Angola’s Victims of Peace

Her sobs sang out in the crowded street like a heartsick lullaby to her dead baby. But except for friends cushioning her head against the pavement, the collapsed woman went mostly unnoticed.

The spectacle of a grieving mother outside the pediatric hospital here is as familiar to Angolans as the ubiquitous stench of death inside. Every day, an average of 16 children lose their lives to meningitis, malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition in sweltering, fly-infested wards. About one in every three patients admitted to the hillside hospital dies--usually within a few hours.

“The hospital has such a bad reputation that people avoid coming,” said Dr. Luis Bernardino, who runs the 250-bed facility. “The government gave us a budget of $1.6 million last year, but we received only half that. We often don’t have enough money to buy drugs.”

Down the shady road toward the center of town, Mario Silva is facing a severe shortage as well. The smartly dressed commercial director of the capital’s new Mitsubishi car dealership has imported two sports cars from Japan. With a sticker price of about $100,000 each, the autos have 15 would-be buyers. Silva has decided to sell the flashy red vehicles to whoever shows up first with the cash.

“To say the economy is in the hands of the people is not true,” said Silva, whose thriving business has been built on sales to government officials and foreign businesses. “The situation with luxury cars isn’t necessarily right in relation to the misery you see in this country. At the same time, it shows the world that something isn’t right here.”

Something hasn’t been right in this southern African country for a long time, but with three decades of colonial rebellion and U.S.-backed civil war giving way to an uneasy truce, people here are beginning to ask questions that not long ago would have been considered unpatriotic--perhaps even treasonous, because the long conflict demanded unquestioned loyalty.

Topping the list: Where has all the money gone?

At issue are billions of dollars in government spending that receives scant public accounting, a decade of massive foreign aid that has made Angola one of the world’s biggest charity cases, and the country’s enormous oil wealth that keeps homes heated in New York and Chicago but, according to popular perception, enriches so few here.

“As I see it, just 2% of the people in Luanda are getting the benefits of the system,” Bernardino said. “That is all.”

Alzira Gomez, 34, who runs a small food store across town from the hospital, agreed: “The highest echelon of the government is benefiting from this peace, not us. Not the people.”

That’s not the whole story, according to Finance Minister Mario de Alcantara Monteiro.

“It is necessary to note that governing in the conditions that Angolans have lived in the last years--facing invasions, blockades [and great destruction]--doesn’t allow for normal government,” Monteiro said. “We are aware of the shortcomings in our past economic performance. The reasons for the shortcomings, particularly the war, are now behind us.”

But oft-repeated explanations that the costly demands of war are to blame for the country’s intractable economic and social ills are no longer accepted as plain truth on the street or in the offices of international humanitarian organizations.

Affluence Flaunted

Despite violent clashes in rural areas and increasingly frantic reports of an unraveling peace process, there has been no major fighting between the government and the erstwhile U.S.-backed rebel forces for four years, and the fleet of Mercedeses, BMWs and other expensive cars navigating the city’s potholes is an in-your-face reminder that not everyone in Angola is suffering.

When provincial leaders fly to Luanda, they typically load their aircraft with fancy vehicles to cruise the capital in style and comfort. True or not, popular belief has it that one government official has a multicolored fleet of cars--a vehicle to match each of his designer suits.

“I see the beautiful cars,” said Xavier Alfredo, 22, who peddles household furnishings on a dusty median strip clouded with exhaust fumes. “I don’t know where the money comes from, but they stop and buy things.”

Beyond the tinted windows and leather upholstery, unemployment hovers around 45%, destitute children beg and steal to survive, infant mortality remains among the world’s highest, and most of Angola’s 12 million people will not live past their 47th birthdays. In 1996, the country’s gross national product per capita--an international measure of economic activity--was estimated at $320, compared with an average of $490 in sub-Saharan Africa.

“We are reaching the point where people are saying the war just doesn’t cut it anymore as an excuse,” said a source close to the peace process. “The war is over, and you can’t hide the truth anymore.”

The United Nations, which is scheduled to end its peacekeeping mission here this summer, has spent more than $1 billion trying to set things straight in Angola. Scores of private organizations have spent millions more. Relief workers say “donor fatigue” is taking hold as unsafe conditions make many operations too hazardous to continue and major funding sources--from the European Union to the U.S. government--question the value of their contributions.

Donors Grow Tired

“Our biggest problem right now is donor reluctance,” said Sandra Laumark, director of CARE International Angola, which distributes food and other relief in several provinces.

At the core of the discontent is the growing perception that the Angolan government isn’t doing enough to help its people. The International Monetary Fund estimates that in 1996, less than 9 cents of each $1 spent by authorities here went to social programs, well below the norm even for poor countries. U.N. officials say there is a deep resentment that the government is shirking its own rebuilding responsibilities.

“People are saying, ‘We put all of this money into Angola, but what are the results?’ ” said a U.N. official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I think people are very keen on investing in Angola, but they are tired of the government expecting everyone else to do what the government themselves should be doing.”

Philip Owusu, head of the World Bank office in Luanda, says about half of the government’s $3.5-billion budget is spent on items not included in the public budget; a recent IMF report says that more than two-thirds of total government spending occurs without adequate accounting records or budgetary review.

The so-called extra-budget spending is impossible to trace, Owusu said, but financial and political analysts suspect that much of the money is lining the pockets of government officials, military officers and their close network of friends, supporters and suppliers. The IMF suspended its economic assistance program in 1995, in large part because of what economists euphemistically refer to as a “lack of transparency” in the government’s bookkeeping--code for corruption and under-the-table dealing in everything from armaments to electronics to foreign currency.

