Headline 8th July, 2012 / "The Love-Hate Relationship With Angola"

"The Love-Hate Relationship With Angola"

This is now the ultimate rainbow nation. You run into South Africans, Mozambicans, Brits, French, Americans, Portuguese, Spanish, and the elusive Chinese. So, what truly affects this ultimate boom town are the merciless forces of 'supply and demand'.

You can import bikinis from Brazil, or you can rent a Jeep Cherooke for just over dollars 300/day. No price here is real. Whatever you sell will make you money. The car market is a case in point. Almost everyone has a 4X4 because if you don't you will vanish down a pothole. 

The government designates them luxury vehicles and subjects them to 100% tax. So you either pay up or, more likely, you find ''solutions''. That involves 'coming to an arrangement' with someone in customs, or importing a car via Dubai, which apparently saves you money. Or take housing. 

Luanda was built for for less than a half million folk. The war drove the population up to four million people. Fleeing as the two sides--the communist government backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and the rebel UNITA forces supported by America and the apartheid South Africa--fought out one of the most vicious conflicts of the Cold War. That is why you have such a fast urbanisation.

That is why everywhere you look, you see shanties, shacks in fetid and treeless slums than stretch for miles to the horizon. That is why the city suffers from power cuts, why traffic doesn't move, and why sanitation has collapsed. When it rains, the polluted Bengo river overflows; the water merges with the garbage strewn banks, producing yet another bout of cholera and misery. 

At the top end of the scale there aren't simply enough homes to service the foreigners working for the Oil companies. This is one of the highest rental markets in the world. Small downtown colonial era apartments without a garden can go for pound 10,000/month. Yes per month! Plus a year's deposit upfront. Beyond making money, there is not much to do, so people take a longtime doing it. 

At the weekends, lunch stretches out all afternoon. Most of the activity takes place on the IIha, a peninsula in the heart of the city that sports one beach resort after another. The view from the water is not enhanced by the Oil Tankers in one direction and the cranes in the other. The silence often broken by whirring of the oil-men in helicopters. 

By night people party -- hard, until dawn while their drivers sleep in the carpark. For the rest, it is struggle as usual. So one good question to pose is which nation yields the most influence in Angola? Possibly China. Possibly Brazil, due to the language and growing trade links. 

But the real truth is that not any one nation does , after all they saw off the Americans, and the South Africans during the civil war, and they saw off the Portuguese after 500 years of colonialism. It might not look like it, but the Angolans are really running the show! 

So, wishing all of you a great weekend!

Good Night and God Bless.

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless