War, Legacy of Colonial Rule Blamed : Poor, Beleaguered Angola Sets Standard for Decline

The garbage-strewn, potholed streets, the boarded-up stores, the half-finished buildings, the rusting carcasses of old trucks and buses--the decay of Angola has become legendary.

One of Africa’s most fertile countries, Angola now grows less than half the food it needs for its 8.7 million people. Nearly a fifth of its people are either refugees or destitute, according to government figures, and an estimated 45% are malnourished.

The Angolan currency is worth so little that peasants want to be paid in cigarettes, soap or socks for their potatoes, oranges and onions, and workers will not take factory jobs unless they are promised some of the output, whether fabric or tires, as well as their cash wages.

In nearly 12 years of independence, Angola has become a country where little works well and much does not work at all, a country whose great economic potential only dramatizes the extent of its collapse.

The causes of Angola’s misery are complex--colonization by a country--Portugal--that itself was underdeveloped; mistakes by the Marxists who came to power after a 14-year war; partial occupation by South Africa, and a rightist insurgency. As a result, reversing the decay will be a long and difficult process.

“I cannot say when our country will be at peace, when the economy will grow, when life will become normal,” said Paulino Pinto Joao, propaganda secretary of the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the MPLA from its initials in Portuguese.

“Maybe this will all come right for my grandchildren. I hope so. . . . But few nations in history have had such problems as we in Angola.”

A Nation in Decline

Although most impoverished countries of the Third World can publish some statistics showing economic growth, however limited, Angola at present seems able to record only decline.

Diamond production, once a major foreign-currency earner, stands at only one-third of the level of 1973, the last full year before the Portuguese military overthrew the government in Lisbon and precipitated its withdrawal from Angola and other African colonies. Coffee exports are now less than 5% of what they were then. The country’s rich iron mines have been closed for a decade. Production of such household necessities as salt, sugar, soap, matches and vegetable oil has declined by as much as a third while the population has grown.

Only oil production, which accounts for 35% of Angola’s estimated total economic output and 90% of its exports, has increased--running at 300,000 barrels a day now and expected to reach as much as 500,000 barrels a day by 1990 with new offshore wells.

Although Angola’s economy is believed to have shrunk to less than $7 billion in what a government report frankly described last month as “a steady decline,” it cannot be measured as a whole because much of what remains is now based on barter rather than on the nearly worthless kwanza, the national currency. With social services failing as general production drops, there is “a worsening of conditions throughout the country,” the report said.

Hunger and Infant Death

In human terms, the collapse has been horrendous. Half the urban population cannot feed, clothe or house itself adequately, even by the Angolan government’s meager standards. One child in four dies before the age of 5, according to government figures. And widespread famine could result unless the country receives 200,000 tons of grain in international relief donations this year.

“The emergency situation has now reached a new critical threshold,” the Angolan government committee that coordinates relief operations recently reported, noting that lower oil prices have meant that the country will have less money for food imports this year and next.

And Luanda, once known as the Rio de Janeiro of Africa for its gentle foothills, palm-lined harbor, sandy beaches and pastel-colored stucco buildings, has come to symbolize Angola’s cumulative decay.

Families that fled the fighting between the government and rightist guerrillas in the countryside live like modern cave dwellers--without water, electricity or even windows--in high-rise apartment buildings left half-finished at independence in November, 1975. Others have built enormous shantytowns, where spigots intended to water the city’s lawns and gardens have become communal taps.

Luanda Doubles in Size

After losing perhaps a third of its population when more than 300,000 Portuguese settlers fled, fearing the retribution of a Marxist, black-majority government, Luanda has now more than doubled in size with an influx of refugees from rural areas.

“The trouble is that those who left knew how to run the city’s factories and offices, how to operate both the machinery and the government bureaucracy,” said a European woman who remained after independence and supports the government.

“But those who have come to the city are either peasants who know nothing but farming, or they are guerrillas who left school as boys to fight for independence and who are now responsible cadres without the expert knowledge they really need for their jobs.”

An underlying cause of Angola’s decline, government officials and foreign development specialists agree, was Portugal’s failure--refusal, some say--to prepare the country for eventual independence.

Portugal Draws Blame

“The Portuguese did everything that required all but the lowest level of skill--say, driving a car or installing a light switch or even waiting tables--and they trained us for nothing,” said Miguel de Carvalho, a former guerrilla who now heads the government’s press center.

“Some of the smart ones had been sent by the church to Portugal to study, but at independence we had only a few dozen professional men, perhaps a couple of hundred university graduates or former students, and a population that overall was 90% illiterate. Remember, we had 350 years of virtual slavery--even into the 1960s with what the Portuguese called conscripted labor. And, suddenly, we had to run the whole country.”

The Portuguese exodus had an immediate and profound economic impact. Eighty percent of Angola’s plantations and 60% of its industries were abandoned within a year, and the government had to take over most of these. Retail trade collapsed as more than 20,000 importers, shopkeepers and rural traders left, and again the government took over.

Skilled Labor Left

And with the Portuguese went perhaps 200,000 Angolans, many of them of mixed race, who made up the thin layer of local skilled workers and who might have been able, had they remained, to keep their enterprises operating.

“When we opened our embassy 10 years ago,” an East European ambassador recalled, “we had to bring 15 workmen from home because we couldn’t find an electrician, a plumber, a bricklayer, an auto mechanic--even someone who could replace a broken window. The skill level was almost at zero here. Theirs was hardly an industrial economy, but they lacked nine-tenths of the people needed to run and manage what little they inherited.”

