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Angola in the International Arena – Foreigners’ “energy security” first?

Angola na arena internacional – A “segurança energética” dos estrangeiros em primeiro lugar? 1
David Sogge e Bob van der Winden
p. 121-143

Resumos

No contexto do projeto de investigação “Sociedade Civil e Política em Angola”, este artigo discute forças que atuam fora de Angola, cuja governação e economia foram “desnacionalizadas” durante muito tempo. Após uma análise retrospetiva das suas contribuições anteriores para o projeto, os autores centram-se no período 2017-2023, que viu Angola ainda mais profundamente cativa de um sistema mundial liderado pelas empresas, principalmente em nome da “segurança energética” dos estrangeiros. Os resultados são ainda maiores desvantagens e descontentamentos para a maioria dos angolanos. Olhando para o futuro, os autores observam formas pelas quais ativistas civis, jornalistas e académicos dentro e fora de Angola podem continuar a sinalizar impasses económicos e uma democracia deficiente, onde a extração de combustíveis fósseis domina sob a sombra cada vez maior da catástrofe climática.

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  • 1 The authors wish to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and useful (...)

1As with many others in the non-Western world, Angolans have never been allowed time and space among themselves freely to contest and shape their society and politics. After more than 400 years without solitude, Angola is today more confined than ever in a predatory world system. This fact, emphasised in our contributions in earlier stages of the project “Sociedade Civil e Política em Angola” (see Vidal & Chabal, 2009) has lost none of its salience in affecting prospects that Angola’s political economy might someday respond equitably to all Angolan citizens. In this paper, we reflect critically on our earlier observations, consider today’s realities, and conclude with a look ahead. We make occasional reference to Mozambique, where extractive capitalism also looms large. By doing so, we hope to put some lessons from this project into bolder relief.

Framing the issues

2In this article, as in 2009, we locate Angola’s political economy in a framework of nested arenas, loosely-bounded spheres of relational and discursive power (Sogge et al., 2009). A political arena like Angola’s is constituted by sub-arenas of military, economic, state and civil bodies. Some of these operate transnationally, hence Angola’s arenas are at the same time subject to arenas beyond those constituted domestically. In these transnational arenas, states, corporations, offshore financial bodies, and inter-state organisations set the rules and contest for power to change the rules, sometimes challenged by civil and uncivil organisations. We underlined ways in which Angola’s economy, culture, and politics are “extraverted,” and its governance increasingly “de-nationalised,” especially in crucial matters of fiscal and monetary policy (Sogge, 2015, citing Sassen, 2006). The primacy afforded extractive industries and the rents flowing from them illustrate the workings of nested arenas serving capitalist accumulation, chiefly outside Angola, and crippling public politics and governance for Angolan citizens on home ground.

Looking back

3In our 2009 analysis of Angola’s politics and governance, we noted the following.

4The ruling party-state enjoyed a near-monopoly of power domestically. To win elections and recruit cadres it relied on its longstanding, largely urban constituencies. Yet this perpetuated social and political fractures. Urban middle classes and (semi-)proletarians rallied to the MPLA, while much of the rural, black, agrarian strata rallied to UNITA and other opposition parties. Ethnic and regional affiliations as well as class status influenced a wide range of policies and practices.

5In their management of power, the MPLA and its corporate allies used oil rents for patronage, coercion, co-optation and competition. This included semi-colonization of civil spheres (Abreu, 2008) through Party-affiliated NGOs, and creation of official bodies such as human rights commissions and an ombudsman. These measures helped to channel dissent and suppress potential rivals. Health and education services for most citizens suffered further neglect, while private schools and clinics, including many abroad, catered for the elite. To cushion some hardships the party-state relied on non-governmental bodies supported from abroad. Hence instead of a solid array of public services and protection which citizens could claim as entitlements, there was a “tyranny of structurelessness” among unstable and unaccountable service providers, some of them in an increasingly privatised domain available only to the better-off. This kind of minimalistic and arbitrary welfare provision works to diminish citizen readiness to claim more and better – a demobilising factor we failed to mention, but is now evident from studies elsewhere (for example, Holland, 2018).

6Western donors and mainstream media occasionally expressed dismay about official neglect of the poor and about heavy-handed action against civil protest. Major western aid agencies praised NGOs and other formal civil society bodies and provided some of them with modest, often fluctuating funding in order to signal their virtue and to keep alive a semblance of countervailing power. But for international bodies like the IMF and private corporations, an active, politicised citizenry and a robust social contract were not on the agenda. Indeed, serious shifts of power were for them unwelcome.

7We concluded then:

Protection, confidence and information needed to mount advocacy efforts are nowhere guaranteed in Angola. […] The balance of forces in the public arena today is tilted overwhelmingly against emancipatory initiatives in civil domains. The interests of the producers and consumers of hydrocarbons (and other sectors, especially financial services, serving producers and Angolan elites) have priority, severely constraining research, debate and protest at both national and global levels. (Sogge et al., 2009)

8Looking forward from 2009 we stated:

Public space for associational life is also without question a good thing. But a responsive state, built around public services and the active pressure of constituents (consumers and producers) to make them work well, seems to us to be an even more pressing and probably more feasible objective in the middle run. Therefore, a chief priority for foreign support should be those organisations actively enlarging public space and fighting in the public arena, as well as the means (e.g., media, communication) that de facto enlarge and protect the public domain.

