In southern Angola lack of regular food has forced many people to eat leaves and roots, which they mix with salt and oil to make a paste, and tree berries. Courtesy: Joao Statmiller

By Louise Redvers
DUBAI, Jun 28 2013 (IPS)

Church groups, local NGOs and international aid organisations have launched appeals to get supplies to drought-stricken southern Angola where people are reported to be dying from a lack of food and water. It is estimated that between half a million and 800,000 people have been affected.

The drought has destroyed thousands of hectares of agriculture and livestock pastures in the hardest-hit parts of Cunene, Namibe, Huila and Kuando Kubango provinces in southern Angola, where, in addition to people, crops and animals are also dying.

“We need urgent help. People are dying of hunger and getting sick from drinking unclean water,” Pascoal Baptistiny,director of Mbakita, a small Angolan NGO based in Menongue, the capital of Kuando Kubango Province, told IPS.

“People who still have crops are not going to the fields because they are hungry or sick, and children are dropping out of school, partly due to hunger, but also because their parents are sending them off to find water for the animals.”

Riverbeds and boreholes have dried up and large swathes of arable land have gone to seed.“There are two narratives in Angola: what the government tells you and what is really happening - it is very sad.” -- Father Jacinto Pio Wakussanga

The lack of regular food has forced many people to eat leaves and roots, which they mix with salt and oil to make a paste, and tree berries, IPS was told.

The government of this southern African nation has formed an emergency response committee but many say aid is not getting through fast enough and more needs to be done to help those in need.

In May, the government created an inter-ministerial commission to address the drought. According to state media, hundreds of tonnes of food aid has been mobilised, along with emergency water supply tanks, to different communities.

This week, a new water supply system was announced for the Gambos municipality, one of the worst hit areas in Huila Province.

But Father Jacinto Pio Wakussanga, who is commonly known as Father Pio and is the director of Associação Construindo Comunidades, a Huila-based NGO, said the official response was insufficient, and described it as too little too late.

“I know there have been high-level meetings and various fact-finding missions, but not enough is being done on the ground. In my parishes people are dying,” he told IPS.

“In my view this is more than a food situation, it’s about rethinking for the long term so people plant more resilient crops and have better access to water through irrigation, so they are less vulnerable to drought situations.

“We have a lot of water under our soil; we need to give people a way to get it.”

Although agriculture only accounts for a tiny part of oil-rich Angola’s GDP, it is the main source of employment in the country where millions live hand-to-mouth on rain-dependent subsistence farming.

This is the second consecutive year that Angola has been affected by drought after several seasons of heavy rainfall and flooding.

In 2012 some parts of the country experienced 60 percent less rainfall than average and the Ministry of Agriculture reported that 1.8 million people, close to 10 percent of the population of 19.2 million, were affected by food shortages and crop failures.

In conjunction with the government, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) set up emergency feeding centres in four central provinces where agricultural yields were hardest hit and cases of severe infant malnutrition rocketed to over 500,000.

Now it seems, however, that the problem has moved south.

According to a Monitoring Agricultural Resources report produced for the European Commission and published in June, the provinces of Cunene and Namibe have had their driest spells from January to April for 25 years.

Huila, south-western Benguela and Kuando Kubango provinces have also seen significant drops in rainfall leading to crop failures, a lack of water, and food security issues.

IPS was unable to access UNICEF estimates for child malnutrition rates in these areas, but community workers paint a worrying picture.

Catholic Church-funded Caritas Angola described the situation as “critical” and urged people to give money to a fund they were setting up to help support the most vulnerable.

Geneva-based ACT Alliance, a network of Protestant and Orthodox church groups, which carried out a rapid assessment in Angola earlier this month, has also launched an emergency appeal.

It says it needs to raise 700,000 dollars to pay for food, water and community support for people affected by the drought in Huila and Cunene.

Mairo Retief, East and Central Africa emergency coordinator for  the Lutheran World Federation, which is an ACT Alliance member, told IPS: “Aid agencies will need to act fast to ensure that neither Angola nor Namibia turn into a Sahel drought situation.”

Opposition parties have also been critical of the government’s response, claiming that communities who support the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) were receiving priority treatment and that local party branches and officials were promoting themselves through aid distribution.

Francisco Filomeno Vieira Lopes, secretary general of Bloco Democrático, a small party that has no seats in parliament but is vocal on social issues, told IPS that the government was too preoccupied with attacking those who were trying to publicise the problem, rather than actually helping those in need.

He said sounder food security policies were required and lamented the lack of available data and apparent monitoring of previous schemes that could help inform future decisions.

Alcides Sakala, a senior member of União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), the country’s second-largest party, told IPS: “Not enough is done to help these rural families in general. More needs to be done to diversify the economy so people are not living in these precarious situations in the first place.”

The growing alarm over the devastating impact of the drought in the south of the country sits uncomfortably with Angola’s recent award from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO).

Agriculture Minister Afonso Pedro Canga travelled to FAO headquarters in Rome earlier this month to collect the award for Angola meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition.

While accepting that progress had been made since the end of Angola’s long civil war, which began in 1975 and continued at intervals until 2002, Father Pio said he felt the timing of the award – and the announcement that Angola would be donating 10 million dollars to the FAO’s Africa Solidarity Trust Fund to promote food security – sent the wrong message.

“People here are starving and they are giving all this money to the FAO. This is very upsetting,” he said, also referring to a front page headline of the state-owned newspaper about the FAO prize that boldly claimed, “Angola beats poverty”.

He said: “People assume that Angola is a rich country and that it is providing for its people, but it is not, it is quite the opposite, and despite all the money here, many people are suffering.

“There are two narratives in Angola: what the government tells you and what is really happening – it is very sad.”

UNICEF, which has been working with the government on its response strategy, declined to be interviewed for this report and was unable to give updates on its feeding programme or estimates of how many children were now at risk from malnutrition.

In Angola, the Giant Sable’s natural habitat is Luando Reserve where some 70 are thought to live wild. But this population is now under threat following the allocation of prospecting rights to private diamond companies. Courtesy: Pedro Vaz Pinto

By Walter García and Louise Redvers
DUBAI, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

Environmental campaigners are urging the Angolan government to halt plans to mine diamonds inside a national reserve that is home to the world’s last wild population of a rare antelope, the Giant Sable.

There are believed to be fewer than 100 purebred animals left and the species is listed as “critically endangered” on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In Angola, the Giant Sable’s natural habitat is Luando Reserve, which is situated in the northern province of Malange, where some 70 are thought to live wild. But this population is now under threat following the allocation of prospecting rights to a group of private Angolan diamond companies.

“Legally, this should not have been allowed to happen. The law is very clear, mineral activity is not permitted within protected areas,” a spokesperson for the Kissama Foundation, an Angolan environmental NGO, which has led major conservation projects, including the restocking of large game into parks, told IPS.

The spokesperson, who did not want to be named, said he was concerned for the physical impact that mining would have on the reserve.The Giant Sable is on an absolutely critical threshold. They are on their last breath before extinction so it’s not going to take much to push them over the edge." -- South African conservationist Brian Huntley

“This is going to put the Giant Sable population in great danger and we are very concerned that this has been permitted by the government.

“This is a desperate situation. We need support from the international community, we need people to make a noise and stop this from going ahead.”

Decades of civil war, along with widespread poaching, have decimated the Giant Sable Antelope population.

The Palanca Negra Gigante, as it is known in Portuguese, is Angola’s national symbol. Palancas Negras is the nickname of the southern African nation’s national soccer team, and the antelope’s long curved horn is pictured on the logo and fleet of the national airline, Transportes Aéreos Angolanos or TAAG.

While significant efforts, through both private and government-sponsored schemes, have been made to preserve and promote breeding of the animals inside a section of Cangandala Park, a national park also in Malange Province, Luando Reserve remains their natural habitat.

But 3,000 square km of the Capunda diamond mining concession falls nearly exclusively inside the Luando Reserve, straddling the provincial borders of Malange and Bie.

According to Angola’s environmental law and mining code, mineral activity is not permitted inside protected areas such as national parks and reserves and all projects must undergo an environmental assessment impact to judge risks and suitability.

Pedro Vaz Pinto, an Angolan who has led the programme to protect the Giant Sable in Cangandala Park, told IPS: “Mining inside the reserve would be a disaster for the animals. There are surely legal constraints that should not allow it.”

He added that there was already uncontrolled poaching linked to mining activities along the Kwanza River. He said that the meat was being used to feed miners and workers.

“I am extremely worried with the establishment of further organised industrial mining operations in the area and that poaching, which is a real threat to the Giant Sable, will only increase.”

