The first glimpse of peace in Angola’s interminable civil war came in 1990 as the Cold War drew to a close. Throughout the 1980s Angola had remained a pawn in the Cold War, a theatre in which the United States and the Soviet Union used proxy forces to compete for ascendancy. While the Russians and the Cubans continued to prop up the MPLA’s Marxist regime in Luanda, the Americans, along with the South Africans, sustained Jonas Savimbi’s rebel Unita movement. Angola featured as part of President Reagan’s strategy of ‘bleeding’ Soviet resources by fuelling insurgencies in countries he regarded as Soviet ‘client states’. During his first term in office, Reagan, thwarted by the 1976 ‘Clark Amendment’ banning direct US assistance to Unita, used third parties to arm Savimbi. During his second term he succeeded in overturning the Clark Amendment, enabling him to provide direct covert military aid to Unita. Year by year the amount increased.
American officials dealing with Savimbi gave him high marks for leadership. ‘It was difficult not to be impressed by this Angolan, who combined the qualities of warlord, paramount chief, demagogue and statesman,’ wrote Chester Crocker, a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, in his 1992 book High Noon in Southern Africa. Noting that Savimbi was fluent in three African languages and four European ones, Crocker considered him to possess ‘a world-class strategic mind’. In 1986 Savimbi was invited to the White House and presented to the American public as a ‘champion of democracy’.
With American as well as South African support, Savimbi’s forces gained control of much of southern and central Angola and spread northwards to the border with Zaire, overrunning the diamond fields of the Lunda region that provided three-quarters of Angola’s diamond production. With the collusion of Mobutu, Savimbi used Zaire as a base for guerrilla activity in northern Angola, a conduit for receiving American arms supplies and an entrepôt for selling diamonds.
To fend off the Unita threat, the MPLA government relied on 50,000 Cuban troops and spent heavily on Soviet arms, drawing on revenues from the offshore oil fields being developed by American companies. Between 1987 and 1990, the Soviet Union supplied more than $3 billion worth of military equipment. One of the paradoxes of the Angolan conflict was that Cuban forces were given the task of defending American-owned oil installations from attacks by American-backed rebels. The overall cost of the war was huge. During the 1980s more than 350,000 died and a million more – deslocados – were uprooted from their homes.
Though a deal involving South Africa’s withdrawal from Angola and Namibia in return for the phased withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola was reached in December 1988 it still left the war unresolved. Mobutu, anxious to win favour in Washington, attempted to broker a local peace deal and in June 1989 invited Savimbi and the MPLA leader, Eduardo dos Santos, to his palace at Gbadolite where they met for the first time and frigidly shook hands. Seven days later Savimbi’s commandos attacked Luanda’s electricity supply.
Meeting during Namibia’s independence celebrations in March 1990, American and Russian officials initiated their own discussions for peace in Angola. Portugal, the former colonial power, joined the initiative, mediating at a first round of direct talks between the MPLA and Unita in Portugal in April. Thirteen months later, at a meeting in Lisbon on 31 May 1991, dos Santos and Savimbi signed a sixty-page package of agreements intended to bring an end to sixteen years of civil war. Dos Santos was stiff and silent; Savimbi was charming and exuberant, brimming with confidence. American and Russian officials attending the ceremony simultaneously declared an end to the Cold War in Africa. A key role was accorded to a United Nations mission led by a British-born UN diplomat, Margaret Anstee, which was charged with monitoring the peace process and verifying elections scheduled for 1992. In the sand slums of Luanda – the musseques – where 2 million residents lived, the 1991 accord was gratefully known as ‘Margaret’s peace’.
Despite the appearance of goodwill, the two sides viewed each other with intense distrust. The MPLA was an authoritarian party in the hands of a small elite – an oil nomenklatura – long accustomed to wielding power in an arbitrary manner and to enriching themselves from the business of government. It had relied heavily on a security apparatus developed with East German assistance to ensure control and to suppress any sign of opposition. An internal coup attempt in 1977 had been put down with the help of Cuban forces with extreme violence, instilling a mood of fear that still prevailed. Since taking office in 1979 on the death of Agostinho Neto, dos Santos, a Soviet-trained petroleum engineer, had accumulated more and more personal power, developing a personality cult. Eulogising his leadership, a MPLA congress in 1985 declared: ‘His prestige, authority and respect and admiration of militants and the people are becoming increasingly evident, owing to his consistency and honesty in respect of the principles of the revolution and his intelligence and modesty in analysing and solving the party’s central problems.’
