Oil, Power, and Civil Rights in Angola: an Uncomfortable Relationship
Story one
It’s a warm, humid day on
Ilha do Cabo, the stretch of pristine beaches dotted with luxury villas
that stems out of Angola’s capital city, Luanda. Emilio Costa, an emigrated
Portuguese club owner welcomes a government minister and an American oil tycoon
for afternoon poolside cocktails at his members bar. Here on Ilha, the mojitos cost $60 and Porsches
roam free; a veritable playground for the rich. On the one side, the view of
the immense Atlantic Ocean fills the air with a salty smell, whilst on the
other, the two men enjoy the sprawling view of Luanda’s skyline, dotted with
construction cranes and filling up steadily with ever taller skyscrapers. They
can hear music from the glitzy restaurant-bar next door; it belongs to
‘Isabel’, as do very many of the surrounding businesses and ventures. Isabel
dos Santos, named by Forbes as the richest woman in Africa (totalling a worth
of $3.4bn), is the daughter of the President José Eduardo dos Santos; her name
is synonymous with the immense and far-reaching wealth of the Angolan elite.
The two men enjoy their drinks as the sun begins to set and
the melodious sounds of Cesaria Evora animate the atmosphere with nostalgic
Morna beats. Theirs is a common sort of meeting – oil money and the ruling
elite form an intricately woven carpet. Angola is the second largest exporter
of oil on the continent after Nigeria, while politically, the MPLA (People's
Movement for the Liberation of Angola) has governed since the end of Portuguese
colonial rule in 1975. As they discuss their sturdy friendship, with ambitious
plans to invest in local luxury real estate in exchange for generous deals on
oil exports, the juxtaposition of a broken wooden canoe slowly disappearing
behind the gigantic outline of a glistening white yacht in the bay doesn’t affect
them. Indeed, the immense gap between rich and poor does not seem to bother
them at all. They’ve become desensitized to an issue that has been normalised
over the years, a necessary side-effect of such rapid enrichment, perhaps? Or
maybe, they are in denial but rather comfortable as this is a side of Angola that
simply isn’t a part of their world.
Story two
In the Cambamba slum a few kilometres from Ilha, Lourenço
Faustino’s lungs feel heavy, filled with the dust of the day. As the sun sinks
lower, he leans on his wife and two-year old baby as he revisits the day’s
events. Just a few hours ago his entire neighbourhood, including their small
family home were effectively razed to the ground. The government police have a vision
in mind for how Luanda should look,
and slums like Lourenço’s have no place it in. His grandmother looks
obsessively for any remaining spuds in the soil near her own hut, which has
also been razed to the ground, while she half talks half sings to herself. She
has forgotten now how many times she has had to watch her home be destroyed
before her eyes against her own will and with no permit, only to be told by
authorities she must move further and further away. Lourenço’s cousin Adriano,
who has always harboured a deep resentment for the government’s
presumptuousness, was beaten bloody and is now in police custody for raising
his voice and questioning the officers on the legality of what they were doing.
Unfortunately, because the land is unofficially settled, the people living on
it have no rights to it and this land belongs to the government – hence their
legal liberty in forcibly evicting generations and communities out of their
houses.
The half cog wheel crossed with a machete and a star on the
Angolan flag serves as a stark visual reminder of its bloody civil war spanning
three decades. The symbols bear an obvious resemblance to the hammer and sickle
of Communism, a hangover of the MPLA’s fighting days where it was funded and
sustained by the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism was the founding ideology of
the MPLA in the 70s, and although this was true largely the product of Soviet
and Cuban sponsorship, it was a message with which the MPLA won the hearts and
minds of a recently liberated colony. They promised a more equal country, run
by Angolans for the greater good of all Angolans. The situation now could not
be more starkly different to the socialist ideal that is printed on the black
(Africa) and red (bloodshed) flag. Angola is a place where poverty and inequality
now plague the country since its enormous economic boom that began in 2002 and has
continued to rise. The country was the fastest growing economy from 2000-2010
(E&Y); a monthly rental in Luanda can cost $10 000, and it has overtaken
Tokyo and Moscow as the most expensive city in the world for expatriates
(Mercer Cost of Living Survey, 2014). By contrast, two thirds of Luandans live
on less than $2 a day (Guardian), about one child in five does not reach the
age of five years old, and Angola is ranked 149 out of 187 in the UN's Human
Development Index for 2014 (BBC).
Story three
A small group of protesters gather outside a courthouse in
Luanda. They’ve come here in support of an Angolan journalist who has come to
symbolise the atrocious price that those who criticise the regime will pay.
Rafael Marques de Morais has become a household name among the human and civil
rights activists in Angola, and internationally as well. The government here
knows that de Morais’ allegations are threatening their control of absolute
power in the country, and through his investigations – including award-winning
articles on controversies regarding conflict diamonds, corruption and violence,
and multiple books – he has become the personification of the struggle against
censorship. Echoing their friend’s premonitions. Most of the protestors are arrested
by police; a woman is badly beaten up.