But despite this, in June 2012, former minister of geology, mining and industry Joaquim David signed off on “Project Capunda”, the details of which were published in the government’s legal gazette, the Diario da Republica.

The companies listed behind the project – KCC Limitada, Yango Limitada and AM & BC Limitada – are all Angola-owned but hitherto unknown with no apparent record of prior involvement in the diamond sector.

The country’s state-owned diamond firm, Endiama, which automatically gets paid equity in every diamond project, holds a 32 percent share in the deal.

Although the Ministry of Environment failed to respond to requests for comment, both Endiama and the Ministry of Geology and Mines, tried to play down the situation.

Endiama spokesman Antonio Freitas told IPS: “Endiama is discussing possible alternatives with the project investors. The concession is in a large part inside the national park and the law must be respected.”

And in an email, Minister of Geology, Mining and Industry Francisco Manuel Monteiro de Queiroz, who replaced David in August 2012, told IPS that the ministry has been following this process with concern.

“We are working with the Ministry of Environment, Endiama and the concessionary companies to correct the situation in terms of the environmental law and the mineral code.

“The mineral code clearly prioritises protection of areas of environmental, cultural and other sensitivities when confronted with mining projects.”

Brian Huntley, an internationally-respected South African conservationist, who has collaborated closely with the Angolan government and several United Nations agencies to develop national park strategies, welcomed the high-level response.

He said that the ministries were engaging was extremely positive, but it was important that their words were followed by definitive actions.

“The Giant Sable is on an absolutely critical threshold,” he told IPS. “They are on their last breath before extinction so it’s not going to take much to push them over the edge.

“It’s actually a miracle they are still hanging in there. Any further pressure on them will be the end. The Giant Sable is a national icon and it is hugely important for the people and for the government, it must be protected.”

It has been claimed locally that the owners of the companies granted the mining concession have close links to powerful figures from the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), which has been in power since independence from Portugal in 1975, and that the ministries are too scared to challenge the deal.

The rush to exploit mineral resources could spell environmental disaster for countries like Angola where weak institutions are regularly held hostage to personal interests that appear to be able to ride roughshod over legislation.

As well as the world’s fifth-biggest diamond exporter, Angola is Africa’s second-largest crude oil producer behind Nigeria, and there are growing concerns about the impact the rigs – and their spills – are having on the country’s coastline and fish stocks.

Drilling for oil off Angola’s coast. Angola is Africa’s second-largest crude oil producer behind Nigeria, and there are concerns about the impact the rigs and their spills are having on the country’s coastline and fish stocks. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

A culture of secrecy, however, dominates Angola’s research institutions and ministerial departments and little information is ever published.

Private or overseas companies that are hired to carry out studies are not allowed to share their findings without governmental permission, which is seldom granted.

Local communities who claim to have been affected by oil spills are typically given ad hoc cash payouts by the multi-national firms operating in the area and strongly discouraged from speaking to the media.

Later this year, state oil company Sonangol is due to auction a number of new licences for onshore oil and gas exploration blocks, raising separate concerns about land contamination and habitat destruction.

Seismic studies are already underway inside one national park near the capital Luanda, and foreign operators have been seen inside a desert park in the south of the country.

Huntley stressed that it was a critical time for Angola in terms of its environmental management.

“After a decade of peace and the rehabilitation of infrastructure there has been a surge in activity, particularly in the extractive industries sector,” he said. Angola’s 27-year civil war ended in 2002 and over the past decade the country has had one of the fastest-growing economies on the continent.

“This places huge urgency on the consolidation and rehabilitation of national parks. On a positive side, there is a lot of interest in Angola and significant donor funding available so we do have an opportunity to match the interests of the industrialists and the conservationists by sensible planning and management.”

Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has been in power for 33 years, and will serve another five-year term of office after his party’s landslide victory, which the opposition claims is fraudulent. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Sep 4 2012 (IPS)

Question marks hang over the legitimacy of Angola’s general election as Africa’s second-longest serving leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos has won a five-year term in office following his party’s landslide victory.

The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) – which has ruled Angola since independence from Portugal in 1975 – secured a parliamentary majority of just under 72 percent.

Its former civil war enemy, the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), is second with nearly 19 percent, almost doubling its 2008 tally. Third is the newly-formed Salvation–Electoral Coalition (CASA-CE) which won six percent of the vote, according to provisional results released by the National Electoral Commission (CNE) on Monday, Sep. 4.

But while the MPLA – whose lavish campaign is reported to have cost over 70 million dollars – is celebrating its win, UNITA, CASA-CE and civil society groups are understood to be working on legal challenges to contest the results.

Once the final results are in, there is a 48-hour window available for a party to lodge a legal challenge with the southern African nation’s constitutional court.

In a statement issued on Sep. 3, UNITA said it was running its own parallel counting and was following the provisional results being presented by the CNE.

UNITA accused the CNE of using government security staff to run polling stations, questioned its processes for transmission of data, and complained about how many party delegates and observers had not been able to get accreditation to monitor proceedings.

The party has been critical of the CNE and its preparation for the election for some months, alleging fraudulent manipulation on the part of the MPLA. Complaints have centred around voter lists, the way they were compiled, audited and shared.

UNITA claims thousands of “ghost voters” have been added to the rolls and that the delay in publishing the final list would prevent many people from voting.

“We will not allow a brand of fraud to take place and we will not recognise the legitimacy of any government resulting from elections held outside of the law,” UNITA leader Isaías Samakuva said a week before the vote was due to take place.

On Aug. 31, the day of the elections, many people – exact numbers are unknown – were unable to vote due because they were unable to find their names on the voters’ list. Some were told that they were actually registered to vote several hundred kilometres away in another province.

The provisional results from the CNE indicate turnout was down significantly from 80 percent in 2008 to 60 percent this year. Turnout was significantly lower in the capital Luanda at around 50 percent.

However, teams from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU) and the Community of Portuguese Language Speaking Countries praised Angola’s CNE for the way it organised the election.

The AU mission chief, Cape Verde’s former President Pedro Pires, noted some issues with delayed accreditation of party delegations and observers, unfair access to public media space and a failure to allow diaspora voting. However, Pires said overall the election was “free, fair, transparent and credible”.

Bernand Membe, Tanzania’s Foreign Affairs Minister who headed the SADC mission, acknowledged some of the claims made by opposition parties but said: “We are of the opinion that while some of the issues raised were pertinent, they were nevertheless not of such magnitude as to have affected the credibility of the overall electoral process.”

Angolan musician and activist Luaty Beirao, who has been involved in various anti-government street protests and has helped set up a website that has been publishing complaints from the public about the election, told IPS that he was very disappointed in the observation missions’ standpoint.

“How can these elections be considered fair?” he asked.

“How can you say that thing went well just because there were no fights and people were not throwing stuff at cars or burning tyres in the street?

“Peaceful is not the only the way we analyse if an election was fair and free. We must analyse the high numbers of people who were not able to vote.”

Beirao, who has been jailed several times for his activism, added: “This election was rigged and this government is not legitimate.”

The CNE has denied any wrongdoing and the MPLA has accused the opposition of making up allegations of fraud to distract from their poor results.

The MPLA, however, has already claimed victory and many ordinary Angolans seemed oblivious of UNITA’s claims.

Avelino Pacheco, 22, from Luanda, told IPS: “In my opinion these elections went very well and we were free to chose who we wanted. The people have chosen the MPLA and President dos Santos.

“There was no fraud, we must respect the choice of the people,” the statistics student said.

A woman, waiting in a taxi queue who did not want to give her name, told IPS: “It doesn’t really matter about the result though, the MPLA is in power and will be for a long time. We should just accept it.”

Six other parties and coalitions, including the historic National Front for the Liberation of Angola and the Party of Social Renovation, shared the remaining three percent.

The country’s 27-year civil war only ended in 2002 and since independence in 1975 Angola has only had two previous elections.

The 2008 poll passed peacefully despite widespread allegations of vote-rigging, but the election in 1992 was abandoned midway and triggered a second phase of the civil war that lasted until 2002. The first civil war began after independence in 1975 until 1991.

Under the terms of the country’s 2010 constitution, the head of the party that wins the most parliamentary votes becomes president – thus Dos Santos is returned automatically to power.

This will be the 70-year’s first official mandate, Russian-trained engineer never having previously been formally elected, despite having ruling Angola since 1979.

While the oil-rich country has enjoyed stellar growth since the end of its three-decade civil war in 2002, and is forecast to see a GDP hike of 12 percent in 2012, only a few of its people have shared in the peace dividend.

According to the United Nation’s 2011 Human Development Index, Angola ranks 148 out of 187 countries and more than half of the population lives below the poverty line without access to basic services.

