Rich-Poor Divide Scars Angola as It Heads for Polls
Reuters, August 27, 2012
HUAMBO, Angola (Reuters)—A four-lane avenue separates the shelled ruins of the art deco Ruacana Cinema from Huambo’s shiny new Chinese-built railway station, a symbol of the leaps Angola has made to recover from a devastating 27-year civil war that ended a decade ago.
As Angolans prepare to go to the polls on Friday for only the second time since the end of the war, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos’s ruling MPLA party reminds them daily of the rewards of peace and boasts of its reconstruction achievements.
In power for nearly 33 years in Africa’s second-largest oil producer after Nigeria, Dos Santos—who turns 70 on Tuesday—is expected to lead his party to a one-sided election win thanks to his political dominance and his carefully cultivated official image as guarantor of Angola’s peace and rebuilding.
“We were at the abyss for a long time, now … we can see the great gains,” said Joao Limpinho, a government-employed signals manager at the railway terminal at Huambo, Angola’s second city, 600 kilometers (375 miles) southeast of Luanda.
But, while big investments in construction and infrastructure have covered over many of the scars of war, critics and ordinary Angolans say widespread poverty and inequality are festering, unhealed sores.
The reserved, inscrutable Dos Santos, Africa’s second longest-serving leader after Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, faces accusations from opponents that he has squandered his country’s huge oil wealth to enrich himself, his family and a small elite, while failing to deliver enough housing, education and jobs for most Angolans.
Independently of how they vote on Friday, many ordinary citizens are unhappy and openly clamor for a better life.
“We want schools for our children, we want work. I make 10,000 kwanzas (around $100) a month, my husband earns a miserable 20,000 kwanzas, and we have nothing left at the end of the month,” said Tucha Manuel, a market fruit-seller in the capital Luanda, one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Backed by an oil output boom, Angola has posted rapid growth. Between 2002 and 2008 the economy expanded by an average of 15 percent per year.
A fall in oil prices caused growth to brake to 2.4 percent in 2009 and 3.4 percent the next year. After disappointing oil output due to technical problems last year, when the economy also grew 3.4 percent, GDP is expected to expand between 8 percent and 10 percent this year.
The IMF says Angola’s GDP per capita in 2010 was $4,328, among the highest in Africa.
But rights groups like Global Witness and Human Rights Watch and local rights activists have leveled a barrage of criticism against Dos Santos and his ruling MPLA for failing to share the oil riches more equally among Angola’s 18 million people.
The rich-poor divide is glaringly visible across the nation.
In Luanda, glossy skyscrapers and high-end shops and restaurants are close to sprawling, crowded, tin-roof shantytowns whose poor residents sell goods—from flip-flops to smartphones—on the streets.
The mostly new road between Huambo and Benguela is flanked by dozens of villages composed of shacks whose residents have no electricity and still collect water from nearby streams.