In reality, the MPLA’s policies had proved disastrous. For fifteen years it had enforced a Soviet-inspired system of centralised planning and nationalisation, causing the collapse of both industrial and agricultural production. Oil revenue was the only source of wealth. Oil enabled the government to prosecute the war against Unita, to pay for food imports for the urban population and to provide the nomenklatura with extravagant lifestyles. The rural population was meanwhile left to fend for itself. Even in Luanda there were constant shortages. While the MPLA elite enjoyed the use of their own supermarkets, well stocked with Italian chocolates, Scotch whisky and red meat, ordinary people spent hours each day in queues – bichas – hoping for a modicum of rice or potatoes. Street trade was mainly conducted not with currency but by bartering eggs, six-packs of lager in aluminium cans or other items. When public services disintegrated, the elite used education and health facilities abroad, paid for by public funds.
At his presidential headquarters at Futungo de Belas, a modern complex built for him by the Cubans on a promontory overlooking the sea, dos Santos resided in luxury, rarely leaving the compound, remaining remote from the squalor of Luanda, its decrepit buildings, its power shortages, its outbreaks of cholera, its stench and decay. Though the MPLA still proclaimed itself to be a Marxist-Leninist party, its commitment to socialism was entirely bogus.
In 1990, after the Russians had lost interest in Angola, the MPLA formally abandoned Marxism-Leninism and pronounced itself in favour of economic reform. The reforms it instituted, however, provided yet more business opportunities for the elite, notably the privatisation of state assets. What the MPLA had come to represent by then was little more than a front for a cabal of wealthy inter-related families linked to the presidency – the futungos – whose central purpose was self-enrichment. None of them had any intention of putting their business interests at risk for the sake of a peace deal.
As for Unita, it was Savimbi’s personal fiefdom, a vehicle for his relentless drive for power. For all the praise heaped on him by President Reagan and other Western admirers, Savimbi was a ruthless dictator with a messianic sense of destiny, insistent on total control and intolerant of dissent and criticism from anyone in his movement. He purported to represent the ‘African’ people of Angola, portraying the MPLA as a coastal party dominated by whites and mestiços in Luanda. Yet he himself had survived only as a result of assistance from South Africa’s white rulers as part of their crusade to sustain white supremacy. For thirteen years his headquarters at Jamba, a remote spot in the south-east corner of Angola, within easy reach of South African bases in South West Africa and the Caprivi Strip, had been supplied and protected by South African forces, keeping his rebellion alive. Foreign journalists ferried there were invariably impressed by Unita’s discipline and efficiency, comparing it favourably with the incompetence and corruption for which the MPLA was renowned. Adept at public relations, Savimbi readily represented himself as a staunch anti-communist defending Western values. He relished his image in Western circles as a heroic guerrilla leader who in the 1970s had endured a ‘long march’ into the bush to continue the fight against Marxist tyranny. Yet, like the MPLA, Savimbi relied heavily on an extensive security apparatus to maintain his grip, using fear as a method of control. He systematically purged Unita of rivals and critics, ordering death sentences not only for party dissidents but for members of their families as well. Human rights groups reported incidents of how women and children, accused of witchcraft, had been publicly burned to death, on a bonfire. According to his biographer, Fred Bridgland, Savimbi was also reputed to have a voracious sexual appetite. ‘Savimbi’s sexual practices went beyond most usual concepts of lust. He chose wives for his senior officers and slept with them in a bizarre rite of passage before they were married.’ He had even seduced his own teenage niece, Raquel Matos, and made her one of his concubines. ‘Raquel’s parents protested and were executed,’ said Bridgland.
An inside glimpse of Savimbi’s methods came in February 1992, as Angola was preparing for elections. Two of Savimbi’s closest colleagues – his ‘foreign minister’ Tony da Costa Fernandes and his ‘interior minister’ General Miguel N’Zau Puna – announced that they had quit Unita after discovering that Savimbi had ordered the death of two prominent officials, Tito Chigunji, and his brother-in-law, Wilson dos Santos, together with their families. Chigunji came from a distinguished Ovimbundu family which Savimbi was said to regard as potential rivals; several members had previously died in suspicious circumstances. According to the two defectors, Chigunji’s two children, one a baby, had died with their heads smashed against a tree.