9Despite the government’s near-total control over domestic media, however, we did envision potential sources of civic education via Internet-based media, drawing in Angolan diasporas, policy activists and scholars (Sogge et al., 2009).

10We drew attention to Angola’s continuing extraversion and the importance of factoring in the roles of powerful outsiders when assessing prospects for democratic practices and a decent social contract.

Given that organisations are nested in a globalised pattern, and that Angolan elite interests are anchored offshore, strategies of countervailing power increasingly have to be made relevant at those global levels. Improving the responsiveness of domestic elites and their global allies will require confronting them in the domestic arena but especially in the global arena, where transparency, anti-corruption and good governance are needed more than ever. (Sogge et al., 2009)

In the balance today

11As in the past, fossil fuels today loom large in the international arena. Oil from Angola, and as from 2010 gas from Mozambique (Rawoot, 2020), continue to command the attention of Western corporations and the governments who subsidise them. In the West, those powerful actors have long exalted the virtues of competition, while they have seldom faced any serious rivals. But today they face real competition in the form of Chinese political and economic enterprise. Wars in Ukraine, Israel and Syria, with resulting economic shocks have only intensified struggles for “energy security.” These struggles pivot on fossil fuels – despite all the talk about the need to decarbonise. International patron-client alliances are a result. Dependence on fossil fuels and their rents helps account for the high degree of foreign official and corporate tolerance of ruling oligarchies in Angola and Mozambique, who are their reliable clients.

12Following the investiture in 2017 of João Lourenço as President, the Angolan government rolled out a series of measures intended to accommodate foreign capital, chiefly in facilitating access to lucrative activities and assets and in de-risking private investment. It faced calls to seize the moment and act decisively. From a Western citadel of economic power came urgent advice that there was “a historical and relatively short political window of opportunity to push a critical mass of difficult and necessary reforms across a broad front” (IFC, 2019, p. xx1v). The prescriptions were to make Angola welcome foreign capital not only de facto but also de jure. Chief among them were:

13Private Investment Law (2018) to facilitate outward transfers of capital and eliminate the “local partner” share required under the 2015 version of this law.

14Competition Law (2018) to align Angolan statutes with international commercial law and its systems.

15AIPEX: Agency for Private Investment and Promotion of Exports (2018) to facilitate foreign direct investment that may boost, as the name indicates, exports.

16Privatisation Law (2019) and its accompanying PROPIV system to reduce formal state control over the economy by selling off many major state assets, including the oil giant Sonangol and its subsidiaries, the diamond firm Endiama (already linked with Russian, Israeli and Brazilian capital), the national airline TAAG, the insurance company ENSA, etc. By the end of 2022, some 96 firms or other assets had been privatised – about 100 fewer than intended, thus justifying the extension of PROPRIV's mandate to 2026.

17Public-Private Partnership Law (2019) to “de-risk” private investors as enabled by the government’s Office for Public-Private Partnerships.

18Free Trade Zone Law (2020) to govern low/no-tax business districts and put a new legal floor under the Sonangol-owned, China-financed “Luanda-Bengo Special Economic Zone,” now joined by a no/low tax enterprise zone, the 2800-hectare “Uala Agro-Industrial Reserve.” However, close studies in the case of Angola (Lippolis, 2022) and assessments of these tax-free and regulation-poor zones worldwide (Slobodian, 2023) point to risks of megalomania, elite self-dealing, and poor performance, if not failure, despite the upbeat advertisements about them.

19BODIVA, a fledgling stock exchange, gained prominence in 2022 when Banco BAI hoovered up 94 million investor dollars in Angola’s first Initial Public Offering.

20The EU-Angola Sustainable Investment Facilitation Agreement (2022) intended mainly to streamline authorisations for businesses and facilitate their access to key officials. As of 2020, EU-based interests held assets worth €10 billion in Angola, while Angolan entities held €2.4 billion in the EU – hence, reciprocal principles are supposed to underpin the agreement (EC, 2022).

21As the government rolled out these and other new laws, policies and agencies, the IMF was more satisfied than ever. Its staff members may quietly express dismay when they see poor people, but officially the IMF continues to praise the new regime’s policies as “sound” and “prudent” (IMF, 2023) – that is, aligned with IMF preferences. In such praise there’s an element of self-congratulation, given that the fingerprints of the IMF and allied institutions are all over these policies. That is apparent in the intensity of “technical assistance” and “capacity building” furnished by the IMF and World Bank for Angolan policymakers (IMF, 2023, Annex VI). The power behind the IMF throne, the US government, also expressed enthusiasm about investment prospects in Angola (US Department of State, 2023). Hence, the scaffolding to extend and consolidate Angola’s extraverted, market fundamentalist model, co-produced by foreign corporations and national elites, was in place.

22This enhanced investor-friendly approach also benefits Angola’s upper strata. Established figures (minus the now disgraced dos Santos family and its close associates) are favoured, perhaps along with some businesspeople beyond the ruling party’s direct patronage. But will benefits come to Angolan citizens on a broad basis? Up to now, IMF-endorsed pledges to combat poverty, promote downward redistribution, achieve greater regional equity and diversify the economy away from petroleum have come to little. Much of the new policy package resembles that imposed on most post-socialist countries since 1991 – policies which in most cases led to wider poverty, greater inequality and corruption (see, for example, Dale & Fabry, 2018). In their ambitions to widen the scope and lower the risks for foreign capital, these policies resemble those of the “old” extractive economy of the colonial era.

23The IMF assesses Angola’s performance according to many criteria, but among the most important is that Angola must show respect for freedom for global capital. That criterion is: “Not to impose new or intensify existing restrictions on the making of payments and transfers for current international transactions” (IMF, 2022, p. 95). When drawing up budgets, Angola’s government prioritises creditors abroad, as demonstrated by two leading Angolan NGOs (ADRA+OPSA, 2022, p. 7). In principle, Angolans set priorities through open, democratic processes; in practice, however, democratic oversight and control carry little weight. In its report on consultations with Angolan authorities in 2022, the IMF and other external agencies enjoy far more influence over policies and budgets than do Angolan citizens and their elected representatives. Going by comparative assessments of the International Budget Partnership (IBP), a non-profit group whose main office is in Washington DC and is supported by major Western donor agencies and philanthropies, Angola’s budget processes get very low rankings. For the budget of 2021, it assessed public participation in Angola at the low end of “insufficient”; it rated official legislative and audit oversight of the budget as “weak” and termed transparency (public access to documents) as “insufficient” (IBP, 2023). Other observers share this view. For example, in its analysis of the National State Budget, UNICEF Angola (2023, p. 27) urged the government to “improve fiscal transparency and financial literacy and to promote more opportunities for interaction with civil society.” A civic watchdog, the Angolan Citizens’ Platform on Public Debt (@pacdp_oficial), has exposed executive neglect of parliamentary-approved spending targets, such as for military purposes and allocations (“Direct Adjustments”) earmarked for corporations such as Grupo Carrinho, Omatapalo, GEMCORP and the Israeli Mitrelli Group.

24Meanwhile, financial resources continue to flow offshore, largely without Angolan public oversight or serious actions by international authorities such as the IMF. A recent report prepared in alignment with the G7’s intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force, for example, found that Angola “is particularly exposed to capital flight through embezzlement of export proceeds and export mis-invoicing” (ESAAMLG, 2023, p. 119). Laws against illicit flows are on the books, but are rarely if ever enforced. Without calling much attention to them, Western authorities and private interests continue to tolerate and enable illicit financial flows from Angola, mainly to Western entities onshore and offshore. A formidable industry of accountancy and juridical “enablers” does the dirty work (Shaxson, 2022). Capital flight from Angola exploded in the period 2010-2018, when an estimated at US$63 billion departed. But because that total does not include sizable losses due to mis-invoicing, the actual financial drainage from Angola is probably much greater (Ndikumana & Boyce, 2022, p. 18). In net terms, foreign direct investment flows have long been negative. Flows in the years 2014 and 2015 were exceptional in that more foreign direct investment arrived than departed (IMF, 2022; UN-SDG, 2023). Behind legal walls and secure digital systems managed in New York, London, Amsterdam, Dubai and elsewhere, corporate agents and their Angolan partners deal in large streams of money via secrecy jurisdictions. These illicit flows, together with remittance of conventional profits and debt repayments, have long made Angola a net creditor to the world.

25Investigative journalists, aided by whistleblowers and hackers, have revealed major instances of capital flight. Explosive revelations emerged from the “Luanda Leaks”. Around 2019, the Paris-based anti-corruption watchdog PPLAAF (Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa) handed over more than 700,000 documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for further investigation. This digital “hack” turned up confidential emails, contracts, spreadsheets, ledgers, audits, incorporation papers, organisational charts, lists of clients with overdue payments for jewels, board of directors meeting minutes and videos, bank loan and other loan agreements, deeds, public contracts, government advisories, invoices, tax advice and tax returns. Over more than eight months, more than 120 journalists from ICIJ and 36 media organisations in 20 countries pursued leads in the documents and plumbed their significance. Together, they showed how Isabel dos Santos and her husband, Sindika Dokolo, exploited weak or non-existent regulations to enlarge their fortune and shield their assets from tax authorities and others, with the support of elite, mostly Western financial service providers, many of them in Amsterdam. Investigative pieces such as “How Angolan Elites Built a Private Banking Network to Move Their Riches into the European Union” (Sharife & Anderson, 2020) have widened public knowledge of Angolan “stolen assets” and triggered formal measures against some of those doing the stealing. Not the least of these measures were carried out by Angola’s post-dos Santos government. Even the Dutch government began, cautiously, taking steps to crack down on the use of Dutch legal gimmicks that enable illicit flows. Yet the Dutch government has yet to “walk the talk” about anti-corruption.