Several dozen protestors who were arrested for taking part in a demonstration in the capital Luanda in November 2011. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Jul 6 2012 (IPS)

Preparations for Angola’s second peacetime polls scheduled for August are being overshadowed by allegations of electoral fraud, state media bias and growing concerns about a violent crackdown on activists and protestors.

Human Rights Watch has criticised the government for its heavy-handed response to street demonstrations by former soldiers demanding unpaid military pensions, and the lobby group said that it was worried about a series of violent attacks on youth groups known for their criticism of the government.

“The recent spate of serious abuses against protesters is an alarming sign that Angola’s government will not tolerate peaceful dissent,” said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director.

“The government should stop trying to silence these protests and focus on improving the election environment,” she added.

Meanwhile opposition groups are unhappy about how the elections, which are scheduled for Aug. 31, are being organised. Several parties who were on Friday Jul. 6 barred from taking part altogether – supposedly due to paperwork irregularities – are crying foul.

Of the 27 parties and coalitions who applied to run in the election, only nine have been formally approved by the Constitutional Court.

Among those rejected are the Bloco Democrático (BD), led by leading intellectual and former ruling party member Justino Pinto de Andrade; and Partido Popular, which was formed by respected human rights lawyer David Mendes.

“This is a symptom of Angolan democracy. They have deliberately blocked the parties who campaign for human rights and show solidarity to social causes,” BD secretary general, Filomeno Viera Lopes, told IPS.

The largest opposition party, União Nacional pela Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), has been cleared to run, but it remains highly critical of various aspects of the electoral process, especially around the allocation of tenders for services like the printing of ballot papers.

It is also asking whether it is really the National Electoral Commission (CNE) that is in charge of the election or the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA).

The CNE has refuted the allegations of wrongdoing and its president André da Silva Neto has said the vote will be conducted with “exemption, impartiality, transparency and fairness”.

The MPLA has also denied the fraud charges and accusations that it is targeting critical activists. Several senior figures, including President Jose Eduardo dos Santos himself, have publicly stated that the party was too big and too popular to need to cheat.

“From a judicial point of view, we have a lot of problems because the electoral commission is still violating the electoral law and we plan to formally complain to the constitutional courts about a number of issues,” UNITA spokesman Alcides Sakala said.

He complained about the state media bias towards the ruling party. He also cited a last-minute change to allow diaspora voting, despite the fact that overseas electoral registration had been restricted to embassy staff and MPLA supporters.

Sakala also expressed concern about a plan to allow police officers and the army to vote ahead of polling day.

“How will this process be monitored?” he asked. “No one will be able to control that and that raises a lot of concern from our side.”

While UNITA remains the largest party with 16 seats in parliament, it faces some stiff competition from new kid on the block Convergencia Ampla de Salvação de Angola (CASA-CE).

Formed just months ago by the highly regarded Abel Chivukuvuku, himself formerly of UNITA and with close links to the late war-time leader Jonas Savimbi, CASA-CE brings a new dynamic to the Angolan political scene.

Angolan expert Markus Weimer from London-based think tank Chatham House said that while CASA-CE could only hope to secure a few seats in parliament, its formation was ruffling feathers within the MPLA.

“I think the MPLA is worried by CASA-CE because it is an unknown,” he said. “The party has come seemingly from nowhere and from nothing and they are not quite sure how to handle them.”

Weimer said he was confident the MPLA, which has a firm grip on the country’s economy and media, both state and private, would win the vote. He added that it was crucial that the doubts over the voting process were cleared up.

“The process needs to be seen as legitimate by everyone for the MPLA’s win to be accepted,” he explained.

“The MPLA will be prepared to lose seats if it means the election is regarded as credible and legitimate.”

Angola’s experience of elections is limited, having only previously held two since the country’s independence from Portugal in 1975.

The 2008 poll passed peacefully despite widespread allegations of vote-rigging, but the election in 1992 was abandoned midway and triggered a second phase of the civil war that lasted until 2002. The first civil war began after independence in 1975 until 1991.

There are fears that if opposition parties do not feel the vote is conducted fairly, this could trigger protests and lead to unrest.

“We want to keep a positive approach and avoid this,” UNITA’s Sakala said.

“We will be insisting that the law is followed so that we can avoid other situations that can lead to other difficulties that are not good for the country.”

He said they had been encouraged by the Supreme Court’s June decision to uphold his party’s appeal against the appointment of MPLA member Suzanna Ingles to the presidency of the CNE despite only being a lawyer, and not a serving judge as the law required.

While this is a legislative election, the vote will also decide who will be Angola’s president because a controversial change in the constitution in 2010 means that the head of state is now elected from the top of the list of the party which wins the most parliamentary votes.

With the MPLA on course for what seems like another victory, Dos Santos, who has been in power for 33 years since 1979 despite never being formally elected, will be handed a new five-year term.

The length of the 69-year-old’s presidency, one of the longest in Africa, alongside widespread allegations of illicit enrichment by his family and inner circle, has been a driver for some of the recent youth protests.

Despite the country’s enormous oil wealth and impressive post-war economic growth, between half and two thirds of the population still live in poverty, many in slum-style conditions without access to running water, sanitation or electricity.

The Angolan government is being urged to carry out a thorough and independent investigation into allegations of sexual and physical abuse by its security forces against Congolese migrants.

In a 50-page report released on Monday, May 21, entitled “If You Come back We Will Kill You”, New York-based lobby group Human Rights Watch (HRW) documents chilling testimonies of men and women who entered Angola illegally to work.

Many claim that they were subjected to various forms of torture, beatings and gang rape while being held in custody in Angola before being deported back to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Angola shares a northern border with the DRC.

Migrants interviewed by HRW researchers between 2009 and 2011 told of how they were rounded up from diamond mines, markets and villages across northern Angola by a combination of border police, immigration officials and soldiers. They were then tied up, beaten, whipped with chains and scorched by hot knives.

Women, many pregnant or with young children and babies, described being thrown into cramped prison cells, which were packed with as many as 100 or even 150 other people. The women were forced to sit in their own urine and excrement and only had access to food and water if they had sex with the security guards.

“In prison they beat us when we refused to have sex with them and they kicked us with their boots in the belly,” recounted one 30-year-old woman, who was held in Condueji prison in Dundo, Lunda Norte province, which borders the DRC.

“They came in groups of 20 or 30 to ask for girls. We were 147 women in a cell and had nothing to eat, nothing to wash ourselves with, we were not able to sleep,” she added.

HRW noted that children often witnessed sexual abuse against their mothers and other female inmates.

One woman, aged 27, also held at Condueji, told HRW researchers: “We were 73 women and 27 children in the cell. They disturbed us all the time to have sex with us. They had different uniforms, khaki and green, blue and black.

“I finally accepted to have sex with a soldier in a khaki uniform because of the hunger. He gave me biscuits but I hurt a lot from the rape.”

Claims that Angolan security services are abusing Congolese migrants – many of whom cross the border to work in the vast open-pit diamond mines – are not new, however.

Nor are the mass deportations. Deportations began in 2003 just after the end of Angola’s decades of war (1961 to 2002), when it began tightening its borders and reinforcing national security. However, the deportations have steadily increased against a backdrop of deteriorating bilateral relations between the once-close allies.

The United Nations estimates some 400,000 Congolese citizens have been expelled from Angolan territory since the deportations began. U.N. reports from February 2011 showed there were 55,000 deportations during that year, and of that total, 3,770 people were raped.

Antonio Mangia, a protection officer at the International Committee for the Development of Peoples, an Italian non-governmental organisation that has U.N. funding to support and monitor Congolese citizens deported from Angola, told IPS that “the situation is very worrying.”

“We have seen more than 25,000 people expelled since January this year with more than 1,000 incidents of sexual or gender-based violence in that time.”

“Humanitarian assistance is under-funded, so the rights of these Congolese are violated twice, first in Angola, and then when they return to the DRC where they don’t have access to health care, shelter or other basic rights,” he added.

Angola makes no secret of its expulsion campaign, regularly writing about special deportation operations in border towns, as it defends its right to protect its territory and resources, particularly diamonds, which it claims the Congolese are trying to steal.

Over the years there have been a number of damning reports published by the U.N. cataloguing horrific abuse claims such as the ones recorded by HRW. There have also been several high-level visits from the organisation’s representatives to challenge Angola about the abuse allegations.

These included a mission by the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Margot Wallström, who also visited border areas in both Angola and DRC last year. In February this year U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon raised the issue at a meeting with Angolan Foreign Minister Georges Chicoty.

Chicoty, however, while agreeing to look into the situation, has played down the abuse claims. He has said on several occasions that allegations are made up to excuse the border infractions. It is a position shared by many in the Angolan government.

Earlier this month, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Šimonović visited the DRC border and met a number of people who said they had been abused while being deported from Angola.

He told reporters that international human rights law was being violated and that he would raise the matter at the U.N. Security Council.

HRW researchers, who carried out their interviews on both sides of the border, speaking to government officials and aid workers, said that while there was no evidence that the Angolan officials in question had been ordered by their superiors to commit such serious crimes, the victims’ testimony indicated a “high degree of complicity” among the different security services involved in expulsion operations.

“These security officials routinely abused their authority and powers, particularly to sexually exploit migrant women and girls in their custody, and there is lack of effective oversight to prevent such abuses from taking place,” the report noted.

And it adds: “Information gathered through interviews with former detainees also suggests that the deprivation of essential items in custody, including food, water, and sanitation facilities, even if not deliberate, increases the vulnerability of migrants, particularly women and girls, to sexual abuse and exploitation, and exposes female inmates to health risks, such as HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.”

HRW acknowledges that since Wallstrom’s visit the Angolan government has made a commitment to increase protection of migrants’ rights by taking measures such as the construction of new detention facilities.

But concluding its report, it called on Angola to carry out “a thorough, credible, and impartial investigation into all allegations of serious abuse, including sexual violence, torture, degrading and inhumane treatment, and killings against irregular migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and others during past expulsions.”

As well as urging Angola and the DRC to “strengthen bilateral co-operation” to be able to respond better to problems along its shared border, HRW also makes a direct appeal to the U.N. to provide stronger oversight of the situation.

(END)

Angola is now focusing on cash crops. This is a new sugarcane plantation in Malange, Angola. Credit: Louise Redvers

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, May 11 2012 (IPS)

Millions of Angola’s poorest families are facing critical food insecurity as a prolonged dry spell across large parts of the country has destroyed harvests and killed off livestock.
Up to 500,000 children are now thought to be suffering from severe malnutrition triggered by the collapse in food production after a lengthy dry season in the first three months of this year. Currently emergency feeding centres are being set up in the worst-affected communities.

The provinces of Huambo, Bie, Benguela and Zaire in central and northern Angola are the hardest hit, but across the country both small-scale and commercial farmers are suffering. Crop yields are down by as much as 70 percent in some places.

There are reports of subsistence farmers abandoning their fields altogether in a bid to find other paid work in towns and cities so that they can feed their families, and large commercial farms are laying off workers because there is no harvest to gather.

Despite Angola’s enormous oil wealth and the International Monetary Fund’s forecast that GDP will swell by 9.7 percent in 2012, nearly two thirds of rural households live on less than 1.75 dollars a day.

More than four decades of war (1961-2002) left the country with one of the highest child mortality rates in the world, with 20 percent of youngsters dying before they reach their fifth birthday.

Poor diet is a major factor in the high death rates and according to the latest National Nutrition Survey, carried out in 2007, nearly 30 percent of children under five are stunted, more than eight percent are wasted, and close to 16 percent are underweight.

Koen Vanormelingen, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Angola, explained that this year’s weak harvest was already taken its toll on the most vulnerable children, who were showing elevated rates of malnutrition.

“These people were already living on the border line and were scraping by at the best of times,” he said.

“But where they were once eating a varied diet three times a day, now they are having just one meal a day, maybe two, and they are restricted to a very poor selection of cassava and bananas.

“It is a very serious situation and we are very concerned because we are seeing a significant increase in malnutrition and malnutrition-related mortality in children,” he added.

The government has allocated 43 million dollars to an emergency response campaign, which will include the distribution of food and water supplies, as well as seeds and other agricultural inputs to help farmers salvage their wasted crops.

In addition, a 40-tonne shipment of nutritionally-enhanced peanut-based paste used to treat malnutrition has been imported with support from the Clinton Foundation. It is ready to be sent to emergency feeding centres that are being set up around the country.

“This is not a famine, it is an issue of food insecurity,” Vanormelingen explained. “There is food available; the issue is that because people are not producing as much food, they must buy more.

“And because their production has gone down, their income has also gone down so they cannot afford to buy food, and as supply falls and demand increases, prices are going up – in some cases doubling.”

This collapse in crop production is a major setback for Angola, which has been trying desperately to re- launch its once buoyant agricultural sector that was destroyed by decades of war.

In a bid to help boost output, last year the government launched a high profile 150-million-dollar microcredit scheme giving small farmers loans to buy seeds and fertilisers.

But now with yields so low, many families are struggling to repay their debts.

The União Nacional das Associações de Camponeses Angolanos, the national union of farming cooperatives, has said that the government will help bridge the payment gap with the commercial banks, which made the loans.

But Belarmino Jelembi, director of Angola’s largest rural development organisation, Acção para o Desenvolvimento Rural e Ambiente, warned: “The government needs to be extremely careful how this is managed, because there is a risk that if it is not managed well, the whole programme could fail altogether.”

He added: “What this situation tells us is that we need to do more to support the small farmers with basic tools for irrigation, so people are not so dependent on the rain for their crops.

“We need to think about the basic things at local level, rather than investing huge amounts of money in big capital projects that often turn out to be white elephants.”

Abrantes Carlos, provincial director of the Agriculture Ministry in Benguela, where around 100,000 families – or well over half a million people – are now food insecure, agreed that “more sustainable systems” of irrigation were needed.

“Benguela is a province that often faces dry spells, so we need to have better irrigation so we can overcome this situation,” he told IPS.

“We have large rivers in the province but we are not managing our supplies, and we do not have accurate data about how much water is available.”

Carlos said the lack of water in the province, where many rivers have run dry, was the worst the area had seen for over 30 years, and that for the first time since the end of the war in 2002 there were plans to start giving out food aid to families.

“At this moment people still have some food, but the situation in the next three months will likely get worse,” he said. He explained that the government was assisting in the drilling of new boreholes to try to find water, and was also providing seeds for crops that could be grown in the cooler months, in a bid to boost the next harvest.

Jelembi welcomed the government’s commitment to provide assistance, but said: “We have seen a lot of announcements about what the government is going to do to help people affected, but in practice not much is happening yet.”

South Africa needs to stop agonising over whether it deserves to be in BRICS and start focusing on making the most of its membership to leverage better trade deals.

That is the message from business leaders and academics following last week’s BRICS summit in New Delhi, which brought together the heads of state and government of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

From the moment South Africa was asked to join the group there has been much discussion on whether the country really qualifies, and even the inventor of the BRIC acronym, Jim O’Neill, has made no secret of his doubts around the African country’s membership.

In a recent interview with South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper, the global chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management said: “It’s just wrong. South Africa doesn’t belong in BRICS. South Africa has too small an economy… and in fact, South Africa’s inclusion has somewhat weakened the group’s power.”

But Gus Mandigora, executive director for Trade Policy at Business Unity South Africa (BUSA), said the question over whether South Africa merited membership of BRICS was getting old, and what was important now was making the most of that membership.

“Our view is that we are members, so let’s get over that question of whether we deserve to be there or not,” he said.

“Yes, BRICS is still in its infancy and yes, it is still a work in progress, but I think the question we should be focusing on is, not should we be there, but how can we use this platform and its opportunities to our advantage.”

Mandigora, whose organisation led a delegation of more than 50 South African businesses to New Delhi – among them Africa Rainbow Minerals, the Development Bank South Africa and Standard Chartered – said he agreed that more needed to be done to “institutionalise” the role of business within BRICS.

“One criticism that is often made is that between summits nothing happens, so we need to ensure more work is done in between the summits to follow up on discussions,” he said.

“These are still early days and we are still refining how we do things, but we are confident that we can get advantage for South African businesses out of the country being in BRICS.”

Abdullah Verachia, a partner at South African emerging markets consultancy Frontier Advisory and the head of the India-Africa Business Network at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg, agrees the question of South Africa’s eligibility is no longer relevant.

He told IPS: “We cannot keep lamenting whether we should be there or not, we know our economic profile pales in comparison with the other members and even with countries outside like Turkey and Mexico.

“I think we should focus more on how we can benefit by being at the table and engaging within this dynamic economic grouping, which by 2015 will make up 50 percent of global market capitalisation.”

Verachia said more engagement between business and government was crucial, in order to capitalise on South Africa’s membership of BRICS. He welcomed the announcement of a plan to create a BRICS development bank, which could open the door for more engagement among the five countries and reduce dependency on the dollar.

The idea for the bank, which would offer an alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, has been largely supported by global analysts, although some say there is not enough political cohesion and there are too many conflicting interests among the member countries to make it work.