A report last month by the Southern African Development Community, a regional organization that includes Angola as a member, included a blunt warning about the Angolan section: “Some discrepancies are evident in figures from Angola, and it is advisable that the figures . . . be treated with some caution.”

The beneficiaries of what one diplomat characterized as undocumented “wild capitalism” are as easy to identify as the passengers on the perpetually overbooked flights between Luanda and South Africa.

Angolans of means do their shopping in Johannesburg and Cape Town; those with entrepreneurial sense return home with bloated inventories of goods, which are then sold at great markups on street corners and in shops. The South African Embassy in Luanda issues at least 100 visas a day.

“It is all quick money, and it is all outside official salaries,” the diplomat said.

“There is no proof,” Owusu said of the government’s complicity in economic corruption. “You can only make wild guesses.”

For many ordinary Angolans, the guessing comes easy.

“The war is over, but we have not yet seen democracy,” said Alfredo, who shares his street corner with a dozen or so hustling teenagers. “We are angry with the government. We can find work like this, but the salary is not enough to support a family. . . . We should be in school learning instead of selling here on the street.”

Struggling to Get By

Gomez, the grocery shopkeeper, says life in Luanda has gotten more difficult since the 1994 peace agreement. The mother of two struggles to keep shelves stocked amid constant shortages and crumbling city services. As she spoke outside her ground-floor shop, sewage from the apartment building above gurgled into the street.

“You have to do what you can to survive,” said Gomez, who buys much of her stock on the black market.

Prices in Luanda are a case in point. At official exchange rates, a single egg costs 40 cents, an apple about $1 and a tube of toothpaste $4. A flimsy pair of plastic women’s shoes from China costs $20. Even on the black market, where prices are halved, most goods are beyond the reach of ordinary Angolans.

A recent World Bank survey ranked Luanda as one of the world’s most expensive cities for the bank’s employees, second only to Geneva. Yet the city’s posh restaurants and nightclubs never lack for clientele.

At the bustling Maquil general store near the Luanda waterfront--where the stock includes everything from Japanese outboard motors and scuba gear to European generators and construction equipment--owners say government officials are among their best customers.

“They are using their money to finance corruption . . . ,” a diplomat here said of the government. “Very little of it is going for the running of the country.”

Angolan officials in Luanda did not respond to requests for an interview. Questioned by a reporter during an economic conference in neighboring Namibia, finance officials dismissed questions about “lack of transparency” as journalistic invention.

“I would like to assure you that we already have enough transparency--probably not total, but better than in some other countries,” said Monteiro, the finance minister. “Our statistics are public and publicized and accepted by the IMF and World Bank.”

Critics acknowledge that some financial turmoil is to be expected in a developing nation emerging from Africa’s longest civil war, which was perpetuated for many years by the U.S.-Soviet rivalry.

The government and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola--the former rebel movement known by its Portuguese acronym, UNITA--remain distrustful of each other and are jockeying for advantage should the country slip back into fighting.

No one is quite certain if the peace process, now in its final stage, has created peace or a momentary absence of war.

But even with the uncertainty, economists say, Angola’s predicament remains extraordinary because of the disparity between the country’s enormous mineral wealth and its squalid human conditions.

The country is experiencing Africa’s biggest oil rush, with experts predicting that it will surpass Nigeria in the next decade as the continent’s largest oil producer. Oil company executives identify Angola’s offshore drilling blocks as among the world’s most promising new finds--along with reserves in the Caspian Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Even with depressed prices worldwide, oil accounts for about $9 of every $10 in government revenue, with most of the oil being exported to the United States.

Oil Versus Diamonds

The split in Angola has always been one of oil versus diamonds, with the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, controlling offshore oil fields and UNITA financing its war effort with diamonds from the interior. UNITA has also come under strong criticism for squandering billions of dollars in diamonds on military adventures, leaving its supporters without adequate food, water and medical care.

But UNITA has given up control of large diamond areas as part of the peace accord, which has also given the organization token power-sharing in a government of national unity. If peace is for real, the former rebels are now asking, what is to come of the oil profits? Will ordinary Angolans benefit from the black gold?

“I am not sure what we need is [more] money in this country,” said Isaias Samakuva, chief negotiator for the UNITA delegation in Luanda. “We need expertise and the mechanism of helping this country to control its economy. Can you imagine the tens of millions this country gets from oil? . . . Does anybody know how much Angola is getting from oil? These are the areas where we need help.”

Bernardino, the pediatric hospital director, said a recently completed 60-bed addition to the hospital was paid for with donations from foreign oil companies.

But good corporate citizens, he said, cannot turn things around alone. Even with new facilities, a nurse makes just $2 a day and children keep dying at an alarming rate. Bernardino recently suspended two hospital workers who were demanding bribes from patients in exchange for basic supplies.

“They said they needed the money,” Bernardino said. “I said, ‘You are not well paid, but it is not these poor people who should be paying you.’ ”

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BACKGROUND

Angola won its independence from Portugal in 1975 after more than a decade of popular uprisings. The Angolan rebels were split among three rival groups, and although they agreed on a transfer of power from Portugal, their deal fell apart even before the official independence day. With the Cold War in full swing, each of the competing groups found backers abroad. The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) were supported by the United States, its European allies and South Africa; the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was backed by the former Soviet Union, its East Bloc satellites and Cuba. The MPLA ultimately gained the upper hand in the capital, Luanda; the FNLA disbanded; and UNITA took to the hills. Fighting continued until 1992, when both sides agreed to national elections. But after charges of election fraud, fighting resumed. A 1994 peace accord led last year to the creation of a government of national unity, but deep distrust keeps both sides prepared for war.