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Residents Hope 2010 Flooding Prompts Govt Action in Luanda

Louise Redvers

LUANDA, May 6 2010 (IPS) - The water seeped into Feliciana Teresa Matia’s home from beneath its mud floor and when her 20-year-old son Francisco got up to go to work, grabbing a metal pole for guidance in the dark, he was electrocuted.

Clutching her dead son’s identity card, the 49-year-old widow wept quietly as she told of how she had returned home from visiting family to be told her son was in the morgue.

“It’s very, very sad, I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said, adding: “I don’t want to live here any more, I want to move away to another place but I have nowhere to go.”

Feliciana lives in a small concrete block house that she and her family built in the Boavista neighbourhood near Luanda’s port.

Their home – three dark rooms around a small central yard – lies next to an open drain which is full of stagnant green water and rotting litter.

A few hundred metres away, smartly-dressed American and European oil executives climb out of oversized sports utility vehicles as they arrive at at SONILS, the main operations hub for Angola’s billion-dollar oil industry.

Angola pumps close to two million of barrels of oil per day and the International Monetary Fund has forecast a growth of 7.1 percent for 2010.

Yet despite its booming economy, the majority of Angolans live like Feliciana in slum-like conditions, And every year when the rain comes, chaos ensues.

This season’s rains have claimed 54 lives, left more than 65,000 people homeless and destroyed schools, bridges and businesses.

While the provinces in the south and the north of the country experienced the most rainfall, the overcrowded capital Luanda bore a large brunt of the damage.

Heavy downpours during February, March and April left large areas of the city under water, newly-laid roads collapsed, drains filled up and overflowed, homes were washed away and schools and health posts flooded.

“These are neighbourhoods which are densely populated with houses built in a disorderly way and where sanitation arrangements are precarious,” explained Cupi Baptista, head of Water and Sanitation at the NGO Development Workshop (DW).

“There are many difficulties here,” he added. “The construction is not good quality, many families do not have latrines and defecate in the open air, so when it rains you can imagine how the situation gets worse.”

The rain-induced chaos in the capital triggered a “solidarity campaign” where rank and file members of the ruling MPLA (Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola – Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) rolled up their sleeves and helped clear litter and stagnant water from the worst-hit parts of the city.

Various high level political visits have also been made to the affected neighbourhoods and there has been a wave of pledges from various sectors of government to take action to improve roads and drainage and avoid a repetition of the situation next year.

During a rare news conference held at the Presidential Palace, Minister of State and the President’s Chief of Staff, Carlos Feijó, said a new plan was being drawn up to find “integrated solutions” for the parts of Luanda worst-hit by the flooding.

“Due to the consequences of the recent rains in Luanda, one of the concerns of the president and the executive in general, is how we deal with the problem of Luanda,” he said.

Feijó explained a plan has already been made to redefine city boundaries and reorganise and improve administration.

He added that a new unit had been created to oversee basic sanitation in the capital, focussing on micro and macro-drainage programmes, and a new credit line from Brazil would finance completion of the rehabilitation of Luanda’s trunk roads and secondary routes.

“So that the new drainage works and the other works in the city can be useful and done to time, we need to have a resettlement programme of relocation,” he explained.

“We need an integrated programme for Luanda, and an integrated programme means a combination of various factors, sanitation, roads and population resettlement.”

But Luisete Araújo, political secretary for the Partidos de Oposição Civil (Civil Opposition Parties), is sceptical about the media fanfare surrounding the Government’s reaction to the flooding.

She said: “These speeches are just made for radio and television, to distract people from the real problems and the lack of action, nothing will change, we have been here before.”

She added: “And work that has been done is of such poor quality it doesn’t last, it just creates more problems, that is what happened with the rains this year.

“The war has been over here for eight years now, something needs to start happening, there have been too many broken promises.”

Although there is new language from within government about proactively addressing the problems in peri-urban Luanda in a bid to improve conditions and reduce poverty levels, officials have also appealed families not to build in high risk areas or along water lines.

But Araújo said it was time the government stopped blaming Angolans for the problem.

“This happens every year when the rains come and it proves the government is not prepared,” she said. “They should take preventative measures during the dry season, not wait for it to rain.

“It is not the fault of the people for building their homes in these places, they have nowhere else to go.”

Minister of State Feijó said population relocation would be done in conjunction with a social housing plan, but gave little detail at the news conference.

Baptista, from DW, admitted there had been a number of plans over the year to improve drainage and water supplies in Luanda, but that they had not always been completed due to what he called “logistical constraints”.

But he said: “The idea of a more integrated approach is welcome because we have seen things happen in piecemeal ways for too long.

“We hope that this idea is put into practice and we see more joined up solutions because this is what we need.”