26Dutch multinationals have long been active in Angola, and few can claim to have clean hands. The “Luanda Leaks” exposed ways in which Dutch companies such as Van Oord operate in the “Angolan Arena.” That dredging and land reclamation firm works closely with Dutch state institutions (notably Atradius Dutch State Business, the official export credit agency), the Dutch banks ING and ABN Amro, and above all, with high officials in Angola. The “Leaks” exposed plans involving Van Oord for an upmarket urban development project, Areia Branca (White Sands), first proposed in 2010 when President dos Santos took over exclusive control of the area and delegated it to “Futungo,” the Presidential Office. It was meant to be part of Luanda’s development plan, where earlier a similar part had been realised, known as Luanda Sul. The plan consisted of shopping centres, hotels, marinas and new homes for the wealthy. Early in 2013, the development plan for the wider Areia Branca area was awarded to the companies Urbinveste and Landscape – both owned by Isabel dos Santos, the former President’s daughter. The result came quickly: one night in June, Angolan police, soldiers, and even members of the presidential guard arrived to evict a semi-formal settlement of three thousand fisherfolk, that had been in existence for over fifty years. The eviction force began beating people with clubs, throwing their televisions, generators, mattresses, pots and boat engines into the sea, while shutting down access to the telephone network. This brutal action forced residents into makeshift dwellings in other informal settlements, with no compensation at all (Bicho, 2013). The people were pushed out, but since then no significant investments have taken place, and the place remains exactly Areia Branca, white beach and dunes, with no inhabitants. Futungo approved the plan and awarded Urbinveste and its Dutch partner Van Oord a 615-million-dollar contract to redesign the shoreline close to Areia Branca. The Dutch engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV assisted Van Oord in matters of project layout. The Dutch bank ING lent 400 million dollars to finance the project and the Dutch official credit agency Atradius insured it. Urbinveste received 189 million dollars, but it is not clear what they exactly did for it. The Angolan presidency paid at least 12 million dollars for these plans. Also involved was Broadway Malyan, a big British design company. Both companies could state later – when the whole set-up had been published by ICIJ – that they had “clean hands”: the eviction took place a month before they got involved.

27This way also the banks (Banco BIC, Portugal, partly owned by Isabel dos Santos and ING, Netherlands), as well as KPMG (drafting the business plan in 2015 for 315 thousand dollars) as well as PwC (advising tax-friendly payment routes through Dubai) and Atradius kept a “clean conscience” and as Broadway Malyan stated: we are “committed to operating in a responsible and ethical manner.” Also, Van Oord denied responsibility for the evictions: “The families were removed before the company became involved in the project,” they said (ICIJ, Luanda Leaks, 2020). Already in 2012, the Dutch Central Bank had warned local banks and trust offices for dealing with Isabel dos Santos, who was channelling her assets through nine different private Dutch companies. Routinely ignoring the warnings were several trust offices operating “letterbox” companies, usually consisting of no more than postal addresses.

28For their services as facilitators, Dutch trust offices, legal firms and accountancy companies made millions. Control over them was evidently a low priority for the Dutch government, which routinely regards the Dutch financial sector as a goose laying large golden eggs, regardless of damage to others. Two Leiden University tax experts have written that the “letterbox” sector “has developed into a flourishing industry with its own lobbying position in politics. Its contribution to Dutch GDP increased from about 0.5% in the mid-1980s to over 3% in recent years.” (Vleggeert & Vording, 2019, p. 3). Today such services to politically exposed persons (PEPs) are no longer encouraged. The Dutch Arbitration Court ruled in 2023 that Isabel dos Santos had illegally obtained a 52,6-million-dollar dividend from Angola’s oil company Sonangol, just days before the new President João Lourenço fired her as Sonangol’s Board Chair (ICIJ, 2023). At the request of the Angolan government, the international police body Interpol put dos Santos on a “Red List” calling for her arrest. The Angolan government is suing her for 1.1 billion dollars.

29Dutch law and the legal and financial services that make use of it – and that lobby vigorously to shape laws – are not alone in helping plunder Angola’s wealth. Indeed, there is vigorous competition among firms using onshore and offshore systems under Western jurisdictions. Such beggar-thy-neighbour stances help account for the Netherlands’ very poor score – it is rated 161 of 166 countries – in a recent Sustainable Development Goal ranking of negative “spillover” impacts, which effectively hinder other countries’ social, economic and political improvement (Sachs et al., 2022). The point here is that – especially where plunder requires secrecy, and secrecy enjoys political protection – investigative journalists can play powerful roles. In exposing these and related episodes of externally enabled theft and abuse of power the work of journalists is vital.