On a South African level Verachia said: “There may only be 56 kilometres between Johannesburg and Pretoria, but you’d think it was several thousand, seeing how little business and government seem to talk.”

South Africa’s parliament is located in Pretoria and its unofficial financial capital is Johannesburg.

“In India, there is a much closer engagement between government and private sector and I think that is something we can learn from. But I do feel this needs to come from business, it can’t be government that drives that side of the process,” he said.

Some sort of BRICS-CEO grouping, like the one India and South African already share, could, Verachia said, be a way of creating more tangible and measurable benefits for business within BRICS countries, which he felt were lacking now.

Lyal White, director of the Centre for Dynamic Markets at GIBS, agreed BRICS still lacked firm direction and targets and said more needed to be done to take the discussions out of the summit and turn them into relevant policy.

“I think the development bank is a good idea and there is a lot of potential for this,” he said. “But the idea needs to be backed up with functioning institutions like a secretariat at least to support it going forward.”

White believes that with South Africa due to host next year’s summit, the ball is in their court, to take the initiative and establish the working groups immediately in preparation for 2013.

He said: “If we get the ball rolling now it will make for a stronger summit next year, and it should prevent the agenda being hijacked by either the larger members or geopolitical developments, which to some extent it was this year.”

And he added: “BRICS was created on economic lines, not political, but since South Africa has joined, and perhaps it is just coincidence due to the changes in the global context, it seems the last few summits have been dominated by politics.

“I think we need to get the focus back to the economics and to go beyond the talk about united economic fronts and really start making it easier for businesses and companies in the member countries to engage.”

The BRIC bloc was formed in 2009 and last week’s summit was its fourth. The group became BRICS when South Africa joined in 2010.

The five members account for roughly 18 percent of the world’s GDP, 43 percent of its population and 15 percent of global trade, and hold 40 percent of global currency reserves.

By Louise Redvers and - -
LUANDA, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

Rights groups and activists are warning of a rapidly deteriorating political climate in Angola following a police raid on a private newspaper and a violent crackdown on anti-government protests.

An anti-government demonstration photo. Credit: Louise Redvers

The effective shut-down of the paper and the questioning of its editor, William Tonet, whose mobile phone battery was also confiscated, comes just 48 hours after attempts by Angolan youths to stage demonstrations in the capital Luanda and southern coastal city of Benguela.

The marches had been convened to protest about irregularities in the electoral process including the appointment of a member of the ruling party to run the National Electoral Commission.

Although only a few dozen people gathered in each city, neither protest was allowed to go ahead.

In Benguela heavily armed police broke up the crowds making several arrests, while in Luanda, where in the days running up to the events there had been reports of house raids, threats against the organisers, an unidentified armed gang launched a violent street attack on the organisers leaving several people seriously injured.

Lisa Rimli, from New York-based lobby group Human Rights Watch, said: “We are especially concerned about what is happening in Angola because this is an election year when people should be allowed to express themselves freely.

“That people are not being allowed to stage public demonstrations, which is their right under the constitution, and that private newspapers are being targeted like this, it is very worrying,” she added.

Rimli said she was most concerned about the type of violence being pursued against the protestors.

“What we saw at the weekend was a step up from previous marches, the attackers were armed and they were aiming for people’s heads,” she said. Adding: “It is very lucky no-one was killed.”

Angola’s Policia Nacional or national police has denounced the violence, blaming the clashes on rival gangs and “hooligans”, and a spokesman pledged a full investigation into what happened.

A leaflet has started circulating in Luanda, claiming to be from a separate youth vigilante group, which says it carried out the attack to stop the protests out of “respect for the elections” and to preserve the peace.

But Luaty Beirão, a popular Angolan rapper who helped organise the march in Luanda, and who was himself struck on the head, said he and his friends had been deliberately targeted by a well-trained undercover security operation.

He told IPS: “As soon as we arrived at the arranged meeting place, we could see a group beating up random people and then they came towards us and tried to encourage us to fight back.

“When we refused to be provoked, they changed their tune and said if we went away and cancelled the demonstration, they would leave us alone.

“We refused again and then they just went for us. I just remember being hit on the head and falling to the ground and then hearing shot after shot being fired into the air.”

Beirão, 30, who needed stitches for his head wound, added: “The police were nowhere to be seen and you could tell just by the way those guys surrounded us, they knew what they were doing, they weren’t just ordinary thugs.”

A few kilometres away, 57-year-old Filomeno Vieira Lopes, the Secretary General of the small opposition party Bloco Democratico who was on his way to join the protest, was also attacked and had to be taken to hospital with a wounds to his head and arm.

Sizaltina Cutaia, from the Angolan office of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, said: “Considering that 2012 is an election year these events are indeed very concerning.

“It indicates to us the low status of political participation in Angola, where freedom of assembly and manifestation are systematically denied to citizens. It is a real threat to democracy.”

Until recently, political protests were rare in Angola where few have dared to criticise the authorities for fear of losing their job or the little stability they had found since the end of the country’s three-decade civil war in 2002.

But in response to what is seen as the government’s failure to share out a peace dividend to the majority, despite the country’s enormous oil wealth, and the weakness of the parliamentary opposition, since March last year youth movements have been taking to the streets.

As well as complaining about inequality and poor public services, the youth have been calling for Angola’s president of 32 years, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, to step down.

Beirão, whose stage names are Brigadeiro Mata Frakus and Ikonoklasta, said: “For us the big issue is Dos Santos, he must go. We want him to step down, 32 years is too long for one man to rule a country.

“The youth is fed up with what is happening here. People can pretend everything is alright but it is not, our country is not being run properly, there is no investment in health or education and many people are suffering.”

Angola is one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies whose GDP is forecast to swell by 12 percent this year.

Half the population, however, remains in poverty with no access to drinking water and the country has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world with one in five youngsters dying before their fifth birthday.

Hitting out at middle class silence and people’s general reluctance to confront government which controls the media and most private enterprise, Beirao, whose late father was a dedicated member of the ruling party, said: “People know things aren’t right, but they are too scared for their own jobs and families to stand up to what is happening.

“But for me, those who remain silent are merely being complicit and contributing to the injustices taking place here.”

Clearly sensitive to the growing tide of anti-government sentiment so close to the elections Dos Santos and his party, the Movement for Popular Liberation of Angola have been trying to turn on the charm offensive.

Dos Santos, for many years a recluse, has been making more regular public appearances, even switching his stiff suit for more casual shirts and caps.

In a string of recent speeches he had denied he is a dictator and has urged Angolans to be patient and recognise what his government has done for the country since the end of the war.

Last week the 69-year-old, whose own family is accused of mass acts of corruption, lashed out at what he called “dishonest propaganda” said people with foreign influences were trying to destabilise the country for their own ends.

Angolan journalist and anti-graft campaigner Rafael Marques, who has a website dedicated to outing corrupt government officials, said Dos Santos was clearly struggling to deal with the new generation who unlike their parents were not shaped by the fear of war or fooled by Soviet-style propaganda.

“Dos Santos is looking weaker by the day,” Marques said. “The fact that he is resorting to violence to suppress his own people shows he is losing his control.”

Beirão said he and fellow members of the protest movement Central 7311 (named after their first demonstration last year) had extensive film and photographic footage of the recent violence and planned to use social media to spread it to as many people as possible in order to raise awareness of their struggle.

Excerpt:

The brightly painted old shipping container with solar panels on its roof and high-specification filtration devices inside looks out of place in this dusty Angolan village of Bom Jesus, 50 kilometres east of the capital Luanda.

Joaquina Xavier – who currently collects water from the river – in front of the new AQUAtap machine in her village. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

But it will soon be providing nearly 20,000 litres a day of clean, drinkable water to the area’s 500 residents who currently rely on dirty supplies from the nearby river.

Designed by Canadian technology company Quest Water Solutions, the stainless steel drinking station called “AQUAtap” is being globally piloted in this Southern African nation with a view, if it is successful, to start manufacturing the systems locally to roll out across the region.

Using solar energy stored in large batteries, water from the River Kwanza, 50 metres away, is processed through sand and other filters. Then UV is used to sterilise the water to World Health Organisation (WHO) drinking standards ready for it to be dispensed out of a stainless steel tap at the front.

“It is really very straightforward and simple,” explained Quest’s John Balanko as he gently pushed one of two taps at the front of the block to allow the water to come out into a bottle.

“Yes, it looks a little out of place and rather advanced for here, but it’s not, it’s really quite simple and the beauty is it is very low maintenance.

“The machine itself will only need a service once a month and we are training up some Angolans do be able to do that once we have gone back to Canada.”

