Traffic defines life in Luanda, Angola’s rapidly expanding capital. Traffic and fresh concrete. “It’s one big building site,” said Erna van Goor, Oxfam’s humanitarian coordinator for the country. In many minds, Angola remains synonymous with the Africa of war, a bullet-strafed nation where civil conflict raged for so long that it seemed beyond redemption.
But in three weeks Angola will stage the African Cup of Nations, after hosting last week’s Opec meeting and securing its first IMF loan and the billions of dollars China has already given to the country in credit. Four stadiums have been built, at an estimated cost of £62m, in the cities of Luanda, Cabinda, Benguela and Lubango. Most of them are finished.
Just seven years after the end of a civil war that raged for 27 years and claimed up to million lives while displacing four million people, Angola is booming. Even as the recession has badly affected the value of its key exports, oil and diamonds, economic growth for 2010 is predicted to exceed 8%. A comedown from the double-digit growth between 2004 and 2008 — last year Angola was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies — but an impressive rate for any country emerging from such a shadow.
“Angola sees itself as a regional superpower,” said Alex Vines of Chatham House, the institute for the study of international affairs. “The number of embassies opening in Luanda attests to its growing influence.”
As does the Cup of Nations, a biennial football championship that brings together 16 countries in a high-profile carnival of the sport. The host country takes the honour as a vote of confidence in its stability and economic capabilities. For Angolans, still working to bring about 60 000 of its refugees back from the forests of Congo and battling to repair and rebuild a conflict-battered infrastructure, it is like a shot of pure adrenaline.
The Angolan minister of youth and sports, Gonçalves Muandumba, said that the cup would bring more passion for the sport, resulting in greater social inclusion. In language that harked back to the socialist traditions of Angola’s recent history, he talked of the tournament as strengthening patriotic education and citizenship. He also considered it an important factor in the fight against poverty and famine.
But there are key problems Angola still has to tackle in order to make the tournament a success. First, there is the cost. Flights from Europe are extortionate – from about $2 000 to fly from London. There are still not enough hotel rooms in the country to meet demand and they go for rates that are among the highest in the continent.
But the biggest issue is the roads. Luanda, a vast sprawling city of cranes, glossy blocks rising skywards and slums expanding equally quickly outwards, which doesn’t worry itself with street signs or even road names, is “one bloody great car park” according to one oil industry worker.
“Travel times are just ridiculous,” said Richard Owens who has spent the past two years in Angola. “The thing you hear from a lot of people here, the expatriates, is a countdown to flight-out time, it’s too much for a lot of people to cope with. Even those well-used to the madness of Africa’s great cities. Luanda is something unique. But the whole African nations thing has warmed me to the place. The pride and joy is something you can reach out and touch.”
Billboards that bring a splash of colour to the ugly Cuban-built blocks of flats along Luanda’s ever-growing road network show that pride. “Viva Angola” and “Proud to be Angolan” are slogans that are echoed in the state-controlled media.
“People here are very proud, and the football has really brought that out, given them something to focus on and a great boost to their confidence that Angola can — and will — be fixed,” Van Goor said. “Although the roads are gridlocked in traffic jams with these huge expensive cars, most people have no sanitation — but Oxfam is working hard to deliver these things.
“Angola may well be a building site with new hospitals and schools and more roads being built, but we have problems finding the properly educated and qualified staff to run them. Of course the construction boom has brought a few jobs for Angolans, but many have gone to the Chinese.”
The blue-jacketed Chinese worker army has been conspicuous building roads, railways and schools since soon after the 2002 ceasefire in the civil war. Deals connected to $12-billion in loans given to Angola by the Beijing government since 2004 give Chinese firms the edge when picking up the tenders for public works; some estimates point to well over half such contracts going to China.
Fear of China’s entry into Africa has played into Angola’s hands after years of half-hearted reception from reform-pushing international lenders, said Nomfundo Ngwenya of the South African Institute of International Affairs.
“China’s stepping into the scene was undoubtedly a game-changer,” she said. “Angola suddenly found a seemingly infinite source of finance, without the stringency of externally imposed political, social and economic reform.
“Suddenly everybody is acting as a suitor and the Angolans are beating their chests about their ability to engage a wide range of players without being dictated to — something not many African countries can boast.”
Seen as a sign of credibility, Angola’s securing of its first postwar International Monetary Fund loan of $1,4-billion this year came with commendations from the global lender for commitment to reforms. But despite this and the fact that Angola has enjoyed high-profile visits this year by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, more than 70% of Angolans live on less than $2 a day
Ngwenya said: “Angola is still synonymous with corruption and poverty and it is not yet clear how the windfall is being used. The truth is that the country has been so inward-looking for so long that they have yet to craft a strategy for selling themselves to the rest of the world.”
Angola was being forced to reflect on what it wanted from regional and broader foreign policy, she added.
But at a petrol station in Luanda last week, 23-year-old Evandro Monduro said few had reaped the benefits of living in Africa’s top crude oil producer. “I don’t see anything. Maybe 20 people see the benefits. Only 20,” he said, pointing to a 500-metre queue for fuel stretching behind him, as the Opec oil club gathered under Luanda’s presidency a few gridlocked kilometres away.
Like any developing country, amid the boom and the building are some starkly contrasting statistics. As an expected $10-billion rolls into Angola from oil revenues this year, the average life expectancy is 45 years. The UN has estimated the population to be 18 million but no one knows for sure. The illiteracy rate is 32%. It is not the poorest country in Africa, but it certainly ranks among the most corrupt. Anti-corruption body Transparency International last month placed Angola in 158th place on its annual corruption index of 180 countries.
A lot of NGOs have withdrawn or are in the process of winding down their activities in Angola, mostly because of the oppressively high costs of operating there.
Other African countries have been grumbling about the costs of travelling with their teams to Angola. “I don’t like the Nations Cup in Angola. The conditions are not favourable in any form,” said Nigerian former international Segun Odegbami. “The hotels are very expensive and this means many of our supporters won’t be able to travel to Angola. Also, travelling within Angola is not easy.”
A member of the South African taskforce that bid for the 2010 World Cup said: “I look ahead to the Nations Cup with a sense of foreboding. In fact, I don’t like Angola 2010.”
But other African nations are bending over backwards to catch up on the kind of inroads the Chinese have already made in the new, peaceful Angola.
When SA President Jacob Zuma visited in August this year, he left with agreements for commerce, transport and industry. Angolan president José Eduardo Dos Santos hailed the visit as the start of a new era of co-operation between Africa’s biggest economy and its biggest oil producer. As the pomp and ceremony went on at the presidential palace in Luanda, across town about 100 delegates representing South African businesses were meeting their Angolan counterparts in a two-day networking conference that should see Angolan wealth exchanged for South African knowhow.
“We have got a lot of energy, a lot of interest, Angola is cooking,” one delighted Angolan businessman commented. “It’s on the boil.” –
guardian.co.uk