”If peacetime Angola is to lift itself out of the slough of poverty, the government must open its books to scrutiny, and donors, industry and the international community need to take a tough stance to ensure this happens,” says Doug Steinberg, the outgoing country director of the humanitarian NGO, Care.
”Angola is rich in oil and diamonds, but is poor in almost everything else, and Steinberg believes the lack of transparency is ‘rotting the country from the inside’, keeping Angola at the bottom of the United Nations human development index.
In your two and a half years as country director of Care, you have seen Angola move from a humanitarian emergency to a desperate need for development. What positive changes have you seen?
A huge amount has changed. The war is definitively over — I’ve never talked to anybody who thinks it’s going to start up again. Recently I’ve been asking people about how they think the elections [to be held in 2006] will go, and people talked a little about possible sporadic violence around the elections, but it’s not like it’s going to be war again. That’s a huge positive in this country, and I think a lot of people outside the country don’t recognise this.
The world has kind of forgotten about Angola as being a source of need, or being a problematic place. Okay, the war is over, so they’re focusing their attention on Darfur, Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a bit of negligence here — not only donor resources but of political will — that’s probably what is needed the most, just to get things moving.
Is there sufficient political will, or do projects tend to get bogged down in red tape or stalling, amid a reluctance to accept guidance from outside?
You have a lot of civil servants with good ideas, but putting them into practice is difficult; human resources are a huge problem, requiring an overwhelming investment in training — you have a very thin layer of competency floating under all the bureaucracy.
What Angola needs are ideas from outside, and training — there’s a lot to be learned from looking at other countries, and how they solve their problems. We’re not necessarily saying that Angola doesn’t know how to do it, but the world is big, and we need to learn from each other.
Many people say the government is not doing enough to improve the lives of its people. Do you agree?
I was astonished when I first got here — there was a Human Rights Watch report that said almost a billion dollars was disappearing out of government coffers each year, yet for two consecutive years the UN consolidated appeal was in the order of $300-million. The government of Angola could easily meet the entire humanitarian need and still serve their own political interests. If those [oil] resources were actually used for social development, it would resolve the needs of the people.
What is the crucial factor that is holding Angola back?
This issue of transparency is really the fundamental problem for this country — it’s wasting Angola’s potential. It’s a responsibility which does not just belong to the government — so many other actors need to be involved in building a transparent democracy: the oil companies have to be much more forthcoming; the donor countries need to continue to apply pressure, and must be much more aggressive about it.
Will this lack of transparency jeopardise a donor conference in Angola?
With the whole IMF/SMP [International Monetary Fund’s Staff Monitoring Programme] falling through [due to the Angolan government’s failure to disclose the whereabouts of a $600-million windfall from last year’s high oil prices], I just can’t imagine that any donor would be interested in having a conference — the World Bank is not going to organise it under these circumstances. I think a donor conference is unlikely, and the fact that the government keeps asking for it is a diversionary tactic.
I think it’s reasonable, at this point, that a donor conference be linked to other conditions regarding fiscal management. If you did get it straightened out with fiscal management — more transparency, better reporting and better budget processing — then the question is: is there going to be any need for massive donor assistance? As a platform for Angola to market itself, or show off the legitimacy and credibility of the government, or for everyone to feel that they are doing good, then, maybe, a donor conference is worth doing, but in terms of responding to development needs, then it’s just a piece of theatre.
Angola is due to hold its first peacetime ballot next year. Will this lead to any improvement in the situation?
Every time you talk about problems in Angola, ultimately, you get to the issue of governance … and the fact that decision-making in the government is not transparent. When there is commitment from the presidency, things seem to happen; when there is no explicit commitment, things drag on.
I think the government itself is still remaining pretty much unchanged, in terms of the way it operates and its priorities. I don’t think the elections will change that. The elections have to happen — it’s a necessary condition for laying the foundations of democracy — but I don’t think that, after elections, Angola will be able to say, ”okay, we’re democratic”. There’s so much more that needs to happen, in terms of mechanisms for local level participation, inclusion-type mechanisms, and much, much more transparency.
If there was much more reporting on how much is being paid into the government; how much is received, and where it goes, then you could start laying the foundations for people to participate and make decisions. If you vote without knowledge or information, on what basis do you vote?
How have Care’s activities helped this process?
Much of our work has focused on increasing democracy and participation at a local level. Projects, such as the DFID [UK Department for International Development] -funded Lure [Luanda Urban Rehabilitation and Micro-Enterprise initiative], have empowered communities to liaise with local authorities and achieve basic solutions to common problems, such as a lack of clean, safe water and the accumulation of disease-ridden rubbish.
People are basically taking their own destinies in their hands — that, to me, is empowering. People are starting to pursue their own aspirations, and trying to manage their own lives as best they can, which shows a huge amount of forbearance, of perseverance. The fact that they aren’t just sitting around, waiting for assistance to be doled out, but are going ahead and starting to farm, building their houses, trying to track down their families [separated during the war] — I think that is inspirational.
The problem is, they are doing that pretty much without any external assistance. When you start getting more transparency, then you’ll have much more pressure to use the resources for the country’s social development.– Irin