The stainless steel taps – which dispense a fixed amount of just over one litre per push – and the aluminium platform, have been designed for easy cleaning and there are drains around the edges to collect any spilt water.

Balanko and his business partner Peter Miele, both from Vancouver, have a background in using technology to solve rural water supply issues in Canada.

A chance meeting four years ago with an Angolan resident in Canada, however, gave them a new African focus.

The AQUAtap has been designed specifically for a rural Angolan community where a lack of clean water and limited sanitation is a major contributor to the country’s high childhood mortality rate, which claims one in five youngsters before their fifth birthday.

Since the end of its three-decade civil war in 2002, the Angolan government has spent millions of dollars repairing infrastructure and providing basic services like water to its population of 19 million.

As part of the “Agua para Todas” (Water for All) scheme taps and boreholes have been installed in communities across the country, although according to the government’s own figures, around half the population is still without access to drinking water.

The village chosen by Quest Water Solutions, which was suggested by the municipal authorities, has one of those government-installed taps, but locals, most of whom are subsistence farmers without formal employment, told IPS it had not worked for over a year.

Carlos de Costa Gabriel, 25, welcomed the new machine and made no secret of the fact he wanted a job as its security guard to watch over it at night and prevent the theft of its solar panels.

He said: “We like this project very much. We have been using river water, which causes a lot of problems like vomiting and diarrhoea.

“I have two young girls aged three and five so I am very pleased that now we can get clean water because it will resolve the health problems.”

Mother-of-five Joaquina Xavier, 38, added: “We are very grateful for this. At the moment the water we use is so dirty and it is hard work bringing it from the river in buckets.

“The children get sick from the water, and some in my family have died because of this, but this machine, it’s really going to help.”

Balanko and Miele are working in conjunction with Angola’s Ministry of Industry, which is in charge of sourcing the equipment for the Agua Para Todas programme.

The device, one of two they shipped to Angola at no cost to the government, is being sold for a once- off fee of 150,000 dollars, which comes with a two-year maintenance guarantee.

“We can’t deny we are a for-profit company with a product to sell,” Balanko explained. “But I think you need to be able to make profit so that you can then give back.

“This is a one-off cost for the government, which they will absorb but the villagers will in return get clean, healthy water for at least the next 15 to 20 years.

“It is also very cost-effective in the long-run because our water works out at around 2.30 dollars for 1,000 litres, while at the moment people are paying as much as 30 dollars for 1,000 litres, which is more than 10 times more.”

The water from the AQUAtap will be free for the villagers, Balanko explained, a decision taken by the authorities.

The Canadians accept there are risks involved with the fact the water will be free, that the machine might be vandalised, or hijacked by people who want to sell the water commercially.

But they said they hoped the village would take pride in the new device to stop that happening. Balanko said: “Time will tell, but we believe it will be taken care of. We are going to have a security guard here and possibly flood lights for added security.

“We have told the villagers this is their machine and they must take care of it and we have engaged some elders and respected members of the community to help spread that message.”

By Louise Redvers and - -
LUANDA, Nov 15 2011 (IPS)

Adolfo Andre knows what he wants for his country and says he will fight on until he gets it.

Several dozen protestors square off with police in a demonstration in the capital Luanda. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

“When I see my brothers and sisters living in these terrible conditions when the country is so rich yet people are dying of hunger and from not having clean water or medicines, I have to fight for this because I am Angolan.”

The 32-year-old, who was born two weeks before Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos took office in 1979, is part of a new youth protest movement which emerged in the country at the start of this year.

Partly inspired by the Arab Spring, partly by their own experiences of living abroad, but mostly by what they say is utter frustration about the huge inequalities that divide Angola, the group has no fixed political affiliations and no formal leadership.

Starting off with just a dozen people, their support base has grown rapidly, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook, and in October they mobilised some 700 people to walk down a main street in Luanda carrying placards saying “Down with the dictator” and “32 years is too long”.

Although still small in size, the protests are largely unprecedented in a country where the government controls the media (both state and private) and uses a sophisticated patronage network to ensure critical voices stay muted.

“There are many people in Angola who know things are not right but who rely on the government and the ruling party for their jobs and livelihoods,” Andre, who lived for 15 years as a refugee in South Africa, explained.

“These people are too scared to stand up and challenge what is going on because of what they might lose.

“But the millions of Angolans who have no food, no homes, no jobs and no hope, these are the people we are trying to mobilise, and we believe things are changing, people are starting to question,” he added.

In the past few months there have been a number of protests staged not just in the capital Luanda, but also in other towns and cities, as well as a rush of rare industrial action, at both private and state- owned companies.

Pedro Seabra, a researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security in Lisbon said: “Angola is still a very long way off from any sort of Arab Spring but these protests are very new for Angola and very significant. Things are definitely staring to change.”

While the oil-rich country has enjoyed stellar growth since the end of its three-decade civil war in 2002, and is forecast to see a GDP hike of 12 percent in 2012, only a few of its people have shared in the peace dividend.

According to the United Nation’s recently-released 2011 Human Development Index, Angola ranks 148 out of 187 countries and more than half of the population lives below the poverty line without access to basic services.

Following the death of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi who spent 42 years in power, Dos Santos now uncomfortably vies with Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang for the unenviable title of longest-serving president in Africa. After decades of unquestioned rule, the 69-year-old is rapidly becoming a hated figure.

“Every member of the Dos Santos clan is rich and his daughters are some of the richest women in Africa,” said Makuta Nkondo, a member of parliament for the main opposition party UNITA (Union for Total Independence of Angola).

“On top of that all the members of the government are rich, and this wealth is scandalous when the people of Angola don’t have water, electricity, health services or decent education.”

But standing up to the Angolan authorities comes with a cost.

Andre, who has experiences in construction and banking and speaks fluent English, said he has been unable to find work since moving back to Angola in January and many of those who have taken part in the demonstrations have also lost their jobs.

“It has made my life a bit difficult and it’s put me in danger,” he said. “The security services follow us all the time, wherever we go they know where we are. There’s nowhere to hide from them, they are everywhere, always listening and watching.”

In September Andre was among several dozen protestors who were arrested for taking part in a demonstration in the capital Luanda. He spent over six weeks in jail before his sentence (for public order offences) was mysteriously overturned by the Supreme Court.

Days earlier he claims the group were approached by a top general and offered cars and money to call off their action.

“When we refused the gifts,” he told IPS, “The guy said ‘you’ll see how the fire burns’, and a few days later at the protest we were arrested and badly beaten by the police.

“My family are worried for me, of course, I have a young son and my girlfriend is currently pregnant, so it is a concern but I am also not scared of these people.”

However after an initially heavy-handed response to the protests, the government has changed tack, condemning the youth as insubordinate and accusing them of wanting to re-start the civil war.

Meanwhile for every anti-government protest that is organised, the ruling MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) stages several of its own events, bussing people into city centres, giving them t-shirts, putting on concerts and calling for the country to work together to preserve peace rather than sow division.

And not only is the state media propaganda machine working overtime, highlighting every government project and success and pledging to improve energy and water supplies, Dos Santos, in his annual State of the Nation address in October, took pains to deny he was a dictator.

“There is no dictatorship here whatsoever,” Dos Santos said. “On the contrary, in the country there is a new democracy which is lively, dynamic and participatory and which is being consolidated every day.”

According to Elias Isaac, the director of the Angola office of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, the protests were getting to the authorities.

“You can see that they are feeling the pressure, otherwise they wouldn’t be reacting like this,” he said.

But MPLA spokesman Rui Falcao Pinto de Andrade denied the government was nervous or that Angola was on the verge of an “Arab Spring”.

“We have nothing to do with North Africa,” he said. “We have come out of a long war and what we need is stability to be able to develop.

“It is easy to be in opposition and criticise everything, to see things that are not there, but we the MPLA are working hard for a new era of development and peace.”

Angola is due to hold elections in 2012, although Dos Santos has not yet confirmed whether he will stand again. Under a new constitution ratified in February 2010, the head of state is chosen from the top of the list of the party that wins the most votes. In 2008, the first election to be held in Angola for 16 years, the MPLA won an 82 percent majority.

The next protest action is scheduled for December.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Jul 20 2011 (IPS)

South African companies are being urged to use the leverage of its government’s strong political relationship with India to develop new business and investment opportunities.

Now a member of the BRICS emerging economies grouping alongside Brazil, Russia, India and China, South Africa, is in a strong position, experts believe, to enhance its South-South co-operation.

Trade volumes between South Africa and India doubled from 2007 to 2010, with India becoming South Africa’s sixth-largest destination for exports and its ninth-largest source for imports.

