In the shadow of an oil refinery that belches steam on a hill high above the harbour, ragged fishermen manoeuvre rickety boats around 30 freighters riding at anchor.
The fisherman work at a trade handed down generation to generation, plying the same waters, sometimes in the same leaky boats, as their fathers and their fathers before them. While they toil for meagre catches, modern fishing trawlers from China and Europe steam along the coast, further depleting Angola’s already overfished shore.
Three years after the end of a fierce civil war, Angola is a rich country full of poor people. Foreign businessmen and a handful of wealthy Angolans, mostly government officials, reap huge profits from a post-war boom fuelled by oil and diamonds.
Peace has brought a measure of prosperity, even if it is distributed unevenly and unfairly. Most of hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people from the 25-year civil war have gone home. Schools have reopened, even if poorly attended. The government is carrying out a slow, seemingly haphazard reconstruction campaign and is working to restart agriculture.
President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has ruled since 1979, said earlier this month that he is committed to holding the first national elections since 1992 sometime next year.
Long way to go
”Angola has changed dramatically and in the right direction,” said Richard Corsino, the country director for the United Nations World Food Programme, who adds that although stable peace has bought dramatic improvements, the country still has a long, long way to go.
European construction companies are building hotels, hospitals and office buildings amid the graceful arches and faded pastels of this seaside capital’s aging colonial architecture.
Luanda, the commercial heart of the country and a city untouched by the fighting, gets priority on government spending.
”Rural areas are in shambles and I can’t say if it is by design or neglect,” said Corsino, who noted some rural areas are controlled by Unita, the former rebel group now an opposition party. ”There is no work in Luanda. But in the countryside the people see no hope, so they come here.”
Most of Luanda’s five million people live in ramshackle shacks in fetid and treeless slums that stretch for kilometres to the horizon. Most are unemployed in a city that oil has made one of the most expensive in Africa.
”Luanda is experiencing the fastest urbanisation in the world,” said Lance Bailey, an Atlanta-based architect and urban planner. ”It is home to 44% of Angola’s population and growing at a rate of 4% a year.”
The city, he said, was designed for 250 000, so most of the 200 000 new residents each year must live in the slums with either inadequate or no services such as water, sanitation and electricity.
Oil and diamonds
Post-war Angola is the second-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States-based International Energy Agency predicts it could be number one by 2008 when it estimates production will rise from 1,2-million to two million barrels a day.
Angola also produces six million carats of diamonds a year. The state diamond company Endiama says it will double production next year, overtaking South Africa as the third-largest producer of the gems. It also has substantial reserves of gold, iron ore, copper, manganese, and other minerals.
By the end of the civil war that began as a cold-war struggle between a Marxist government and US-backed rebels, the fighting was over who would control Angola’s oil and diamonds.
In peace or war, huge revenues from oil and diamonds brought staggering corruption. The US State Department said wealth was ”concentrated in the hands of a small elite, who often used government positions for massive personal enrichment”.
”As land mine-maimed children begged in the streets, politicians’ wives flew to New York on the government health budget for nick-and-tuck cosmetic surgery,” wrote John McMillian, a Stanford University economics professor, in a recently revised study on Angolan corruption.
The government, to some scepticism, has promised to fight corruption that is a way of life, from huge payoffs to the gasosas or small bribes paid to underpin any Angolan transaction.
European businessmen interviewed in Luanda noted some progress, even if it was only that they had been asked for smaller bribes.
The International Monetary Fund, in its recent economic assessment, said the economy grew by 14% in 2005, the largest expansion in Africa. It predicted the economy could grow by 25% in 2006.
Hard life
Yet Luanda’s harbour is fished by men so poor they use a tree limb for a mast and plastic sheeting for a sail. Seventy percent of all Angolans live on less than $1 a day.
Life remains hard and short. At one cemetery near on Luanda’s grimy edge, row after row of graves, mostly unmarked mounds of red clay, have nearly filled the vast plot opened just five years ago.
Life expectancy is just 37 years. And in a testament to the quality of health care, Angola has the highest infant mortality rate in the world at 192 deaths for every 1 000 babies.
Many rural roads and bridges remain destroyed by the fighting and many areas are still littered with landmines.
Efforts to restart Angola’s war-ravaged agriculture are floundering. Most farmers, even in the fertile and once productive central highlands, live on subsistence farming and UN food aid.
”There is no incentive,” said Corsino. ”Even if the farmers grow a surplus, there is no way to get it to a market.” — Sapa-AP