Equatorial Guinea votes, Obiang power seen firm

MALABO, May 4 (Reuters) - Tiny Equatorial Guinea, nominally Africa's richest country thanks to an oil boom, held local and parliamentary elections on Sunday that were widely expected to affirm President Teodoro Obiang Nguema's tight grip on power.

Voting began early on Sunday in the capital Malabo, on Bioko island in Africa's oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. The rest of the country is situated on the African mainland.

With a population of just half a million, the discovery of oil in the mid-1990s has catapulted Equatorial Guinea into the ranks of the wealthiest countries. Today it is sub-Saharan Africa's third biggest oil producer after Nigeria and Angola.

Gross domestic product was $44,100 per person in 2007, ahead even of Switzerland, Canada and Britain, according to the CIA.

Yet most ordinary people remain desperately poor.

A small proportion of public money goes to services like schools, health care and sanitation, the International Monetary Fund said in a report last week.

Foreign and domestic opponents of President Obiang also criticise a lack of political freedoms.

Obiang's Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) and its allies won 98 of 100 parliamentary seats in the last polls in 2004 and are expected to maintain their grip on the assembly after a lop-sided campaign dominated by the ruling party.

The opposition Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS) party has modest hopes: to keep its two seats for the island capital Malabo and, possibly, to gain one more from the country's continental mainland section.