South Africa’s minister of trade and industry, Rob Davies, said he believes there is huge potential for furthering mutually beneficial trade exchange and increasing investment channels between South Africa and India.

Speaking at the launch of the India Africa Business Network (IABN) at the University of Pretoria Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), Davies, said world trade patterns were changing and that South Africa was in a good position to seize new opportunities.

“The African continent is now in a fortunate position where there is now a diversity of trade and investment partners,” he told an audience of Indian and South African business leaders and bankers at the GIBS Sandton campus in Johannesburg.

“No longer are we confined in terms of trade and investment to the old powers that we used to know in the past,” he said.

“We now have broader opportunities, particularly from BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries being here on the African continent, and India is of course among them.”

He added: “There’s a very solid commitment from the South African government and our institutions to support South African businesses in becoming more involved in India.”

The minister welcomed the IABN as a way to help grow business relations and address what he called a “mindset issue” relating to how South African companies could position themselves better among dynamic markets.

The IABN will be run out of GIBS’ newly-formed Centre for Dynamic Markets (CDM) and will complement existing networks such as IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) and the India and South Africa CEOs forum co-chaired by leading Indian industrialist Ratan Tata and Patrice Motsepe, executive-chairman of Africa Rainbow Minerals.

The new network’s founder and director, Abdullah Verachia, described IABN as a “knowledge hub for India-Africa commerce” promoting exchange between business leaders and educational institutions in both countries.

He said: “We want to provide a forum where senior South African and Indian government and business leaders can meet and interact so as to increase trade and investment between the two economies.

“There are incredible opportunities for South African businesses in India, which has a population in excess of one billion. The two countries are also on the first tier of emerging market economies and both face similar challenges of poverty and inequality.”

He agreed with Davies that the political foundations that united the two countries through their anti- colonial struggles provided a strong platform for economic engagement.

“It is now how we leverage that that counts,” noted Verachia, who is also a director at the Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory strategy and research company.

Indian investment in South Africa is estimated to be more than six billion dollars with several major Indian multinationals such as Tata, Reliance, and Mahindra and Mahindra having established a firm foothold in the local market place.

This week Tata is due to begin construction on a vehicle assembly plant in Rosslyn, outside Pretoria.

Although details are being kept firmly under wraps until the launch on Jul 22, the factory is believed to be the first of its kind in South Africa and will assemble pre-manufactured parts to produce light commercial vehicles, which are currently imported into the country.

India’s High Commissioner in South Africa, Virender Gupta, told IPS: “Tata has been importing vehicles to South Africa for a long time and it was the logical step to start manufacturing here.

“It’s a very significant development and I would really like more Indian companies to go that route, of creating manufacturing facilities and jobs here in Africa.”

South African investment in India is so far only at around the 250 million dollar mark, spearheaded by SABmiller, First Rand (the first African bank to get an operating license in Africa) and Airports Company South Africa, which won a lucrative contract to rehabilitate Mumbai Airport.

Verachia said the aim of the IABN was to help address that imbalance and help more small and medium South African businesses find their way into the Indian market.

“If you look at Indian investment coming to South Africa, it is in a second wave through smaller businesses, and we as South Africans need to look at that see how we can take advantage of similar opportunities in India,” he explained.

Davies said that mutually beneficial trade was South Africa’s key objective going forward and that greater engagement with emerging economies gave them an “historic opportunity to create new patterns of trading”.

“The dialogue we are having at the moment is looking at the areas where we are directly competitive and those where we are complementary,” he explained.

“The questions are, can we not identify the complementary areas and prioritise those and so contribute to both growth and employment in both of our countries?”

Davies said South Africa currently exported primary or scrap products like coal and wood pulp, while India exported value-added items like petroleum oils, cars, pharmaceuticals and mobile phones.

“We need to find a balance between competiveness and co-operation,” he said, something he believed the Cape to Cairo Free Trade Area would help achieve, as it would create a larger single market of Africa nearer in size to other BRIC economies.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Jul 13 2011 (IPS)

Domestically abused women who are financially dependent on their abusers can now report the crime with the assurance that they will be able to get financial and medical support from the state, thanks to the country’s new law on domestic violence.

Domestic abuse is now illegal in Angola. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

Until now domestic violence had not been illegal in Angola – and on the rare occasions it reached court, it was prosecuted under rape, assault and battery laws.

The law, which was signed into the statue books on Jul. 8, guarantees support to victims, through safe houses, medical treatment and financial and legal help. In addition, violence has been designated as a “public crime”, which means anyone can report it to the police, not just the victim.

“Giving other people the right to report domestic violence also helps because victims can be ashamed of their situations and may not want to speak up about what is happening to them,” Suzana Mendes, editor of the Luanda-based private weekly newspaper Angolense and a leading member of the Angolan Forum of Women Journalists, which has lobbied extensively for the new law, said.

The fact that anyone can report domestic violence, and that victims will get financial and medical support is crucial to the new legislation’s impact, Mendes said. However, no details have been given about the amount of money that will be made available to victims.

“With domestic violence there are so many factors you need to take into consideration,” she explained.

“For many victims they are trapped and unable to report their problems because they are financially dependent on their abuser. Now, they can contact the police and know that they won’t be left vulnerable,” Mendes said.

The legislation, some 10 years in the making, articulates new definitions of domestic violence, which include withholding food from a child, failing to adequately support a pregnant woman and sexually abusing a minor or elderly person in your care.

“This is very good news. We have spent many years fighting for this legislation and it has not been easy.

“We had a big job to prove to society that the law was necessary, to explain what domestic violence was. Initially some people saw this law as being something that was un-African because it interfered with families, and others saw it as anti-men,” Mendes said.

Traditional marriages with girls under the age of 14 have also been outlawed and there are new laws around family finances, giving women more rights to inheritance and family money.

Sizaltina Cutaia, from the Angolan office of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, also welcomed the legislation.

But she said it was not guaranteed that the pledges made in the law would be supported in practice.

“As a country in general we do not have very good records in terms of law enforcement and there too many examples to show that,” she told IPS.

“I think that the adoption of the law is a great starting point but there needs to be resources allocated to provide training to police officers (both male and female) as well as to educate the population, particularly women and girls, about the content of the law and the processes that one needs follow in order to report violence.”

There are no concrete statistics for levels of domestic violence in Angola, partly because until now there has been no legal definition, and any incidents that are reported have been recorded as normal assaults.

However, in one survey carried out in 2008 by the Angolan Women’s Organisation (OMA), the women’s wing of the country’s ruling party, Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, in just one district of Luanda, researchers counted some 4,000 incidents over 12 months – roughly 10 attacks a day.

And another study, referred to in the 2009 United States State Department Human Rights report on Angola, recorded 62 percent of women living in poor suburbs of the capital to have experienced some form of household violence.

Despite this perceived high rate of incidence, there are no formal support networks and just a handful of safe houses in the capital Luanda run by the OMA. Few women bothered to report domestic violence as they believed that prosecution was unlikely and would only complicate matters further.

Cutaia admitted domestic violence was endemic in Angola and hoped that the new legislation and an accompanying civic education programme would start to tackle that.

“When I was growing up, domestic violence was all around me and I remember a neighbour being very badly beaten and a guy standing by saying that sometimes men beat women to show them that they love them,” she recalled.

And added: “When you are a teenager and hear these statements, you believe them. And also, there is a tendency for victims to be asked what they did wrong, as if they deserved it in someway.”

A 2009 study by the South African Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) observed that the legacy of Angola’s three-decade civil war, which only ended in 2002, had left engrained violent tendencies within its people.

Cutaia said too much of Angola’s ills were blamed on its history of conflict, but Mendes suggested the entrenched poverty the war had left behind definitely puts pressure on families.

“When you are living in a place with no water, no electricity and you have no food, life is very hard,” she said.

“Many families are living in poor and cramped conditions and with little space to relax and this can make life very hard and make people start to be angry.”

While celebrating the new legislation, Mendes agrees with Cutaia that it is only the beginning.

“Now we have the law,” she said. “But it is only the first step. We need the media and civil society to make a big campaign to tell people about it and explain to people about their rights.

“It’s important this happens countrywide and that any publicity material is translated into all languages, not just Portuguese, to make sure we reach all communities, not just those people in the urban centres, but the people in rural villages too.”

Angola’s minister for women and family promotion, Genoveva Lino, who has led the fight to criminalise domestic violence for a number of years, described the new legislation as a “victory for all Angolans” that would “help build stronger and more stable family units.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 29 2011 (IPS)

South-South co-operation is firmly on Africa’s agenda. Leading the way is South Africa, which has recently joined up with Brazil, Russia, India and China’s BRIC formation to form a new global grouping of emerging markets, known as BRICS.

