Angola chooses homegrown economic remedy

ShareThis

LUANDA, Angola -- Not long after Angola's brutal 27-year-civil war dragged to an end in 2002, the country's government began a series of meetings with the big players in international aid: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the main United Nations development agencies and the wealthy Western bilateral donors.In the course of the war, nearly every scrap of infrastructure in the country had been destroyed, and Angola's people were some of the poorest in the world. One of every four children died before the age of five. Angola asked for debt cancellation, and for an infusion of aid, especially grants.The international players outlined a series of reforms similar to those that have been instituted at their direction in nearly every other African country in the past 25 years.And Angola said, in essence, no thanks.The two sides in this story, as you might expect, recount it rather differently.Officials from the international financial institutions, who will only discuss the meetings on condition of anonymity, talk about the need for safeguards that international assistance would not be misused in the same fashion that oil revenue has been siphoned off by senior figures in the government. Human Rights Watch, for example, says that $4.2 billion in oil money was unaccounted for between 1997 and 2002. But Angola was not interested in making those changes.They said they told the Angolans: Liberalize your economy (which was then entirely in the hands of the state, ruled by a party that had not long before renounced its adherence to Marxism-Leninism). Remake your public service. Rein in inflation. Cut your spending. Increase your transparency.But Rui Pinto de Andrade, spokesman for the government, said that it was the donors who were arrogant, pushing a series of radical changes on Angola with no thought for what the country actually needed or would work here."The remedy for Angola is not the same as that which would cure the sickness of Zimbabwe or even Kenya or any other country. The doctor who treats Angola will have to base the prescription on the problem here, not the problems of other countries, because we have a different situation," he said.That sentiment is echoed by people across Africa, who often chafe at the policies enforced by Western experts and consultants who jet in on five-day visits but who control access to vital lines of credit, loans, debt forgiveness and sometimes food aid. But Angola's eventual decision to end the relationship was likely emboldened by the country's every-growing total of offshore oil reserves."It would be very nice to be Angola to have something that (the West) really wants and so they would have to be a bit respectful," a senior government minister in a nearby southern African nation, one which does not have vast oil reserves, remarked wearily recently after a meeting with a World Bank team.Inflation will be down to a single digit by next year and school enrolment is up dramatically. The Ministry of Finance now posts its accounts on a website. And much of the economy has been privatized. However, that process has been entirely dominated by government elites; the same people who once controlled the economy through state power now run it as majority shareholders.Angola's government, however, largely avoids answering any tough questions about that sort of thing.After dispatching the Western donors, Angola's government picked up the phone and called east to Beijing, where the government was happy to provide billions in loans on soft terms, in exchange for preferential access to oil contracts.The government refuses to disclose the exact size of China's line of credit, and its interest rate, but the loans are believed to be as high as $13 billion, at extremely low rates.China, of course, says nothing at all about Angola's governance record. But the country may be paying a certain price for the kind of aid it's getting: While big infrastructure projects such as bridges and railways are moving at a remarkable pace, the situation for Angola's poor remains largely unchanged. Despite the fact that it is producing two million barrels of oil a day, Angola remained ranked 17th-poorest on the UN Human Development Index last year.Pinto de Andrade, the government spokesman, was unapologetic. "The international community always said that when Angola reached peace they would come and help Angola, but that was not the case in Angola. We have had to rebuild with no one's help so no one has the right to point a finger at us," he said.(E-mail Stephanie Nolen at snolen(at)globeandmail.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)