Oil-rich Angola is one of the most talked-about investment destinations in Africa, but behind the economic boom there is an impoverished and disenfranchised population burdened with some of the worst social indicators on the continent. Elections in late August are unlikely to improve their fortune. Louise Redvers looks at why the oil money is gushing for a few and dribbling down to the rest. Luanda’s ever-expanding glass and steel skyline stands as a proud symbol of Angola’s impressive post-war economic growth. Thanks to its vast oil reserves, the country has more than bounced back from the decades of isolation and…
Louise Redvers
By Louise Redvers Angola is Africa’s fifth largest economy, its second producer of crude oil, a magnet for foreign direct investment and the custodian of one of the continent’s biggest sovereign wealth funds. Yet, rather surprisingly, unlike many of its smaller and poorer peers, Angola does not have an equities exchange. Trading government bonds outside the central bank began only in May. “Fund management as an industry doesn’t exist in Angola, which is crazy because basically you’ve got the third largest financial market in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Anthony Lopes Pinto, the managing director of Imara Securities Angola, the Angolan…
Angola: local elections The MPLA government has promised decentralisation many times, but is afraid of losing power by Louise Redvers In April 2015 the Angolan capital Luanda hosted the inaugural “President José Eduardo dos Santos” African Mayor Awards. Three prizes, named after Angola’s president of 36 years, were awarded to cities in Ghana, Tanzania and Cabo Verde, respectively, for their achievements in local government. The event was organised by United Cities and Local Governments–Africa (UCLG-A), which has offices in Sandton, South Africa, and is supported by the Angolan government and the IC Publications Group, a company with publishing interests in…
Angola is sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest economy and one of the continent’s leading producers of crude oil. Since the end of its three-decade civil war in 2002, governmental trade missions and private investors have streamed into Luanda seeking lucrative peacetime deals. Yet Angola has posted negative foreign direct investment (FDI) flows for the past four years, according to the 2015 World Investment Report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This is partly a result of the way Angola’s oil industry works: exploration is paid for by parent companies, which recoup their initial investment and additional profits…
Angola: mining scars Angola’s extractive sector generates bundles of cash, but at what cost to the country’s environment? Angola is one of Africa’s most biologically diverse countries, boasting a long Atlantic coastline, dense equatorial forests, rivers thick with mangroves, vast desert expanses, rolling savannah grasslands and high-altitude rocky outcrops . It is also rich in natural resources. It is the continent’s second-largest producer of crude oil after Nigeria, the world’s fifth-largest producer of diamonds, and it is known to have substantial deposits of gold, copper, iron ore and other minerals. With a decade of peace now under Angola’s belt, the…
ANGOLA: Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda Can an overseas stock market help FLEC on the road to Cabindan independence, or is this latest move yet another sign of a fractured and dying struggle? by Louise Redvers Resources have long been the source of conflict in Africa. Battles for control of resource-rich territories take many shapes and—often devastating to people on the ground—are waged on many fronts. Now separatists in Angola’s oil-rich province of Cabinda have turned to stock markets overseas to fund their struggle by selling rights to future mineral assets they hope to own one…
Angola: Lunda Tchokwe One apparently self-funded organisation is fighting for the autonomy of Angola’s diamond-rich but poverty-stricken eastern provinces. by Louise Redvers Angola, endowed with both kimberlite and alluvial diamond deposits, is the world’s fourth-largest diamond producer by value. Its diamond industry generates an estimated $1 billion in revenues annually. But for all the money the precious stones bring in, most of the people living in Angola’s eastern provinces, where the mines are situated, live in grinding poverty. Official economic statistics for the four eastern provinces – Lunda Norte, Lunda Sul, Moxico and Kuando Kubango – are scarce, but a…