The disclosures inflicted enormous damage on Savimbi’s reputation both in Angola and in the West. Chigunji and Wilson dos Santos had served as Unita representatives abroad and were well known in Washington. The US Secretary of State, James Baker, wrote to Savimbi demanding a full account of what had happened to the two men. Savimbi denied any involvement in their deaths and rode out the storm. He remained convinced he was on course to win the election. In Luanda he set up headquarters in a magnificent white villa on the heights of Miramar, a diplomatic quarter overlooking the bay, repeatedly telling journalists who went to interview him there that he could only lose as a result of fraud.
Shortly after arriving in Angola in February 1992, the UN chief, Margaret Anstee, went to introduce herself. ‘Everything about him was larger than life – his hypnotic piercing eyes, his hands, even his immaculately polished leather boots,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘The man simply exuded charisma. On that occasion he also exuded charm and sweet reasonableness . . . Superficially it was a highly civilised and modern occasion. Yet my overwhelming sensation was of being a guest at a medieval court.’
Despite rising tensions, Angola experienced its first dance of freedom. New shops and bars opened; foreign volunteers – cooperantes – arrived in droves; ambitious plans for reconstruction were drawn up; foreign businessmen came in search of contracts; residents painted their houses. ‘Angola in 1992 was like a Rip Van Winkle yawning and stretching awake after the moribund days of socialist deprivation,’ wrote Judith Matloff, an American journalist. ‘The days of spies and using eggs as a bartering currency were over.’ Overall, there was widespread relief at the respite from war, but scepticism about whether it would last. ‘Will it be like 1975?’ a market trader asked. ‘It is not the people who make war, but the leaders.’
The peace process itself was in considerable difficulty. The 1991 accords envisaged that the two rival armies, amounting in all to some 200,000 soldiers, would be confined to cantonments, demobilised and reconstituted as a new national army of 50,000 men – all in the space of sixteen months, before the election was held. The logistical problems alone were immense. Two-thirds of all roads in the country were unusable as a result of landmines or destroyed bridges; air transport was limited. On top of that, an estimated 5 million voters had to be registered.
The United Nations mission assigned to verify demobilisation and to monitor the electoral process – Unavem – was given a limited mandate and few resources. The Security Council, when authorising the mission under resolution 747, insisted on keeping expenditure to a minimum. ‘I have been given a 747 to fly with only fuel for a DC3,’ Anstee told a journalist jokingly after her arrival in Luanda. Whereas the UN’s election exercise in Namibia had been run on a budget of $430 million and in Cambodia on $2 billion, Anstee’s budget was $132 million. To keep the mission on track, she had to resort to begging individual Western governments for more supplies and equipment. A team of 350 military observers was expected to cover a demobilisation plan fraught with danger. ‘The world’s cheapest peacekeeping operation’ was Anstee’s description. A total of 800 election observers were assigned to monitor 5,820 polling stations in an area larger than the combined territories of France, Germany and Italy. Watching the drama unfold, Judith Matloff summed up the exercise as ‘a UN peace mission of absurd incompetence’.
Every aspect of the peace process was soon far behind schedule. By September 1992 only about half of the MPLA’s army had been demobilised and no more than about one-quarter of Unita’s army. The new national army – Forças Armadas Angolanas – consisted of only 8,800 troops. Each side feared the other was holding back forces to resume the war if it lost the election. Disputes proliferated, intensifying the miasma of distrust. Unita was infuriated by a government decision to form a new ‘anti-riot’ police force – ninjas, as they commonly came to be known – whose members, dressed in navy blue uniforms, wearing dark glasses and carrying AK47s and Uzi machine guns, began to appear on the streets of Luanda. Savimbi claimed it was ‘a parallel army’.
The election campaign was conducted by both sides with increasing belligerence. Savimbi excelled at angry rhetoric, threatening that he would not accept an election result that did not give him victory. ‘If Unita does not win the elections, they have to be rigged. If they are rigged, I don’t think we will accept them.’ On the streets, a popular saying at the time was: ‘The MPLA steals, Unita kills.’ The elections nevertheless proceeded in a calm and orderly manner. When the polls closed on 30 September, there had been almost no incidents of violence. Whatever the machinations of Angola’s politicians, the electorate had shown their determination to vote with an estimated 90 per cent turnout, desperately hoping for peace.
The trouble began when the state-run radio began broadcasting preliminary results, mainly from urban constituencies where the MPLA was known to be well entrenched, showing that the MPLA had a commanding lead. A battle of the air waves ensued. Unita’s Vorgan radio station – ‘Voice of the Resistance of the Black Cockerel’ – insisted that Unita was ahead by a two-to-one margin. Without warning on 3 October, as official results were still awaited, Savimbi broadcast a ‘Message to the Angolan Nation’ on Vorgan radio, warning of violence if the MPLA was declared the winner.
It is a pity for me to tell you that the MPLA wants to cling to power illegally, tooth and nail, by stealing ballot boxes, beating up and deviating polling-list delegates and distorting facts and numbers through its radio and television network . . . Right now the MPLA is cheating. In all provinces, Unita is ahead both in the presidential and parliamentary elections . . .
The National Electoral Council will have to take into consideration that its manoeuvres through the falsification of numbers and tampering with the computers will all lead Unita to take a position which might deeply disturb the situation in this country . . .
The National Electoral Council is manipulated by the Futungo de Belas presidential palace and we are not afraid of Futungo de Belas. If Futungo wants the process to halt and the situation in the country to deteriorate, then it should continue telling lies, stealing ballot boxes and distorting the figures. Just as we said in 1975 to the late president, Dr Agostinho Neto, ‘It is easy to start a war, but to prolong and win it is difficult.’ If the MPLA wants to opt for war, it knows that such a war will never be won.
We would like to draw the MPLA’s attention to the fact that there are men and women in this country who are ready to give up their lives so that the country can redeem itself. As far as we are concerned, it will not depend on any international organisation saying that the elections were free and fair . . .
Leaving no doubt about his intentions, two days later Savimbi ordered Unita’s generals to withdraw from the new national army. Savimbi himself left Luanda for Huambo in the central highlands, Angola’s second largest city, which he had used as his headquarters in 1976. Striving to keep the peace process alive, Anstee went to see him there and undertook to investigate Unita’s allegations of fraud before official election results were declared. The investigations concluded that although irregularities had occurred, there was no evidence of fraud on a major scale.
After repeated delays, the official results were finally announced on 17 October. In the presidential elections dos Santos obtained 49.57 per cent of the votes, compared with Savimbi’s 40.07 per cent. Since a 50 per cent vote was needed to win, a second round of voting would have to be held. In the parliamentary elections the MPLA gained 53.7 per cent, taking 129 seats, compared with Unita’s 34.1 per cent, with 70 seats. Anstee gave the results her imprimatur, declaring that despite the ‘deficiencies’, the UN mission considered the elections had been ‘generally free and fair’.
An analysis of the results showed that the MPLA had swept the board in its Mbundu ‘home territory’, winning 81 per cent of the presidential vote and 85 per cent of the parliamentary vote in Luanda and the surrounding provinces of Bengo, Kwanza Norte and Malange. Similarly, Unita had triumphed in its Ovimbundu heartland, winning 80 per cent of the presidential vote and 76 per cent of the parliamentary vote in the three provinces of Benguela, Bié and Huambo and a fourth sparsely populated province in the south-east, Cuando Cubango. What made the difference was the MPLA’s success in attracting support beyond Mbundu territory. In the ten provinces outside the two parties’ core zones, the MPLA won 72 per cent of the presidential vote and 77 per cent of the parliamentary vote. Many voters who might have supported Unita were deterred by Savimbi’s belligerent election campaign, his menacing rhetoric threatening a return to war if he did not win.
Though Anstee’s team and other foreign delegations made prodigious efforts to salvage the peace process, both sides prepared for another war. Unita’s forces decamped from their cantonments and took control of large parts of the interior, including the diamond-producing areas of Lunda, forcing government administrators to flee. In Luanda the MPLA government began handing out weapons to its supporters in the musseques. Clashes broke out in several towns. Unita troops attacked the radio and television stations in Huambo and attempted to occupy the government’s palace.
On 31 October the battle for Luanda erupted. In three days of fighting Unita’s forces were driven from the capital. Its offices, residences and hotels were destroyed. In what one senior United Nations official described as ‘wholesale butchery’, government ninjas and armed vigilantes from the musseques hunted down Unita supporters in a ‘cleansing operation’ – limpeza – intended to eliminate them from Luanda.
The battle for Luanda was followed by similarly vicious contests for possession of other towns in which some 300,000 people died. Once more, Angola was partitioned into government- and rebel-held areas. This time, however, the war was no longer a sideshow of the Cold War nor an adjunct of South Africa’s struggle over white supremacy. It was a war to satisfy the ambition of one man to hold absolute power.