The book that has led to de Morais’ arrest is Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in
Angola, which makes the heavy and controversial statement that private
security companies and the Angolan army took part in “burying miners alive,
executing them en masse, and forcing them to leap to their deaths from speeding
vehicles” (BBC). What’s more, the book highlights the seemingly inextricable
links between the export of diamonds and other materials, the political elite,
and the violence these sales are funding. De Morais has witnessed other societies,
studying in London and Oxford, but since 1992 has been using the power of
journalism to try to bring justice to a country with a rich façade that conceals
the unjust reality of everyday life in its shadow.
From inside the courtroom, Rafael Marques sits and waits for
his fate that rests in a justice system that is likely to be swayed by
political corruption and favours. He feels that if the regime can make him
disappear, it will symbolise a much greater loss in the struggle between
freedom of speech, of dissent and the static control of the status quo. One more
(influential) voice will be lost and thus will deter others from speaking out. Abroad
and among his supporters, de Morais has been applauded worldwide for his work,
he is the winner of the Percy Qoboza award (2000),
the Civil Courage prize (2006)
and the Index on Censorship Freedom
of Expression Award (2015), yet his entire career has been a struggle to tell
the truth whilst avoiding jail. He has written for the Guardian and, in his own
words, he persists because:
Human life – unless it is that of a member of
the ruling elite – is debased in Angola. This country was one of the 10 fastest
growing economies in the world for several years, until 2014. Now it has
“achieved” the highest child mortality rate in the world. Because of its
abundance of oil and diamonds, used for corruption and PR, such a paradox does
not seem to matter at home or abroad.
Angola
Rafael Marques de Morais’ struggle is a key piece in a huge
puzzle, one that encompasses the serious issues that plague Angola. At the Carlos
Cardoso memorial lecture delivered at Wits University, de Morais explained that
two of the key obstacles to civil freedom in Angola are corruption and censorship.
The government has installed a “fear-mongering” strategy by threatening to prosecute
any dissenting voices. Truly independent media is virtually non-existent given
that news sources and publications are under the control of the regime –
officially or by proxy. An example of the sort of censorship commonplace in
Angola can be seen in the reaction to the reprinting by a popular
diaspora-based newspaper, Club-K, of an article from the Portuguese Expresso on the investigation of the
attorney general of Angola, General João Maria Moreira de Sousa for fraud and
money laundering. Individuals that were accused of having ties with Club-K were
subsequently arrested, placed on a travel ban, and were reportedly tortured in
custody. Violence is, in fact, a recurring theme for the critics of the regime,
and is a key ingredient in the government’s strategy in censoring and
silencing. Manuel de Carvalho Ganga was a political activist that was
effectively murdered by a presidential security guard in November 2013. His crime?
Sticking flyers on the walls of Luanda’s central football stadium denouncing
and wanting justice for the killing of two political activists that had been
killed the year before by police. He was dragged to their barracks and shot in
the back in cold blood. In case their message for dissenters wasn’t clear
enough, Manuel’s funeral march was brutally dispersed with tear gas and
violence. The justice system does not fare much better; indeed the vacuum of
justice is baffling. Cases left in limbo, judges reiterating the stance of the
government, and never an investigation or questioning of policy torture,
brutality, and beatings. “The logic, for the regime, is simple. If no one
reports on the abuses, then there are no abuses.” When de Morais and another
journalist placed a complaint on their unlawful arrest, their violent beating
and the breaking of their possessions (new camera equipment, in this case),
they were simply ignored. De Morais on the other hand, faces up to nine
different trials, jail time and $1.2 million in damages, for offending generals
and diamond companies that he accused of over one hundred cases of torture and
murder.
It is clear that Angola faces an extreme imbalance not only
in terms of wealth and poverty, but also in terms of social and civil rights.
The issue is of particular international significance given the spectacular
mineral wealth of the country and the virtual monopoly in the control of this
wealth by the political elite. Indeed it isn’t difficult to see how international
political and economic relations can afford to play solely to the beat of the
elites’ drum and quickly disregard considerations for the Angolan population.
In his article Aid in the midst of
plenty: oil wealth, misery and advocacy in Angola, Philippe le Billon
outlines some of these issues plaguing the country. For example, the all too
present mismanagement of funds and one sidedness of power afflicts the lower
levels of administrative bodies: “the relatively insignificant amount of aid
supplied to resource-rich local authorities means that individual agencies have
precious little leverage, especially when commercial interests rather than
humanitarian or ‘good governance’ principles influence the priorities of
bilateral donors.” In fact, this is as much an international issue as it is a
national one: with economic power, foreign actors take part in and indeed
perpetuate the vicious ‘cycle’ of imbalanced power and injustice in the state
of Angolan affairs. All too often, foreign economic relations (including aid
and development investment) are more easily influenced by their own commercial
interests and ties rather than true humanitarian concern. By entrusting their
“good faith” into local authorities for the direct implementation of economic
help (which, by working for the government, often do not hold an impartial view
of resource management), it is an easy way for international actors to rid
themselves of the trouble and the risk of hampering their comfortable economic
position. It is a an easy pitfall to fall into, and that is why advocacy must
always and foremost be considered a priority for NGO’s and rights organisations
working with and for the people.
Read on:
Human Rights Watch: “They Pushed Down the Houses” Forced Evictions and
Insecure Land Tenure for Luanda’s Urban Poor: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2007/angola0507/angola0507webwcover.pdf
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