The MPLA, one of three groups that had fought for the country’s independence, now recognizes that it compounded these problems after coming to power by rushing into socialism, centralizing economic management and attempting, even before reconstruction was completed, to accelerate the pace of development.

“We did not have the management skills or experience for what we tried to do,” said Lopo do Nascimento, a former planning minister, who as a provincial commissioner now finds himself undoing what he now sees as past mistakes. “At each level of development of a nation, each level of knowledge and training of its people, you must search for an appropriate solution to the problems of that time. We, to my mind, did not. . . .

“We also did not have such a clear concept then of what socialism was, of how to combine private interests with those of the state, of how impoverished we were, of what independence would really mean. . . . Inevitably, we made mistakes.”

South African Role

But Angolan officials contend that they would have been able to correct their policy errors and to begin the long process of reconstruction were it not for South Africa’s attempts at “destabilization.”

South African forces invaded Angola at independence in support of the rival National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, known as UNITA, and drove to about 100 miles of Luanda. They eventually withdrew after Cuba sent troops to save the new Marxist government, which was also fighting another rival, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), north of Luanda. Among the FNLA’s backers was Zaire.

“In 1975, we had no regular army--just guerrillas--and we could not fight South Africa and Zaire,” De Carvalho of the press center recalled. “So we had to ask for help, and the Cubans, who have an organized and experienced army, responded. We had no choice if we were going to maintain the independence we had just won. With their help, we could manage to expel the South African and Zairian troops. We owe the Cubans a great debt.”

The number of Cubans in Angola has since grown to an estimated 37,000. They now operate much of Angola’s air defenses, help train its 100,000-man army and coordinate military logistics. They also work as technical advisers in scores of development projects, ranging from public health and literacy programs to urban construction and reopening of long-closed factories.

South African forces, however, have continued to operate widely in southern Angola over the last decade, trying to prevent guerrillas belonging to the South-West Africa People’s Organization, which Angola supports, from infiltrating across the border into Namibia (South-West Africa).

Continues Backing UNITA

The Pretoria authorities, who have been accused by Angola and several other neighbors of attempting to undermine their stability and thus safeguard continued white rule in South Africa, have also continued their support of the rightist UNITA guerrillas. South Africa provides them with money, arms and training and gives them air and artillery support when their rear bases are threatened by Angolan government offensives.

This insurgency is particularly serious on Angola’s central plateau, impelling thousands of peasants to flee to urban areas and frustrating the government’s efforts at economic reconstruction.

“With probably only a tenth of the forces and none of the big firepower of the government, UNITA has managed to tie this country in knots,” said a West European development specialist here. “It mines the roads to prevent normal transport, it attacks the railways, it ambushes even convoys guarded by the army. Sometimes, it is hard to go 70 miles outside Luanda safely.

“UNITA seems to hit economic targets most of all, and it has even mined peasants’ fields to prevent them from bringing in the harvest. The result is an ever greater economic paralysis of the country.”

Led by Jonas Savimbi, UNITA has also won backing from the Reagan Administration, which sees Angola as a testing ground for its policy of supporting rightist insurgencies to counter Soviet influence. Last year, UNITA received $15 million in U.S. anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, and it is lobbying for more this year.

U.S. Rationalization

The Administration also justifies its support of UNITA partially in terms of the Cuban presence in Angola, although Angolan officials argue that the Cubans are essential for their country’s development as well as its defense.

“We know it makes us an international issue unnecessarily,” an Angolan official said candidly, “but we frankly cannot get along without them--not with UNITA and the South Africans out there.”

Angolan officials complain that the UNITA insurgency and the prolonged confrontation with South Africa drain the country’s limited resources, with defense expenditures consuming more than a third of the national budget and an even larger portion of its oil-export earnings.

The army also gets first call on trained manpower and managers, scarce resources in Angola, and on the technical assistance offered by the Soviet Union, Cuba and other East Bloc countries.

And, apparently to maintain morale, its soldiers are better fed, clothed and housed than most Angolans; the officer corps, clearly an elite, seems almost pampered and has access to imported luxury goods from foreign currency stores.

UNITA inevitably cites the government’s economic mismanagement, the privileges of its low-level officials and the large Cuban, Soviet and East European presence to justify its insurgency and demand the “total liberation” of Angola.

Discouragingly Protracted

According to both Western and East Bloc diplomats in Luanda, however, the government has been able to contain UNITA over the last year, to return to several areas it had lost to the guerrillas, and to reopen a number of key roads to civilian traffic.

Still, the conflict appears almost endless.

“Neither side can win at this point because each has powerful foreign allies that will intervene whenever defeat threatens,” an ambassador said. “Given time and an absence of outside involvement, whether South African or Cuban, the government would probably reduce the UNITA insurgency to a negligible level. But, as things stand, it does not seem likely to get that chance.”

Angolan officials say flatly that they will never negotiate with UNITA, noting that they fought the rightist rebels even during the war of independence against Portugal and that UNITA has since collaborated with South Africa and has no legitimacy.

Their strategy instead is one of slow, patient efforts, trying to correct past errors, hoping to attract foreign aid and even investment, but sacrificing economic growth if necessary to gain military strength.

“A breakthrough solution to our problems is unrealistic, completely unrealistic,” said Venancio de Moura, the deputy foreign minister. “Our strategy is based on moving forward-- politically, economically, diplomatically--wherever we can, knowing that it will be a very long struggle and even harder than the war we fought for independence.”

Parks, The Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Angola.