30In its agrarian policies, Angola’s post-colonial leadership, whether Marxist-Leninist or market fundamentalist, has never departed from its preference for large-scale, high external input agribusiness. In the state socialist epoch, its ambition was to create “factories-in-the-field” inspired by the Soviet bloc. At the same time, political and military chieftains quietly relied on hundreds of privately-run farms and ranches originating in the colonial period. In the late 1980s, having jettisoned most state socialist policies and put most loss-making state farms up for sale, Angola opened its doors to transnational firms and consultants, whose entry signalled continuity with the big farm model (see Sogge, 1994). In this way Angola’s rural “dualism” (Pacheco, 2003) was perpetuated with even greater asymmetries: a largely impoverished smallholder sector is structurally eclipsed by an agribusiness sector dependent largely on oil revenues and imported technologies and management. From an early hour after 1975 there developed a self-reinforcing pattern: imperatives and money to import food have combined with political distrust and disdain towards smallholders and rural traders. The MPLA’s benign and not-so-benign neglect (see, for example, Safarik, 2020) led many rural people to adhere to UNITA or other non-MPLA political movements. In addition, personal avarice among elites (some landholdings and plantation enterprises were in the hands of military and security branches or their senior officers) has further helped align Angolan agrarian policies with outside capital.

31Some voices in the arena of international governance express concern. UNCTAD researchers have called attention to land-grabbing, arbitrary displacement, and under-utilisation of land: “it is estimated that more than one million hectares of land in the whole country have been granted to 48 agriculture and forestry mega projects, but many plots remain unused” (UNCTAD, 2019, p. 50). Some of these plantations have not dispossessed smallholders, as that took place already in the colonial era; de Grassi and Ovadia (2017) have exposed that pattern in Malanje province. But other big-scale projects have led to the abuse of local smallholders at the behest of national or foreign investors. A comparative sample of 14 “mega-projects” in three provinces studied by Tump et al. (2021) found evidence of official allocations of land to investors with little or no local consultation. More striking were the poor economic results for both Angolan and foreign owners, adverse ecological impacts for local people, and losses for Angolan banks stuck with non-performing loans.

32Urban residents, who account for roughly two-thirds of Angola’s population today, have not fared much better. Currently, about three out of five city dwellers live in peripheral, poorly serviced shantytowns; twenty years earlier, only one out of five city dwellers lived in them (World Bank, 2023). A recent expert assessment of the country’s first National Urbanization and Housing Programme (NUHP), launched in 2008, reached disturbing conclusions. Almost all new housing projects, built by foreign firms and routinely financed with foreign loans, fell far short of plans; indeed, some of these new units remained unoccupied for years. Most were built for upper-income families; state help for poor and lower-income people was scant. The expert concludes that “few of the urban poor benefited” from the NUHP, which moreover failed

to lay the groundwork […] of building sustainable and equitable cities that leave no one behind. Even Angola’s nascent housing construction sector seemed to have been ‘left behind’. […] Indeed, our second major finding was that the international private sector was the major beneficiary of construction contracts. (Cain, 2021, p. 202)

33Explanations are many, but there is no doubt about the influence of large companies from Portugal, Brazil, China, South Africa and the Netherlands that have long dominated the lucrative infrastructure, construction and building materials sectors. Recently, however, Angolan firms (many of them with strong links with the ruling party as well as with interests abroad) have managed to win contracts and tap capital of both banks and the state (Wanda et al., 2023). Meanwhile, to house themselves and create sources of income, most Angolans have been left to rely on their own social and economic resources.

34As of 2023, the new government had yet to make good its pledges seriously to reduce poverty. When measured in its multiple dimensions, poverty affected about 48 percent of Angola’s population in 2018, up from 32 percent in 2000 (UN-SDG, 2023). New market fundamentalist policies – for example, higher charges for public services, secondary education and transport, and cuts in public sector employment (see Razavi et al., 2021) – have further dimmed dreams of improvement for waged and informal sector workers (see, for example, Schubert, 2022). A European thinktank recently concluded as follows:

Austerity measures negotiated with the IMF in exchange for new loans have been met with approval from lenders and investors but have exacerbated hardships for ordinary Angolans. These measures, which include the phasing out of fuel subsidies, the introduction of VAT and individual income taxes, have disproportionately affected the poorest segments of the population. (BTI, 2024, p. 36)

35Recently, however, some countermeasures to alleviate income poverty have begun to be tested, with help from such bodies as UNICEF. They target very poor or marginalised strata. Valor Criança, an EU-supported pilot project of cash transfers for families with children under five, ran from 2019 to 2022, reaching 20 thousand households in three provinces. A larger cash transfer effort, Kwenda, began in 2020, backed by a World Bank loan. As of March 2023, about 750 thousand households had received at least one quarterly payment of 25,500 kwanzas (about €29). But public programmes of universal coverage, implying authentic redistribution, are not on the policy agenda. In early 2022, the government announced marginal increases in budgets for education, health, social protection and other public goods. These upward adjustments were opportune for the ruling party, as it faced competition in an election year. But their modest scale was consistent with the preferences of the IMF and its financial sector overlords, whose approval opens ways to Western financial markets and official loans.

