If you want to know what is going on in Angola, Luanda airport is always a good place to start. At the military end, the Antonovs now sit idle for days on end.
A year ago the apron would be clear by 8am, after the lumbering Russian planes set off for the towns of the interior. They carried soldiers and military hardware, but also beer, cooking oil, radio batteries, soap.
Those were the days when Unita still roamed freely through most of the countryside, so what little internal trade there was in Angola took place by air, and it was the Angolan army generals who reaped the profits.
Today the roads are still full of potholes and there has been an alarming number of anti-tank mine incidents — but that has not stopped the generals from switching to the road-haulage business, using military trucks, and putting the Antonovs out to pasture.
At the international passenger terminal there are more Boeings than before — in November, British Airways became the latest big carrier to open a route to Luanda, with more foreigners arriving to get their slice of Angola’s ever-expanding petroleum industry. And the Hercules transport planes operated by the World Food Programme are busier than ever.
During the last months of the war, the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) moved thousands of people off their land in an attempt to isolate Unita, which itself survived on looting and raiding. By the end of the war, 1,5-million people were living on humanitarian aid. That figure has risen to two million since the war ended, but the statistic masks the reality that things are getting better. More people have managed to get access to emergency food, and the first post-war harvest is due soon.
To try and make sense of all this, you could look to the oddly-shaped little single-propeller plane, painted in military camouflage, parked near to where men are loading grain sacks on to the Hercules. ”That’s the plane that killed Jonas Savimbi,” said one Angolan journalist.
The Brazilian-made Toucano reconnaissance plane was used to track down the Unita rebel leader until he was cornered and shot dead on February 22 last year. The remaining leadership agreed to talks, and the result was a formal ceasefire signed on April 4. The FAA continues to battle separatist rebels in Cabinda, but the other 17 Angolan provinces have been at peace since then.
But was Savimbi’s death really a necessary condition for ending the war? It has since become evident that Unita’s founder was ready to enter peace talks at least two months before he was killed. Back then, churches and civilian peace activists had been hoping that a ceasefire would lead to a broad dialogue on Angola’s future, which would have extended the debate beyond the government and Unita.
By killing Savimbi before the talks could happen, the government grabbed the political initiative. Unita’s half-starved generals happily talked on the government’s terms, and the dialogue that did take place was all about the technicalities of disarming Unita’s army in fulfilment of the 1994 Lusaka accord.
Adrift without its autocratic founder, Unita gained few concessions other than a year’s worth of luxury hotel accommodation for its leaders, and vastly ambitious promises of assistance for its rank-and-file soldiers.
Angolans outside of the two main gun-toting political camps continued to demand a say in the process; all that happened was that a handful of organisations were invited to put their views to the United Nations after the real decisions had been made.
The passing of Savimbi may not have been a precondition for peace, but it certainly determined what shape that peace took. One European diplomat put it bluntly: ”If you remember, the war was a matter of two elites screwing the Angolan people. Well, now peace is a matter of two elites screwing the Angolan people.”
Yet no one denies that a two-party system is better than a de facto one-party system. The smaller parties that emerged after the official adoption of multiparty democracy in 1992 have done little to loosen the MPLA’s grip on the resources of the state.
This is why several foreign governments are now giving their support, be it tacit or overt, to Unita as it seeks to rebrand itself as a civilian opposition party.
Can Unita do that? It was Savimbi’s portrait that stared down at the British and American ambassadors as they sat as front-row observers at a recent meeting of Unita’s political commission, yet the new leadership is doing its best to distance itself from the absolutist legacy of O mais velho (the elder) Savimbi.
When the Angolan media leapt on to rumours of party in-fighting, Unita officials were equally quick to spin this as a symptom of healthy democratic debate.
Being an opposition party in Angola ought not to be difficult. The country of 13-million people earns about $10-billion, most of it from oil, each year, yet still managed to rank number 161 on a scale of 173 countries assessed in the UN’s Human Development Report last year.