As Angola’s peace efforts collapsed, a similar exercise was launched to bring an end to Mozambique’s civil war. Over a period of fifteen years it had reduced the country to a wreck. By the early 1990s more than 1 million people had died and 5 million others had been uprooted from their homes out of a total population of 18 million. More than 90 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line, and 60 per cent of those lived in absolute poverty. To prevent mass starvation, Mozambique relied on foreign aid.
Under international auspices, the Frelimo government and the Renamo rebel movement were drawn into protracted negotiations. Since starting life as a proxy force, first for white Rhodesia then for South Africa, Renamo had gained a reputation for extreme brutality, carrying out exemplary massacres and mutilations and conscripting child soldiers; but it had also managed to tap into a deep groundswell of discontent with Frelimo’s authoritarian policies, winning control of large parts of central and northern Mozambique. Offered the prospect of participating in a new political order, Renamo agreed in 1992 to disband its army, transform itself into a political party and compete in an electoral contest. The peace deal was signed in Rome on 4 October, a few days after Angola’s elections were held.
Mindful of the debacle of Angola’s peace initiative, the UN decided to pour resources of men, money and matériel into Mozambique, in effect setting up a parallel government there. Most key functions ranging from demobilisation and disarmament to the resettlement of refugees and combatants were carried out by UN agencies or by nongovernmental organisations acting on their behalf. Demobilisation began in January 1994 and was completed by September, in advance of the election. Presidential elections in October gave Frelimo’s Joaquim Chissano 53 per cent of the vote and Renamo’s Alfonso Dhlakama 33 per cent; in parliamentary elections Frelimo won 44 per cent of the vote, taking 129 seats, and Renamo won 38 per cent, taking 112 seats. Renamo accepted the result and settled for the role of a ‘loyal’ opposition.
In Angola the war of the cities, as it was known, lasted for two years, causing destruction on a scale that it had never before experienced. Changing the guerrilla strategy he adopted in the 1980s, Savimbi focused his campaign on trying to retain control of key urban centres. Driven out of Luanda, Lobito and Benguela, Unita managed to seize five out of eighteen provincial capitals including Huambo which Savimbi used as a headquarters. The battle for control of Huambo lasted for fifty-five days, leaving much of the city in ruins. After retreating from the city, government forces continued to bomb it from the air. Unita also laid siege to government-held towns, trying to starve them into submission. Kuito, the capital of Bié province, was bombarded relentlessly for nine months until a temporary ceasefire was arranged; by the time fighting finally stopped six months later there was little left standing. Both sides planted millions of landmines, leaving behind a new generation of mutilados among the civilian population.
Though Savimbi no longer had the support of his former sponsors – the United States and South Africa – his supply routes through Mobutu’s Zaire remained open, enabling him to trade diamonds for arms. Unita’s earnings from diamonds, ranging from $300–500 million a year, gave him considerable purchasing power. Mobutu provided Savimbi with end-user certificates for arms deals and allowed him to stockpile weapons in Zaire, in return for diamonds and cash. Savimbi also reached deals with the presidents of Congo-Brazzaville and Togo for support facilities; President Eyadéma in Togo provided sanctuary for Savimbi’s children.
Savimbi’s hold on territory, however, began to slip. In 1993 he controlled more than two-thirds of Angola’s territory. But during 1994, as the government reorganised its forces, spending half the national budget on arms, Unita steadily lost ground. In November 1994 government forces recaptured Huambo, forcing Savimbi to fall back on his home town of Bailundo, once the seat of Ovimbundu kings. Eleven days later, for tactical reasons, Unita agreed to a new peace deal at negotiations in Lusaka.
Unlike the 1991 peace deal, the Lusaka Protocol gave direct responsibility for overseeing implementation of the peace process to a new United Nations mission. A contingent of 7,000 UN troops was assigned to the tasks of assisting demobilisation and the formation of a new national army. UN officials hoped to copy the example of Mozambique. But though Savimbi was offered a transitional period of power-sharing, from the start he resorted to prevarication and delay to obstruct implementation, playing for time to amass a war chest from diamond production in areas he still controlled. He sent more than 70,000 men to UN-administered ‘quartering areas’, but most of them were village reservists rounded up to boost numbers. His real army he held in reserve, together with their equipment and supplies. He also turned down an offer from dos Santos to give him the post of vice-president in a future government of national unity. When a foreign journalist questioned him about the offer, he roared back: ‘Do I look like a puppet?’
