As most Angolans sink deeper and deeper into poverty, the conspicuous consumption of the small minority of Angolans who are making money seems to grow more extreme. Inside Luanda nightclubs like Kaos, Bahia and Havana, it is easy to forget you are in an African country at all–especially one where there are almost 2 million internally displaced people, where child malnutrition is at its highest rate in 25 years and where the unemployment rate is said to be hovering at about 80 percent.
Obviously, such disparities are hardly unique to Angola. But what is singularly disturbing about Angola is that these disparities are so unnecessary. Some African countries–the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example–could be rich. Angola is rich. It is already a major oil producer, accounting for some 7 percent of annual U.S. consumption. Geologists estimate that within the decade Angola, with just one tenth of Nigeria’s population, will be producing more oil than Africa’s petroleum giant.
Oil companies understand this. But while major firms like Chevron, BP Amoco and Elf are ratcheting up their operations–oil investments are expected to total $18 billion over the next several years–the Angolan people have yet to benefit. Leaving aside the pervasive corruption that siphons off much of the money to offshore accounts, the government of President Eduardo Dos Santos and his MPLA party in Luanda continues to insist that the 90 percent of the national budget that oil revenues represent is needed to fund a military campaign against the UNITA guerrilla movement led by Savimbi.
Many Angolans question whether the Dos Santos government really wants to end the war. Rafael Marques, perhaps the country’s leading dissident and the coordinator of the Luanda branch of George Soros’s Open Society Institute in Luanda, claims that too many leading figures in the regime are making too much money from the war. It is not even clear that defeating Savimbi would bring peace, for, as Benjamin Castello, a leading Angolan church activist, put it, “even without Savimbi there will still have to be negotiations, and without Savimbi who will the government negotiate with?”
And yet for the most part, Angola’s major foreign trading partners and aid donors seem resigned to backing the government’s insistence on a military solution. To be sure, the IMF and World Bank claim that new help will come with stringent conditions. But many Western diplomats are skeptical. As one put it, “In private meetings, we hammer away about transparency, good governance and an end to corruption, and in effect all they reply is, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll get to all that just as soon as we’ve won the war’.”
In public, Western officials seem, if anything, even less critical of the Dos Santos regime’s approach. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice made headlines in Luanda (if not in Washington) when, during a recent visit to Angola, she seemed to support the government’s return to the battlefield as a regrettable but necessary step. Rice later insisted her remarks were taken out of context. But, as one diplomat recalled, “The day Rice’s remarks were published, you could practically hear the air going out of whatever independent civil society exists in this country.”
Some of these activists believe that this Western stance is purely about keeping the oil flowing smoothly. Many Western aid workers in Angola tend to agree. But the story is probably more complicated. The major oil companies do not really need their government’s help all that much. As one diplomat put it, “Companies like Chevron have always had their own foreign policy.” And he points out that during the 1980s, much to the fury of the Reagan administration, Chevron’s installations in the Angolan enclave of Cabinda were protected by Cuban troops.
The main reason for the approach taken by Washington and its allies, this diplomat believes, is simple exhaustion. “We’ve all tried and failed here in Angola,” he says. “The U.S. failed with Savimbi and now regrets the policy; the Europeans believe there is no alternative to Dos Santos; the United Nations is bitter after failing to make the peace deals it brokered stick, and the Angolan government is brilliant at playing each of us off against the other.”
His aggrieved tone was understandable. Angola has become a graveyard of failed diplomatic efforts. But of course the real losers are not the diplomats, who will go on to other, more rewarding postings, but the Angolan people themselves, whose long agony shows no sign whatever of abating.
