A blind eye

Jimmy Mubenga died as three security guards restrained him with what is believed to be excessive force while being deported to Angola. Last month, a senior journalist at a radio station, accused by the ruling party of trying to incite rebellion, was shot dead in Luanda. In 2004, Mfulumpinga Nlandu Victor, an outspoken politician, was also shot dead in the capital. In 2007, the leader of the main opposition party, Isaías Samakuva, survived an assassination attempt unharmed. There are many lesser known cases of systematic abuse, detentions, torture, deaths, but none of these appear on the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office's (FCO) country profile. Unlike nearby Zimbabwe, Angola does not even feature in the UK's list of countries whose human rights record are of concern.

British business interests, particularly oil interests, are undoubtedly the underlying reason. Angola produces about 1.9m barrels of oil a day. One of the UK's largest companies, BP, has substantial interests there and describes Angola as one of its "six new profit centres". BP's involvement in the country began four decades ago: to date it has invested $8bn. Other British businesses operating in Angola include De La Rue, Lonrho plc, Crown Agents, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Standard Chartered and KPMG. According to Oxfam, British arms brokers were actively selling arms to Angola during the war.

The irony is that many British people take it for granted that our respect for human rights and justice is second to none. Often, when talking about dictatorships in other parts of the world, we assume we have a moral authority that other nations can only envy. The death of Mubenga while in the care of the British justice system suggests otherwise.

Catholic cant

Pope Benedict XVI said Monday his heart cannot be at peace while people are homeless . Critics highlighted the plight of thousands whom the Angolan government has violently evicted from land owned by the Catholic church.
More than 2,000 families have been evicted since Angolan authorities began returning land to the church that had been seized by the former state, according to Muluka Miti, a researcher for Amnesty International. After a rapprochement with the church, the government of Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos in 1998 gave back lands seized by the state that had become occupied by ordinary Angolans.
The London-based human rights group said people were detained and arrested arbitrarily, and subjected to torture in some cases.

"I hope that the pope's message will be heard by our leaders and by the pope's priests and bishops so that no more people are left homeless as I was," said Damiao, who has received no compensation since authorities forced him from his land."It's very sad. I have lost a way of life. They destroyed our community, they destroyed our homes. Some people have been made beggars. Some people have been maimed... I am a Catholic. I cannot blame my church but I am very angry with the ambassadors of Christ, the priest and the bishop who forced us from our homes,"

Angolan Shame

Economic growth does not necessarily translate into improvements in child mortality, major new research suggests.
Ten million children still die every year before their fifth birthday, 99% of them in the developing world, according to Save the Children. A study comparing economic performance with child mortality reveals that some countries have not translated wealth into improvements across society.

Angola comes at the bottom of a new "Wealth and Survival" league table drawn up by the UN Development Programme . There are few countries in the world where there are such stark wealth contrasts as there are between the wealth of oil-rich coastal strip around the Angolan capital Luanda, and the war-ravaged interior.

UNDP statisticians calculate that more than half of the babies who die in Angola could be saved were the country to spread its wealth more fairly.

Water of Life

"Despite impressive revenues from oil and diamonds, there has been virtually no investment in basic services since the 1970s, and only a privileged minority of the people living in Luanda have access to running water," said a briefing paper by the international medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières .

More than half the people living in informal settlements, called musseques, depend on private tankers for their daily water in the oil-rich country. More than 300 privately-owned trucks bring water into the city every day . Raw water is pumped from the River Bengo into the waiting tankers, which then go to a chlorination point, where the drivers buy a container of chlorine and pour into the water before leaving the pumping station. MSF found that many trucks were leaving the station without chlorinating the water, to avoid queuing and make as many round trips as possible. But the 2006 cholera outbreak in Angola in which 67,257 cases were recorded and 2,722 people died - the world's highest fatality rate - shook the authorities.

Development Workshop , an anti-poverty non-governmental organisation found that people living in the musseques were paying private sellers up to 10,000 times more for water than those who were better off and living in the part of city with piped water were paying the provincial water company for treated water.

A family of four in the musseques, earning less than $50 a month, could spend as much as $60 on their monthly water needs. According to Cain, "this often does not include the basic minimum required per person per day - you might find families managing with a 20-litre jerry-can per day".

MSF noted in its paper that the cost of water was determined by market forces. "Water prices are ... subject to speculation and can vary, even on a daily basis, depending on access (distance from the water collection point to the distribution point, and the condition of the road that leads to the final distribution point) and demand (availability of water in nearby areas)".

"It is a business worth several million dollars a year," said Dauda Wurie, the Water and Sanitation Project Officer of the UN Children's Agency (UNICEF) in Angola.

The Curse of Oil

Time magazine reports that yet another nation in West Africa believes it is about to benefit from the discovery of oil . Seismic tests have suggested that São Tomé and Principe, two islands off the coast of West Africa with a population of 199,000, might be sitting on billions of barrels of oil .

"This is a very poor country," says Luis Alberto Praxeres, executive director of São Tomé's National Petrol Agency. "Oil could solve all our problems."

But even if São Tomé and Principe were sitting on as much oil as Saudi Arabia, there would be no guarantee that the black gold would deliver happiness and prosperity to its people. On the contrary, if history is any guide, vast caches of oil can cause developing nations as many problems as they solve. It fuels corruption rather than development, and creates a combustible mix of great wealth, relative poverty, grievance and instability .

Economists often talk of the "curse of oil," pointing out that countries with resources such as oil often grow more slowly, more corruptly, less equitably, more violently and with more authoritarian governments than others do.

There is "a strong association between resource wealth and the likelihood of weak democratic development, corruption and civil war." - Escaping the Resource Curse by Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz and Macartan Humphreys .

