10
Mar
Even by the standards of oil states, Angola is almost laughably unfair. Oligarchs leave €500 tips in posh Lisbon restaurants, while about one in six Angolan children dies before age five — the worst rate on earth, says the United Nations. Angola has the same Gini coefficient for inequality as apartheid South Africa (though a touch better than today’s Manhattan).
Yet this little-studied kleptocracy is an accepted part of the western system. Expat western workers keep Angola ticking. Angolan oligarchs inhabit the global luxury economy of British public schools, Swiss asset managers, Hermès stores etc. In fact, argues the Oxford political scientist Ricardo Soares de Oliveira in his marvellous new book, Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War, we live in “an oligarch’s ideal world”. Western countries barely even pretend to disapprove of kleptocrats any more.
Foreigners have run most things in Angola since the 250-year transatlantic slave trade. Later, Portuguese settlers did almost all skilled and even semi-skilled jobs here. When the Portuguese left in the mid-1970s, there probably weren’t 100 Angolan university graduates. The new Marxist regime therefore relied on eastern European economic advisers (not so good), American oil companies such as Chevron (more helpful) and Cuban soldiers (handy too) to fight their civil war against the Unita rebels.
Magnificent and Beggar Land begins in 2002, when the war ended. By then the Marxists had become “capitalists” but they didn’t exactly build a knowledge economy. Angola’s ruling clique consists largely of a few mixed-race families from the capital Luanda. This elite considers the 21 million or so black Angolans in the bush or slums imperfectly civilised, and has little desire to educate them. Indeed, last year’s “otherwise expansionary” state budget cut spending on Angola’s pitiful primary schools by one-third. Soares de Oliveira writes: “Angolans remain some of the world’s worst educated and unhealthiest people.”
But that doesn’t bother the rulers (who control not so much the barely functional state as the highly efficient state oil company, Sonangol). They simply hire skilled foreigners in practically every major sector of the economy. “Even when there is the illusion of an Angolan role, the actual tasks are being performed by KPMG, Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Deloitte and lesser international providers,” explains Soares de Oliveira.
©Luis GrañenaLuanda “has been partly re-Europeanized”, he writes. “Behind every Angolan tycoon there is a mostly Portuguese management team.” The expats enable an elite that is killing Angolan children by neglect. No matter: the western professional’s ethos is to do a professional job and not worry about much else. And so foreigners pump Angolan oil, make expensive dresses and build pointless airports in the middle of nowhere. An “Israeli defence outfit” guards a stretch of Angola’s border. Chinese workers build factories that then sit unused. Only two western sectors are barely present in Angola: the media and NGOs. The regime doesn’t need them.
The regime likes to remind expats that they are in Angola to make money and shut up. Hence the almost monthly ritual in which “glum-looking foreign workers” are deported live on TV, while the commentators debate “immigration and its impact on Angolan jobs and ‘national culture’” just like European pundits.
Almost all western governments happily shut up. They used at least to pretend to have a “democratisation agenda”: just give General X a few more years and you’ll really start seeing reforms etc. But in the past decade the west has virtually abandoned even democratic talk. This is the consequence of the Iraq war, China’s rise as a new friend to tyrants and the global economic crisis that has made us desperate for any deal, no matter how dirty. China doesn’t nag friends about human rights — and nor do we. In 2013, the UK declared Angola a “High Level Prosperity Partner”.
Angola’s rulers, says the book, have “a pervasive assumption that every interlocutor is driven by the profit motive and, therefore, that solutions, and people, can be bought”. This assumption is almost always correct. Foreigners merely chuckle in private about garish Angolan excess.
Angola’s elite “has spent the last decade converging with the material life and cultural signifiers of the global jet-setting class”, writes Soares de Oliveira. The happy few jet around western capitals, unhindered even by talk of travel bans or freezes on their bank accounts. We accept that Angola’s money is their personal property. Anyway, they stash it in our banks and spend it on our paintings, plastic surgery and holiday villas, plus stakes in our companies (especially in Portugal).
Most of these are goodies that the Chinese cannot provide. Tom Burgis explained in FT Weekend Magazine last August how closely Angolans and Chinese work together on some very obscure deals but Angola doesn’t want China to be its only friend. Rather, the Chinese relationship serves largely as a threat for Angola to wield if western partners ever get uppity about boring stuff like child mortality. Angolan kleptocrats could survive without the west but they would have much less fun. Their models are western. They can even parrot MBA-speak and Davos-style development platitudes.
The elite partied through the oil boom. The likely impact on Angola’s regime of the collapse in prices: not much. If you’re only feeding a tiny percentage of your people, $50 a barrel is ample.
‘Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War’ by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is published by Hurst, £25.
Source: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e8fe02d4-c2b1-11e4-a59c-00144feab7de.html#axzz3TxsJdH4g