About the same time, a leaked International Monetary Fund report gave a clue to the nature of the problem, revealing that $4-billion had vanished from state revenues in five years. The fact that the MPLA is still tipped to walk through the next election (which always seems to be two years in the future, and is now predicted for 2005) is a sign of how deeply dug-in the party is, rather than an endorsement of its recent performance in the government.
Getting 100 000 former Unita guerrillas resettled and in gainful employment may not be the only thing the government has to do at the moment. But it is generally seen as the most urgent, given that many of the soldiers are believed to have hung on to their weapons during a demobilisation process that was never properly audited.
But if the disarmament drive was flawed, resettlement plans have gone nowhere at all. The provision of ”resettlement kits” — farming tools, seeds and other essentials of life — to Unita’s men was held up for six months after the contract to do this was awarded to a company owned by a close associate of President José Eduardo dos Santos. Things look better where the resettlement of displaced civilians is concerned — 1,3-million have returned home since the end of the war — but most of them did so on their own initiative with no government or foreign assistance. Many are going to areas that are still infested with landmines, and where it will take at least another year to become self-sufficient in food.
One UN official insisted that there are plenty of people in the government who want to get things done. Unfortunately, those are not the same people who have the cash at their disposal to do so, since funds get tied up at the level of the presidency — known as futungo after the seaside suburb that houses the presidential compound.
”As long as futungo is there, the problem remains. And futungo is not just going to go away. So we have to work with what there is,” the official said.
There are indeed other signs that the government can deliver when it chooses to. Since Savimbi died, ”normalisation” has become the order of the day. The remnants of war are a mess unbecoming a country that now holds the presidency of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and a seat on the UN Security Council. So there were plans to close the displaced people’s camps and Unita quartering areas by October 2002; those plans were put on hold after Unita and aid agencies pointed out that there was nowhere else for people to go.
Closer to home, in Luanda, the government has had more success in its cosmetic efforts. Pretty public squares with lawns and fountains have been popping up all over the city centre, while the bairros (townships) remain without running water, electricity or sewerage. People who have no taps in their homes will sometimes help themselves from the lawn sprinklers in the parks, provided they can dodge the security guards.
The SADC summit in Luanda in October saw a new frenzy of painting, and squadrons of street sweepers were deployed throughout the city centre after dark. But the government’s zeal when it comes to cleaning up downtown doesn’t stop at litter.
In a city where the sole family breadwinner is often a woman who makes a few dollars a day selling fruit or vegetables on the street, the authorities have launched a new fiscal police force with the express task of chasing the vendors away, fining them and confiscating their goods.
And in a city where housing shortages have driven people to live in drains or ruined buildings, the provincial authorities in December demolished 1 000 solid, new owner-occupied houses in the Soba Kapassa neighbourhood. Residents are still wondering why.
”They forget they were elected to run the country, and they do things that are just not right,” said one man who had supported the MPLA until the bulldozers moved in.
Such mutterings of discontent are growing, in a country where the very idea of dissent still causes consternation.
Last month an independent newspaper published a list of Angola’s richest people. It was the kind of thing that anywhere else would have been dismissed as a light weekend feature, but in Angola it sparked a debate that dominated the media for weeks afterwards — possibly because of the disproportionate number of ruling party officials who made it on to the list. The formerly socialist MPLA put out a statement saying that such criticism was unpatriotic.
As one Angolan journalist put it, ”the workers’ party has become the millionaires’ party”. Ask Angolans why they are so reluctant to complain publicly about their lot and you will get one of two answers. Some will recall the government’s violent response to an attempted coup in 1977, when thousands of suspected dissidents were slaughtered; others say that decades of war have lowered expectations, even bred fatalism. But most Angolans were born after 1977, and the war is now over.
The northern Angola town of Uige still bears bullet scars, but its market is booming. This is due largely to the retirement of the Antonovs in favour of more economical road transport to get the goods in.
It is a modest boom admittedly — not everyone can afford a whole tin of tomato paste, so the women will sell you half a tin, with clingwrap over the open end — but there are many more products and many more stalls than before.
Recently, when a policeman started interfering with the traders, people threw stones at him. When his commanding officer tried to intervene, he too was chased away. Said one resident of the town: ”That would never have happened a year ago.”