to take its place.17
In Manuel Vicente’s offices in Luanda’s hilltop presidential complex the only sound was the purr of the air-conditioning unit that kept the rooms at a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the taps of a hammer as labourers conducted some early-morning maintenance outside. A Mercedes and a Land Cruiser stood ready to part the traffic if the minister needed to venture beyond the tall red-brown wall surrounding the compound. The sole adornment on the beige walls was a portrait of dos Santos in a gold frame.
Vicente swept in, wearing a smart suit and looking fresh from his morning jog. If he was annoyed that I had named him as the beneficiary of a questionable oil deal two months earlier, he didn’t show it. Indeed, as Vicente styled it, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. If, while he was the head of Sonangol, he had knowingly owned a stake in the company assigned to be a foreign group’s local partner, that would have been ‘a conflict of interests’, he acknowledged.18 But Vicente, a man with a reputation for ruthless competence and a commanding knowledge of Angola’s oil industry, claimed he had not known that Aquattro, the investment company he shared with Kopelipa and Dino, had owned a stake in Nazaki, Cobalt’s local partner. When ‘all this news came,’ revealing that he did indeed own a stake in Nazaki, ‘we decided to quit,’ he said. His interest in Nazaki had been ‘liquidated’ the previous year, he said. ‘Today I’m not director and direct beneficiary of Nazaki.’
Vicente’s position was essentially the same as Cobalt’s: if there was anything untoward in the oil deal, they were ignorant of it. Vicente told me that he knew Joe Bryant ‘very well’. Their relationship had stretched back years beyond the formation of Cobalt to when Bryant worked for Amoco, an American oil company that merged with BP in 1998. That relationship, it seemed to me, might have provided a simple way to check whether Vicente and his friends secretly owned stakes in Nazaki. Bryant could just have asked Vicente whether the rumours were true. I asked Vicente: Did you and Bryant ever discuss the matter? ‘No,’ he said.
Alongside their personal stakes in the oil business, the members of the Futungo ensure that the oil revenues that accrue to the Angolan state are deployed to serve the regime’s purposes. Angola’s 2013 budget allocated 18 per cent of public spending to defence and public order, 5 per cent to health, and 8 per cent to education. That means the government spent 1.4 times as much on defence as it did on health and schools combined. By comparison, the UK spent four times as much on health and education as on defence. Angola spends a greater share of its budget on the military than South Africa’s apartheid government did during the 1980s, when it was seeking to crush mounting resistance at home and was fomenting conflict in its neighbours.19
Generous fuel subsidies are portrayed as a salve for the poor, but in truth they mainly benefit only those wealthy enough to afford a car and politically connected enough to win a fuel-import licence. Angola’s government has ploughed petrodollars into contracts for roads, housing, railways and bridges at a rate of $15 billion a year in the decade to 2012, a huge sum for a country of 20 million people. Roads are getting better, railways are slowly snaking into the interior, but the construction blitz has also proved a bonanza for embezzlers: kickbacks are estimated to account for more than a quarter of the final costs of government construction contracts.20 And much of the funding is in the form of oil-backed credit from China, much of which is marshalled by a special office that General Kopelipa has run for years. ‘The country is getting a new face,’ says Elias Isaac, one of Angola’s most prominent anticorruption campaigners. ‘But is it getting a new soul?’21
Manuel Vicente was keen to correct the impression that Angola’s rulers have abdicated their duties toward their citizens. ‘Just to assure you, the government is really serious, engaged in combating, in fighting the poverty,’ he told me.22 ‘We are serious people, we know very well our job, and we know very well our responsibility.’ Talking with him, I had no doubt that there was some part of Vicente that wanted to better the lot of his compatriots, or at least to be seen to be trying to do so. ‘I’m a Christian guy,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work if you are okay and the people around have nothing to eat. You don’t feel comfortable.’
There are two solutions to that problem: share some food or dump the hungry out of sight. The Futungo’s record suggests it favours the latter.
António Tomás Ana has lived in Chicala since 1977, before new arrivals fleeing the civil war in the interior turned what had been a sleepy fishing settlement into the profusion of humanity it is today, sandwiched between the ocean and the slopes rising up to the presidential complex. Better known as Etona, he is one of Angola’s foremost artists. At an open-air workshop walled with breezeblocks, his assistants chip away at acacia trunks with chisels and mallets. One of his trademark sinewy wooden sculptures graces the lobby at Sonangol headquarters.
Among Etona’s sixty-five thousand neighbours in Chicala are military officers and a professional photographer who brings in $5,000 a month, which does not go far in ultra-costly Luanda but has allowed him to build up the corrugated-iron shack he bought twenty-five years ago into the angular but solid edifice around which his grandchildren gallivant today. In June 2012 that house, like Etona’s workshop and the community library he is building, were, along with the rest of Chicala, scheduled to be flattened – and not, this time, by the ocean.
Given the choice, few people would choose to live with Chicala’s meagre amenities and opportunities. The ruling party promised electricity during the 2008 election campaign, but little arrived, and not much had come of the latest pledge, made in the run-up to the 2012 polls, to provide piped water. But places like Chicala are communities, with their own ways and their own comradeship. An estimated three in every four of Luanda’s inhabitants, out of a total population of between 5 and 8 million, live in slums known as musseques. Although conditions in some, like the precarious settlement on top of a rubbish dump, are dire, Chicala and other central musseques have their advantages. Work, formal or informal, is close at hand in Luanda’s commercial districts.
Etona spends a lot of time thinking about the betterment of a slum he could easily have afforded to leave. ‘Regeneration is not about roads and sidewalks – it’s in the mind,’ he told me when we met at his workshop, his red shirt pristine despite the afternoon heat.23 ‘This,’ he said, waving an arm at the bustling slum, where nearby youngsters were furiously duelling at table football, ‘this is also part of the culture, part of the country.’ But Chicala’s days were numbered. Its inhabitants were to be relocated, whether they liked it or not, to new settlements on the outskirts of Luanda. A new luxury hotel and the gleaming offices of an American oil company had risen on the fringes of Chicala, harbingers of what was to take the neighbourhood’s place. A beach that once buzzed with fish restaurants and bars had been fenced off, ready for the developers.
The Chicala residents I spoke to regarded the authorities’ promises of a better life elsewhere with deep suspicion. About three thousand had already been shipped off, some rounded up by police and packed with their belongings into trucks, any objections ignored. The government has been willing to use force to cleanse the slums, deploying troops by helicopter to conduct dawn evictions.24 But Etona, for one, intended to resist when his turn came. ‘If we don’t speak out, we will be carried off to Zango.’
Zango lies just over 20 kilometres south of central Luanda, where the capital’s sprawl thins out, giving way to the ochre scrub of the bush. Like a matching settlement to the north, it is supposed to represent a new beginning for Angola’s slum-dwellers. To listen to officials, Zango is the promised land. ‘We are moving them to more dignified accommodation,’ Rosa Palavera, the head of the poverty reduction unit in the presidency, told me.25 ‘There are no basic services [in Chicala]. There is crime.’
Even if one overlooks the official neglect that lies behind the lack of amenities in Chicala, Zango is hardly preferable. Those who moved to Zango were lucky if they found basic services merely on a par with those they