36Nevertheless, such budgetary gestures for social welfare failed to boost the MPLA’s popularity at the polls in 2022. In Luanda province, the ruling party managed to attract only a third of those voting for the National Assembly – a stunning setback for a party that had always taken its urban constituencies for granted. But dissatisfaction is present country-wide. A recent national survey detected weak popular trust (25-30%) in the President, the National Assembly, the ruling party and opposition parties. Trust in politics and governance is well below the low levels (less than 40%) measured in 2019 (Afrobarometer, 2022). Such political trends can be attributed to popular discontent with the political class and its serial self-dealing, managed routinely in “partnerships” with foreign firms and aid agencies.

37As trust in governing institutions has fallen, political fissures have widened. Political episodes elsewhere in the world, notably the “Arab Spring” uprisings, helped detonate in Angola an explosion of open dissent (Lima, 2013). Inspiring and sometimes leading these displays of civic activism were other actors on the terrains of legal protection, journalism, music, religion and “netativismo” (activism through networks), all relying greatly on social media (Ayres & Babo, 2018). Generating the greatest public visibility have been vigils, marches and other non-violent demonstrations, mainly by young people in cities. These met, and continue to meet, brutal state and corporate repression. For a number of observers, these protests and Angola’s inchoate social movement represent a departure from the depoliticized climate of “fear, resignation and fatalism for a majority of Angolans” (Blanes, 2021, p. 125).

38In Angola’s associative life, some positive gestures are detectable. In 2021, the government carried out its first “participatory budget” process in all of the nation’s 164 districts. Inspired by experiences in Brazil and backed by donors, that exercise is supposed to engage citizens in setting public investment priorities at local levels. It is far from clear, however, that it genuinely reflects public preferences. A labour law of 2015 clarifies worker rights to organise, bargain collectively and to strike. International trade union organisations regularly express concern about worker rights in Angola (ITUC, 2022). A recent overview concludes:

Independent unions have gradually become more outspoken, particularly in the education and transportation sectors. However, in the crucial oil sector, labour unions are relatively weak, and attempts at strikes are frequently quelled by the Rapid Intervention Police. (BTI, 2024, p. 14)

39The domestic media landscape has not improved. “Censorship and control of information still weigh heavily on Angolan journalists.” (RSF, 2024). Media freedoms today continue to deteriorate. The watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranked Angola 99th of 180 countries in its 2022 survey of media across five criteria of press freedom; two years later, Angola’s ranking had deteriorated to 104th out of 180 countries surveyed (RSF, 2024).

40Donor finance at project levels, where some civic sector organisations scramble to survive, complements donor policies at macro levels. Aid for the civic sector, “democratisation,” etc. mirrors the justification of aid’s roles in assuring foreigners of “energy security” (“which is after all the basics of Dutch diplomacy,” as a Dutch ambassador remarked in a personal communication as far back as 2008). In 2003, a peak year of post-war resurgence, Western aid for Angola, mainly for humanitarian efforts, amounted to more than one billion dollars. This changed in the following decade: in the period 2015-2021, Angola’s net official receipts (of aid and other official flows) totalled a negative 730 million dollars, indicating that Angola transferred to OECD countries more than it received from them (OECD, 2023). Aid earmarked for civil society and local governance has been small and channelled largely through Angolan ministries like that of Territorial Administration; an example is a four-year Spanish-led programme for support to civil society in local governance, funded chiefly by the European Union (FIIAP, 2022). Bilateral aid from the Dutch government in the period 2006-2022 averaged €216 thousand per year, and in recent years, it has barely exceeded €100 thousand per year. As of 2023, only one project, under the rubric “government and civil society” and focused on gender, was active (MFA, 2023). Meanwhile the Dutch, like other donors, subsidise private enterprise with grants, credit lines and trade insurance across a range of Western companies. The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) in the period 2012-2023, at a cost of €4.6 million, supported 55 projects in or related to Angola, of which about four were active as of 2023 (RVO, 2023). Those projects’ impacts on Angolan society have not been studied independently, as far as we know, but it is likely that they fortify Angola’s further insertion in transnational circuits of money and know-how.

Looking ahead

41Across the globe in the coming years, anarchic/nihilistic unrest and organised protests look certain to grow. Factors that detonate them differ from place to place, but deep-running forces, as even the OECD has recently acknowledged, “are reinforcing inequalities rather than promoting a fairer distribution of power and resources, and how they are polarising societies rather than mediating between groups to resolve their differences” (OECD, 2021, p. 120). Given the massive inequalities sustained under rentier rule, Angola is an extreme case of these trends. How will they manifest themselves further? In some places they appear not in citizen dissent and rebellion but in withdrawal and depoliticised cynicism. Less common but more newsworthy are angry nativism and resentment favouring reactionary political and religious movements. Can Angola avoid such dead ends and develop broad support for emancipatory politics and culture? The challenges are many and formidable, also for non-Angolans with stakes in the country’s political and economic fortunes.