A government of national unity, including Unita ministers, was eventually established in April 1997. The UN was sufficiently optimistic about the peace process by then to withdraw most of its peacekeeping force and to replace it with a residual mission with only 1,500 troops. But Savimbi still refused to allow the government to extend its authority to many of the areas under his control, in particular the diamond fields. He was brazen enough to hold auctions close to mining areas, inviting foreign buyers to fly in from abroad. By 1997 his income from diamonds over the previous five years had reached an estimated $2 billion.
In exasperation at Savimbi’s obstruction of the peace process, the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Unita in August 1997, banning leading officials from international travel, closing Unita’s offices abroad and prohibiting all aircraft from flying into Unita-controlled areas. After further prevarication, the Security Council in June 1998 ordered a ban on the purchase of Angolan diamonds without official certificates of origin and a freeze on Unita’s bank accounts and other financial assets.
Savimbi’s position in Bailundo appeared increasingly vulnerable. The collapse of Mobutu’s regime in May 1997 deprived him of his last dependable foreign ally. When Congo-Brazzaville was convulsed by civil war in June 1997, he lost another diamond outlet. Unita ministers and members of parliament in Luanda, frustrated with his policy of obstruction, decided to break away. Yet the war chest Savimbi had accumulated had enabled him to re-equip his army in preparation for another push for ‘victory’.
The government too spent vast sums on military purchases, determined to crush Savimbi by force if he continued to thwart the terms of the Lusaka Protocol. Finally losing patience, dos Santos declared in December 1998 that war was the only option and ordered a military offensive against Unita’s strongholds in the central highlands. As the peace process collapsed, the UN closed its observer mission, having spent $1.5 billion on Angola since 1994 to no avail.
The 1998 war lasted for more than three years. Both sides used forced recruitment, destroyed villages, looted property, murdered civilians and raped women and children. Nearly one-third of the entire population – about 4 million people – were listed as deslocados, left homeless and destitute. After losing control of Bailundo and his last remaining large airfields in 1999, Savimbi moved his headquarters to the eastern province of Moxico, abandoning his strategy of capturing towns and reverting to guerrilla strikes on government targets. Weakened by government offensives, Unita’s fighting capacity steadily diminished. In the final stages of the war the government resorted to scorched-earth tactics, forcibly deporting the rural population from Unita areas and burning their crops. The end came in February 2002 when Savimbi was trapped and killed in a firefight in the remote region of Luva near the Zambian border. Within days, Unita sued for peace.
Throughout the rollercoaster years of war and peace, dos Santos and his entourage prospered greatly. From his headquarters at Futungo de Belas, dos Santos ran a presidential patronage system that rewarded his family, friends and colleagues – the futungos – with government contracts, business opportunities, diamond concessions, land titles, import licences, trade monopolies and cheap credit. Arms purchases for the war provided a favoured few with large kickbacks. The government’s privatisation programme enabled high-ranking army officers and senior officials to acquire state-owned properties, farms and businesses for nominal sums or sometimes for no payment at all. Allowed access to foreign exchange, some futungos made fortunes from the dual exchange rate, ‘round-tripping’ between markets.
Elite families also benefited from state scholarships for their children to study abroad, in secondary schools as well as university level, and from state provision of foreign medical treatment. Between 1997 and 2001 overseas scholarships accounted on average for 18 per cent of total government expenditure on education, more than was spent within the country on technical education and higher education combined. Foreign medical expenditure consumed 13 per cent of total government spending on health, almost as much as was spent on primary health care. Ministers and officials who proved their loyalty were awarded generous ‘Christmas bonuses’ far in excess of their annual salaries.
A large proportion of Angola’s oil wealth was siphoned off for private purposes. Oil production rose sixfold after 1983. Between 1997 and 2002 the oil sector generated $17.8 billion. Yet what happened to the income was shrouded in secrecy. An International Monetary Fund report in 2002 showed that 22 per cent of government expenditure between 1996 and 2001 was ‘unexplained’; a further 16 per cent was listed as ‘extra-budgetary’. Using IMF figures, a Human Rights Watch report published in 2004 calculated that between 1997 and 2002 an amount of $4.2 billion went ‘unaccounted for’ – an average of $700 million a year, nearly 10 per cent of gross domestic product, roughly equivalent to the total sum spent on education, health and social services over the same period. What had occurred, said the report, was gross mismanagement and corruption on the part of Angola’s rulers.
