eligible for charity.

$65 million

The Business for Social Responsibility study recommended a $65 million plan of investments in health, education and advancing the status of women, who are the mainstay of Equatorial Guinea's meager farms.

The companies themselves took on some of the work.

Exxon Mobil focused on schools and school restrooms.

Marathon took on malaria, the country's biggest public health problem. More than 60 percent of the Equatoguinean people have malaria.

The disease is a debilitating, lifetime illness that makes it difficult to run any sort of business or government agency because so many employees are routinely too sick to work.

Half the people of Equatorial Guinea live on Bioko Island, 20 miles from the mainland.

Marathon, working with other medical professionals, decided to attack the mosquitoes on the island.

The strategy was unique: instead of spraying the island, they sprayed insecticide on the interior walls of every building on the island.

After feeding, mosquitoes land on the walls to digest. And, on Bioko Island, that's where they died.

Mosquito traps around the island are now virtually empty. Marathon's program is on the verge of eliminating the spread of the disease.

A new regimen of drugs, meanwhile, is helping those who already have the illness lead normal lives.

Get help

The oilmen also urged Mr. Obiang to get help from the U.S. government.

After years of wary negotiations, that effort is also bearing fruit.

Equatorial Guinea and the Bush administration have signed a road map for social and political development.

In a unique twist on U.S. foreign aid, the Equatoguinean government is paying the U.S. Agency for International Development $4 million to help create financial accountability and other systems at government ministries.

A private security group of retired U.S. military professionals is helping Mr. Obiang put together a national defense force that may let him sleep with his eyes closed.

What's emerging is national development built on what Marathon describes as a three-legged stool — the Equatoguinean government, the U.S. government and the oil companies.