42We see a continuation of Angola’s “de-nationalised” governance, a term used by political economy scholar Saskia Sassen to refer to the privatisation and reorientation of parts of states and political processes to fit the agendas of powerful bodies abroad (Sassen, 2006, pp. 222-276). As in the colonial era, real power is anchored abroad, but managed together with Angola’s elites and institutions of the state. Full sovereignty is a fiction. Its appearance is maintained in both the transnational arena (financial bodies, the “international community” of Western donors and military/security forces, inter-governmental networks, etc.) and the domestic arena in a hierarchy of state institutions. The strongest of these, notably the central bank and the Ministry of Finance, are effectively co-produced with external interests. Most international civil society organisations, with their monitoring and indexes of performance, pay too little attention to de-nationalised governance and, by so doing, help to protect it from public scrutiny.

43Foreign interests remain decisive in Angolan development strategies, both in content and in presentation. Angola’s Minister of Finance chose to make public the general lines of the National Development Plan 2023-2027 in a public appearance with the Director-General of the IFC, the World Bank Group’s private sector arm. The Minister then stated that “the private sector should be the jewel in the crown” in that national plan (Redacção_E&M, 2022). Finally published in September 2023, Angola’s five-year plan claims to be aligned with about three-quarters of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (Angola, 2023, p. 9). It refers in any case to donor-pleasing notions about equity, sustainability and private sector leadership.

44For activists and their allies, keeping powerful domestic and foreign interests on the backfoot and answerable for their actions and inactions remains imperative. Continuing attention to the pillage of Angolan resources and the illicit flows stemming from that pillage will be required. Perpetrators – extractive firms, banks, Politically Exposed Persons and their facilitators in law and accountancy firms merit more investigation and exposés. And those interests continue fighting to preserve their secrets. For example, in November 2022, the EU’s Court of Justice capitulated to offshore and real estate interests when it invalidated the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Directive that requires EU countries to provide public access to beneficial ownership registers. Needs are thus growing to boost support to organisations that investigate and campaign on a host of issues. These include tax secrecy and illicit flows, extractive sector complicity in social and environmental damage and the furnishing of military and security hardware and software. Whistleblowers have been vital in the struggle for justice in Angola, yet as of early 2022, Angola was the only country in Southern Africa without any laws to protect whistleblowers (UNODC, 2022).

45At its outset many decades ago, South-South cooperation promised authentic solidarity and emancipatory politics. Today, however, it is largely a depoliticised business centred on technical and managerial issues, chiefly to serve the mercantile and diplomatic aims of richer non-Western donors. That is, South-South cooperation largely mimics the established Western aid industry. The case of Brazilian aid to Angola is typical, as it serves chiefly to promote and de-risk Brazilian extractive and infrastructure corporations (Dye & Alencastro, 2020). Yet some Angolan organisations have connected to sister organizations abroad in efforts to transfer social know-how and strategies in a number of fields, from low-income community development and local government to nature conservation and public health. Campaigning through “Transnational Advocacy Networks” focused on social and environmental damage by extractive projects has shown results in the case of Brazilian companies in Mozambique (Shipton & Dauvergne, 2021). If well-anchored and protected, such efforts could also carry impact in Angola. Noteworthy on this front is “BRICS from Below,” a network platform that punctures myths about counter-hegemony posed by the likes of Brazil, India and South Africa.

46The forward motion of authentic public democracy and the emancipatory camp of Angola’s civil sector will, in our view, gain less from official donors than from transnational networks of researchers, journalists and activists promoting socio-economic and civil rights, land, housing, environmental justice and related issues. We see that democracy and responsive government can better develop from the bottom up – where possible, supported by networks of likeminded people or organisations abroad. Within Angola, a number of initiatives have advanced in recent years to promote civil activism. Among these are consortia of civic organisations, notably “Civic Movement MUDEI” and the Platform South. There have come research efforts, including one led by the Social Sciences Laboratory at the Catholic University of Angola, on civil activism. Longstanding efforts include citizens’ analysis of Angola’s national budget by the Observatório Político Social de Angola (OPSA). At the same time, research, publicity and solidarity actions abroad, often created or inspired by Angola’s diaspora, including Internet-based news and commentary sources (such as Club-K and Angola Aktuell) furnish information and moral support to the emancipatory camp of Angola’s civil society. A growing number of investigative projects by journalists linked South-North and South-South point ways forward for transnational cooperation (Schaepman & van der Winden, 2017). A challenge for investigative journalists and policy activists is to avoid dependence on official donors, for whom – as in the case of the Netherlands and most other donor countries – “energy security”, and the continued capture of fossil profits and rents, have higher priority than equitable development.