When a government is the direct beneficiary of a centrally controlled major revenue stream and is therefore not reliant on domestic taxation or a diversified economy to function, those who rule the state have unique opportunities for self-enrichment and corruption, particularly if there is no transparency in the management of revenues. Because achieving political power often becomes the primary avenue for achieving wealth, the incentive to seize power and hold on to it indefinitely is great. This dynamic has a corrosive effect on governance and, ultimately, respect for human rights. instead of bringing prosperity, rule of law and respect for rights, the existence of a centrally controlled revenue stream – such as oil revenue – can serve to reinforce and exacerbate an undemocratic or otherwise unaccountable ruler’s or governing elite’s worst tendencies and enrich itself without any corresponding accountability . . . This has happened in Angola.
Dos Santos went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the government’s oil accounts were hidden from scrutiny. A State Secrecy Act passed in 2002 classified as secret ‘financial, monetary, economic and commercial interests of the State’, authorising terms of imprisonment for anyone caught divulging information. When an IMF team, attempting to unravel the government’s oil accounts, asked for an explanation about a discrepancy of up to $215 million between what the government said it had received in oil exploration fees from oil companies and what the oil companies said they had paid, government officials said they ‘could not provide any supporting documentation on those payments because of confidentiality agreements with the oil companies’. When British Petroleum, responding to demands for greater transparency, announced in 2001 that it would publish its payments to Angola, the government threatened to cancel its multibillion dollar contracts and threw in a warning to all other oil companies: ‘In the hope of maintaining good relations that we have always had with the oil companies that operate in Angola, we strongly discourage all our partners from similar attitudes in the future.’
Despite the government’s determination to maintain secrecy, glimpses of some of dos Santos’s dealings came as a result of a series of investigations in Europe into what colloquially became known as ‘Angolagate’. In July 2000 a former oil company executive, André Tarallo, testified to French authorities that dos Santos was one of the beneficiaries of a multimillion-dollar slush fund that Elf-Aquitaine kept to pay African leaders in exchange for influence and oil deals. Dos Santos denied the allegation. ‘The Cabinet of the President of Angola believes that Mr Tarallo’s attitude to be unacceptable and unfair, given that the Angolan authorities granted him, in good will, all manner of assistance to ensure the success of Elf’s operations in Angola and its good performance, which allowed France to occupy the second position in the Angolan oil industry, with obvious benefits.’
Dos Santos was also named as a beneficiary in a murky deal involving the rescheduling of Angola’s $5 billion debt to Russia for arms purchases. In 2002 a Swiss magistrate, Daniel Devaud, ordered a freeze on $700 million held in a Geneva bank account while he investigated transactions involving ‘Russian and Angolan dignitaries’ connected to the debt deal, one of whom was dos Santos. The MPLA leader was livid. In a letter of protest to the Swiss president, dos Santos claimed that Swiss judges had no right to get involved in a bilateral matter between Angola and Russia and threatened to withdraw his ambassador from Switzerland. He denounced Devaud’s action as ‘arrogant and an abuse of power and a violation of the principles of international law’. However, in June 2002 Angola’s minister of the interior admitted in Luanda’s parliament that government funds had indeed been placed in private bank accounts, but justified this as commonplace in countries facing exceptional situations. When IMF staff asked for details of the Russian debt deal, the government refused to comply on the grounds that ‘it would infringe on national sovereignty’.
An indication of how wealthy the futungos had become was provided by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2003. It reported that there were thirty-nine individuals in Angola worth at least $50 million and another twenty reportedly worth at least $100 million. Six of the seven wealthiest people on its list were longtime government officials, and the seventh was a recently retired official. Overall, the combined wealth of these fifty-nine people was at least $3.95 billion. By comparison, the total gross domestic product of Angola, with a population of about 14 million, was about $10.2 billion in 2002.
The stark contrast between the rich elite and the mass poverty of the rest of the population was nowhere more evident than in Luanda. Its streets were packed with the latest models of Mercedez-Benz and Toyota Land Cruisers; jet skis circled the bay; prices in air-conditioned shopping malls were equivalent to those in London. But milling around on street corners were groups of street children and mutilados begging from the passing traffic. Half of the city’s population of 4 million had no access to clean water and survived on untreated water from the Bengo river bought by the bucketful from informal vendors. Most Angolans subsisted on less than seventy cents a day.