In Angola, the government collected $10 billion in oil revenues in 2005 but the gains are not evenly spread. 70% of Angolans still live below the country's poverty line. Cholera and malaria are rife, and child mortality rates are among the worst in the world. In Angola a 2004 Human Rights Watch report claimed that $4.22 billion in oil revenues went missing between 1997 and 2002.

"The rich use mineral water. For us there is no water. No electricity or sanitation either."

The second stage of the oil curse kicks in at this point. Investment in other industries gets crowded out, in part because it's hard for them to provide high enough returns to meet the costs of rising rents and salaries. Oil becomes virtually the only game in town, and the benefit to workers is surprisingly limited, with many of the more lucrative jobs — such as rig operator and refinery manager — going to foreign experts. Hence the expat enclaves in oil towns from Port Gentil to Baku. In some cases, unemployment can actually worsen. Fueled by the new spending power of the few, the cost of living also goes up. Higher prices mean real poverty actually rises.

Nigeria pumped its first barrel of oil in the 1950s and in 47 years, Nigeria has suffered a civil war that killed a million people, 30 years of military rule and six coups.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the country's 135 million people remain in poverty, a third are illiterate and 40% have no safe water supply. Then there is the environmental cost: more than 1.5 million tons of oil have been spilled over 50 years, and the Niger Delta is one of the most polluted places on earth.

"God has given us everything in the Delta: water, fish, oil. And yet we are suffering. That is our cross...We will share our pain with all Nigerians." - Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta vowing a new campaign of attacks against creek- and land-based installations around the Delta. Car bombs will be freely utilized.

And when the well runs dry ?

Gabon is at the beginning of the end of its life as an oil producer, output is expected — optimistically — to halve in the next 20 years and stop in 30.

15,000 people in Gabon hold 80% of the nation's wealth. 124th on the human-development index .Yet the capital Libreville itself has ranked among the Top 10 most expensive cities in the world for most of the past 20 years Hummer and BMW dealerships for the local privileged elites . In a country that is four-fifths rain forest and has coastal waters full of fish nearly all the country's food is imported from Europe.

Gabon is afflicted by a widespread sense of moral degeneration — from bureaucratic corruption to petty theft to sexual violence.

"The lack of standards shown by Gabon's leadership has generated a complete immorality in the country," says a European economist in Gabon. "That's the real curse of oil."

In São Tomé the dream lives on but from the lessons and experience of other African nations , it will all end up a nightmare .

Unless of course there is democratic control and common ownership of natural resources by all the peoples of the world to satisfy human needs and not to provide profits for the few .

Angola - Beauty and and the Beast

Angola fought an anti-colonial guerilla war against Portugal for 14 years before its political independence in 1975. Right after independence, the three liberation movements involved in the struggle for independence fought each other for control of the country, initiating a civil war that lasted until 2002leaving a death toll of over one million and nearly four million displaced from their homes .
When independence was declared, 95 percent of the Portuguese population—approximately 340,000 people—fled the country, leaving behind houses, apartments, and farms. Most of these abandoned properties were later occupied by Angolan families.The number of houses abandoned was especially high in urban centers, where the majority of Europeans lived. The government process of granting land rights to families that took over abandoned properties was also not completed and many individuals throughout Angola, particularly in Luanda, never received formal titles to housing they occupied after independence. 68% of urban dwellers living below the poverty line.

The Angolan government forcibly evicted 20,000 poor people, including small-scale farmers, and destroyed 3,000 homes between 2002 and 2006 in the capital, Luanda, "to facilitate development and 'beautification' in the public interest".

Research found that evictions of Luanda's poor are not isolated events. A pattern of abuse is laid bare in the study, showing a concerted campaign by government to clear poor areas around the city. Those affected included the elderly, children and female-headed households -- left destitute by evictions that took place without regard for ownership or tenure claims, and in the absence of legal grounds for removal. Most evictees only realised they were being turned out of their homes when bulldozers and trucks arrived, and victims were typically not allowed to gather their possessions. In those cases where residents were informed of an impending eviction, they were not allowed enough time to rescue their belongings. Local government officials and police used violence, intimidation and "excessive force" to remove poor people from informal areas around the city.

The BBC explains the land was cleared to make way for new homes for the new Angolan elite and ruling class .
They are very expensive looking. They're surrounded by high walls and fences, they all have car ports, there are big satellite dishes on many of them and the roads are all paved. Everything is very neat and tidy. Large condominiums - high-quality, gated housing for locals and foreigners - have sprung up; last month the country's first indoor shopping centre, Belas Shopping, was opened, an investment of $35m (£17.7m); a Hugo Boss store for men's clothes has opened in the heart of Luanda


Angola is sub-Saharan Africa's second largest oil producer after Nigeria , presently the largest supplier of crude oil to China and the seventh largest supplier to the United States. About 1.4 million barrels of oil are produced daily, a total that is projected to rise to two million this year. It is also one of the world’s largest diamond producers - with both industries capable of increasing their output. Together with other natural resources such as iron ore, phosphates, copper, bauxite and uranium, Angola should be one of the richest countries of the African continent and even the world. Angola's economy grew 14.3 percent last year and is expected to grow by a whopping 31.4 percent in 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Despite those figures, little of the wealth has trickled down to the great majority of the country's 13 million people. Angola ranked 161 of 177 countries in the U.N. Development Programme's (UNDP) 2006 Human Development Index. The 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International ranked Angola 142 out of 163 countries . The high rate of child mortality [260/1000] has stayed the same from 2002 to 2004

"They say we live in a rich country, but the people don't see any of that wealth" says Killa ,a young rap singer . "We don't blame the international community.The people who should be blamed are those who open the gates and let them in. The foreigners come here to exploit our riches and they are helped by the barons of this country."