47Angola has seen many decades of underinvestment in public services, especially those that promote human flourishing across a broad basis. Neither the leadership (with a few exceptions) nor foreign donors have shown enthusiasm for such investments. In one of its recent statements, the World Bank argues that “Angola’s most important wealth are its people, who are young (the median age is 17) and can power climate-resilient development across sectors – but only if they are healthy, well-nourished, and properly trained.” (World Bank Group, 2022, p. 5). This sounds beneficent, but it may be fairly asked of the World Bank Group, which for decades has promoted and enforced public austerity and private accumulation, how it intends to shift course and help Angola create a robust basis in public services and human resources. Evidence of any such intention is scarce, while evidence of intentions to de-fund public services is abundant (as compiled by Mackenzie & Sahay, 2023, among others). Monies for “social protection” that were budgeted, authorised and actually spent by the Angolan government have, since 2017, at a time of enhanced IMF and donor influence, broadly declined (UNICEF Angola, 2023).

48Our planet’s climate crisis is already beginning to hammer Angola. Even under conservative American leadership, the World Bank has published grave warnings:

Climate change is not just a future threat, but already a reality in Angola. […] Agriculture will be hard hit… [and] destruction of capital stock due to floods and reduced labour productivity due to higher temperatures are also expected to result in significant headwinds to Angola’s development. (World Bank Group, 2022, p. 2)

49In official documents, Angola’s government appears to show commitment, at least in stating intentions to adapt to the looming crisis. However, for Angola’s “climate refugees” fleeing south to Namibia due to the continuing drought, the promised adaptation measures will come too late (Martinez, 2022). Angola’s recent National Development Plans (Angola, 2018; Angola, 2023) contained detailed goals and priority actions. Even more detail and reasoning appear in its National Strategy for Climate Changes 2018-2030 (Angola, 2017). In its mitigation policies, enforcement of existing laws on gas flaring has had some positive effects after 2016, but far more could be done (World Bank Group, 2022, p. 25). Meanwhile, the government has announced its intentions to set up a carbon credit scheme that would attract foreign corporations wishing to offset their emissions through tree planting. Such a pursuit is remarkable given the poor record of carbon offset schemes worldwide over the past three decades (see, for example, Greenfield, 2023; Stoddard et al., 2021). Angola’s pursuit of such a scheme is consistent, however, with the leadership’s readiness to follow advice from bodies such as the World Bank, whose solutions to most problems involve marketisation that benefits elites.

50Yet, sometimes the World Bank is capable of issuing facts and views that squarely contest the primacy of fossil fuels, namely their public subsidies. A recent World Bank report, Detox Development, states: “Governments are spending trillions on inefficient subsidies that are making climate change worse – money that could be tapped to help solve the problem.” (Damania et al., 2023). Such a message did not stem from the Bank’s own insight and volition but emerged amidst accumulated knowledge and a climate of opinion that civil activists and researchers have built over decades.

51Continued use of fossil fuels threatens millions today and many more tomorrow. From climate and resource activists to the United Nations, calls to de-carbonise and to “leave the oil in the soil” are being amplified. Even some national governments (such as those in the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance) express concern, while financial sector investors show alarm at the prospect of being stuck with “stranded assets” in their hands. What do these appeals imply for Angola? In de-nationalised governance “co-produced” with foreign lenders, these imperatives are acknowledged rhetorically but with little enthusiasm. On the one hand, the government tells the IMF that its efforts to diversify Angola’s economy beyond oil are a “matter of life or death.” But at the same time, it faithfully follows the World Bank Group’s advice that “investments into new oil exploration are needed” (IFC, 2019, p. 110). Driven by these and other powerful incentives, Angola and its corporate collaborators continue along the hydrocarbon path, giving at best sporadic lip service to an alternative strategy. This existential matter hardly figures on the agenda of Angolan civil society organisations.

52Fossil fuel industry defenders may scoff at talk of stranded assets, but other observers take the risks seriously. A probing article entitled “Unburnable Wealth of Nations” in an IMF publication highlighted in 2017 an urgent need in fossil fuel export lands to develop other sectors “rather than wait for the next commodity price boom” (Cust et al., 2017). How will progressive Angolans respond when investors lose their appetites for fossil assets, leaving them stranded? A fair process of decarbonisation is urgently needed. That will require both capturing revenues generated by Angola’s carbon assets, preventing them from fleeing offshore, and putting them to productive uses onshore in Angola. Yet, a host of powerful interests, domestic and foreign, oppose the capture and repurposing of fossil rents. This is a “wicked” political problem, defying easy answers. To help address it, the “co-production” of solidarity between domestic and international forces for social and climate justice will become imperative.

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Notas

1 The authors wish to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and useful remarks and suggestions.

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Para citar este artigo

Referência do documento impresso

David Sogge e Bob van der Winden, «Angola in the International Arena – Foreigners’ “energy security” first?»Cadernos de Estudos Africanos, 47 | 2024, 121-143.

Referência eletrónica

David Sogge e Bob van der Winden, «Angola in the International Arena – Foreigners’ “energy security” first?»Cadernos de Estudos Africanos [Online], 47 | 2024, posto online no dia 01 maio 2025, consultado o 15 junho 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cea/9076

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Autores

David Sogge

Associate, Transnational Institute
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
dsogge@antenna.nl
ORCID: 0000-0003-1128-9607

Bob van der Winden

Independent consultant
bwinden@gmail.com
ORCID: 0009-0009-1236-143X

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