Heavy duty: Angola is still dependent on oil for 90 percent of overseas revenues

Building the foundations of a new stability
Reconstruction and democracy are presidential aims, and the laws applying to self-government in the provinces have been bolstered to strengthen their powers

he government of Angola is trying to reorganize the internal structure of the country along more democratic lines, even as the armed forces attempt to bring the civil war to a final conclusion.
Picking up the pieces during the continuous conflict that has wracked Angola since it won independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 is not proving easy, not least because the government has yet to establish its undisputed control across the whole country.
In the meantime, the laws applying to self-government in the provinces have been modified to strengthen the powers of the provincial governors – and to make them more accountable to the electorate.
“Provincial matters are now resolved under the responsibility of the governor,” says Fernando Faustino Muteka, minister of territorial administration in the national government. “If there are successes or failures in the provinces, that is their business and they will have to justify their actions.”

The minister sees the task of the national government as putting in place policies, which are then carried out at local level by the provincial authorities. “We intervene in education, health, agricultural development and the reconstruction of infrastructure,” he says.
Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos has stated that government forces have established political and military control over about 90 percent of the country.
Even so, Unita is still able to inflict severe wounds on the Angolan people, as it did when it ambushed a train in the north of the country in August, killing more than 250 people and injuring another 185.
Mr Muteka freely concedes that the national government has yet to fully recover control of the entire country, or its borders, and that some municipal authorities are still in Unita’s domain in several provinces.
President Dos Santos has emphasized the need for the authorities to be able to guarantee internal stability if the elections tentatively called for next year or 2003 are to go ahead. The president, who has ruled the country since 1979, has declared that he will not run for re-election in what some observers say is a clear commitment to an indisputably democratic succession.

Free market
Other analysts speculate that if no election is held, Mr Dos Santos – who has steered the ruling MPLA away from its original Marxist foundations and put Angola on the road to a free market economy – could stay in power for many years more. They argue that this prospect is all the more likely since Unita shows no signs of giving up the battle.
The problems created by the influx of refugees from the war zones to the relative safety of urban areas, and above all, the Angolan capital, Luanda, is increasingly being dealt with by the provincial authorities, although it is still financed by the national government.
“Funds are being decentralized to the provincial governments so that they can attend to the needs of these people,” says Mr Muteka.

“The fundamental condition that has to be taken into account is the choice of location, where people can live in good conditions with sufficient water to develop agricultural activities.”
As to the question of the refugees returning to their homelands, the governor takes a long-term approach. “Taking people back to their own land is something that has to be based on an agreement between the government and those people,” he says.
“We cannot force them to go back – we have to discuss it with them in order to find a solution and then put in place a program for them to achieve self-sufficiency.”
The emphasis on encouraging development of the agricultural sector reflects the fact that Angola cannot yet feed its rapidly growing population on its own. For the foreseeable future, however, Angola’s economy will continue to rely heavily on the oil and diamond industries, which between them account for virtually all the country’s export earnings – the oil industry contributes a massive 90 percent.

Atlantic coast
Angola’s good fortune is that almost all its reserves of oil and natural gas are located under the sea off the Atlantic coast, far away from the hazards of civil war.
Foreign oil companies continue to show great interest in developing Angola’s hydrocarbon reserves, which produce about 700,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil.
ExxonMobil has started work on a $3 billion scheme that will become the largest offshore project in West Africa. The project, called Kizomba, is forecast to produce 250,000 bpd of oil from reserves estimated to total one billion barrels.
French giant TotalFinaElf is developing several offshore fields near its Girassol project. Girassol is due to come onstream at 200,000 bpd towards the end of this year.

BP is involved in a massive $2.5 billion five-field project, Greater Plutonio, which is scheduled to output its first oil in 2005.
Angola is already a significant source of America’s oil imports and is poised to increase it. Proposals have been made to build a liquefied natural gas project, at an estimated cost of $3 billion, based on offshore reserves – most of the gas would be sold to America.