Rob Davies: South Africa's huge trade imbalance with the rest of Africa cannot be allowed to go on forever. Credit: South African Department of Trade and Industry

Q: What is South Africa’s current trading relationship with the BRIC countries? A: We have seen a very large quantitative increase in trade between South Africa and BRIC countries. South Africa’s exports increased four-fold between 2006 and 2010 and our imports doubled over the same period.

Meanwhile our trade with developed countries took a significant dip in 2009 and, although it recovered somewhat in 2010, it still remains at pre-2008 levels. So what you can see is definitely a shift in terms of our South-South trade and this is a policy we are pursuing.

Q: How would the South African government want South-South trade to develop from here? A: What we’re looking to do is to try to change some of the quality of the trade we do with the BRIC countries. For example, here in South Africa, we are mostly supplying primary products but we also have bilateral undertakings from countries that we now want to enforce.

We want these countries to purchase more value-added products from us so we can try and even out the imbalances that exist in the trading relationship at the moment.

And, within the African framework, we want to bring about more balance of trade with the rest of the continent. We can’t continue to carry on just selling to them if there’s a huge imbalance, which is something we recognise.

Q: So, you want Africa to do more than export raw minerals and resources? A: Yes. That’s what we’re looking at, to construct a set of relations with other countries of the South and on the African continent. Because the principles that are often mentioned in trade agreements are very often not followed through, like mutual benefits and reciprocity.

We want to see these principles being put into place in the trading relationships with other developing countries, either the emerging markets or even those on the African continent.

Q: Do you think being part of the Tripartite Free Trade Area (T-FTA) gives South Africa more weight within BRICS? A: I think we already represent Africa in terms of carrying a mandate. We’re there as a member in our own right but I think it’s obviously very clear that the other BRIC members felt they were lacking something from the African continent when they were thinking about enlarging the group.

So they chose us because we are a key player on the African continent. The dynamic and relationship between us and the BRICS, and us and the African continent, is very much connected.

Q: Do you therefore think the BRIC countries will start to see Africa as more of a single entity due to the T-FTA? A: We would hope so. I have said this before: it’s not very difficult to find someone to construct the infrastructure from the mine to the coast, to get raw materials out of the African continent, there are plenty of people who are willing to do that.

But a more difficult nut to crack is building the infrastructure that connects us, because all the main communications routes on the African continent go from the inland to the coast. They don’t go from north to south, nor connect us as people.

And I think that’s where the challenge lies. We would like to work with other partners on those kinds of infrastructure challenges to improve the connections, the transport logistics between central, eastern and southern Africa ourselves.

Q: What has been the reaction from the BRIC countries to the proposed T-FTA? A: I am not aware of any specific comments made since the summit but we had shared the ideas for this project before and we had talked about it on several occasions during our interactions with them. They all seem pretty positive about it and view it as an important development.

All of the BRICS are becoming increasingly involved with the African continent, and they all know that Africa is a source of opportunity. I think this is the big change that has been happening since the recession: Africa is now increasingly being recognised as source of opportunity.

A number of studies are saying that Africa has the best growth prospects globally, after China and India.

Q: Is South-South trade more attractive to Africa than the historical North-South relationship? A: I think there’s a clear historic opportunity for us to create a new pattern of trading relations based on real delivery on principles of mutual benefit.

To some extent, the model of North-South trade has so far been replicated with South-South trade, as Africa has been supplying raw materials. This is due to the fact that you have new players, the fact that China is industrialising and creating a commodity boom and that commodity prices are high.

But the African continent is very well aware that it cannot continue to live on the basis of a commodity boom, nor anticipate that it will carry on forever. We have to develop more value-added activity. So I think we’re looking to, among other things, South-South trade and co-operation to give us ways of moving that forward.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 28 2011 (IPS)

The plan to create a new 26-nation liberalised trade zone for Africa, spanning the length of the continent from Cape to Cairo, could open up more possibilities for South-South cooperation that would benefit Africans.

Members will come from three existing regional groupings, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the East African Community (EAC) and COMESA, the Common Market for East and Southern Africa.

The idea is to improve regional integration and in the long-term create a single African trading bloc to compete with other joined-up markets in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

But how will this affect Africa’s existing trade relations, and in particular the growing South-South links between African countries and emerging markets like China and Brazil?

Taking the example of South Africa, exports to the Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) countries increased four-fold between 2006 and 2010. In the same period, imports doubled, indicating strong trade growth but still a trade deficit.

South Africa’s Minister for Trade and Industry Dr. Rob Davies believes forming the Tripartite Free Trade Area (T-FTA) will improve the quality of the continent’s engagement with other emerging market partners.

In an interview with IPS he said that the BRIC grouping, which now includes South Africa, had reacted positively to the concept of a more economically united Africa.

“They view it as an important development,” he said, “But so do we — from the point of view that we want to work towards improving the quality of our trade, moving away from supplying primary products like commodities to being able to export value-added products.”

He added: “We want to see principles like mutual benefits and reciprocity put into the trading values between Africa and the emerging markets and to have a more balanced trading relationship.”

Working together as a single bloc with a population of 600 million and a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of nearly one trillion dollars, he said, would make this aim more achievable.

Simon Freemantle, a senior analyst at Standard Bank’s African political economy unit, however sees little immediate impact from the T-FTA on South-South relations, due in part to the fact it could take at least a decade to come into operation.

In the longer term, though, Freemantle believes aspects of the T-FTA, like increased market integration and improved regional infrastructure, may help African countries be more competitive, particularly in the manufacturing sector.

“A lot of the imports that come from China and India, for example, are low-cost manufactured goods which African countries currently don’t have the capacity to make,” he explained.

“But there is a huge market for these goods here. If that market were made more accessible by, for instance, reducing trade tariffs and improving regional integration, then there is no reason why these products could not be produced in Africa instead of being imported.”

Overseas investors could also share Africa’s gains in terms of improved infrastructure and integration, he said. “Depending on how the T-FTA develops, we could also see more Asian companies coming here to make the most of Africa’s existing trade links with other regions.”

The example he gave is of a Northern intervention — the U.S.’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives eligible African countries preferential trade allowances – causing a number of Asian textile operations to move into countries like Swaziland and Lesotho.

Such relocations, although not without their own controversy around low wages and working conditions, create jobs and insert money into the local economy.

Dr Lyal White, director of the Centre for Dynamic Markets at the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science, while sceptical that Africa is politically ready for such a large combined trade area, believes it could improve the continent’s engagement with emerging markets.

He told IPS: “It could provide the BRIC countries with an incentive to look at Africa more as a whole and more collectively, especially in terms of infrastructure, like building port facilities.

“At the moment you see these countries engaging individually, without integrated approaches. Africa could also take advantage of its own political integration to drive more infrastructural links, like using Chinese investment to build roads between two countries rather than just inside borders.”

White said that, following the emergence of groupings like BRICS, there had been a trend for countries to come together in blocs.

“Individual countries alone are insignificant but as a sum they have more collective impact,” he said.

“Africa is feeling pressure to create an identity for itself and it’s using that identity to help galvanise an African agenda which will help it find a place among the new emerging economies.”

However, both White and Freemantle agree that there is much groundwork to be done before any grand T-FTA can work.

“We already have a number of trade zones operating in Africa and there are still many aspects that are not working,” White explained. “I think we need to iron out the problems within the regional groupings first before we move onto continent-wide discussions.

“Dealing with the intricacies of infrastructure — literally the poor state of roads and border posts — is where we need to start. We need to change mentalities on the ground rather than just relying on high level handshakes.”

Davies defended the decision to create a larger liberalised trade zone, saying that it was precisely from issues in the localised regions, like countries having overlapping memberships in different groups, that the idea for the pan-African grouping had emerged.

“We want to build unity and have a unified approach,” he said. “What Africa needs is a bigger regional market to be able to compete on a global scale.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, May 23 2011 (IPS)

Fixed targets for universal access to AIDS treatment and funding to make it achievable are what HIV and AIDS organisations want from the upcoming United Nations General Assembly Special Session due to be held in New York next month.

Due to be held in early June and attended by international policy makers and heads of state, this meeting will shape the direction of the global response to HIV and AIDS for the next decade and beyond.

The 2006 Special Session of the General Assembly (UNGASS) and subsequent creation of the Global Fund grant distribution body were instrumental in mobilising funding for the expansion of antiretroviral treatment (ART) programmes, which now reach roughly five million people.

But campaigners stress that this momentum must be maintained to avoid undermining progress made so far in the fight against the disease and funding shortfalls need to be addressed.

Anton Kerr, head of policy at International HIV/AIDS Alliance, said: “We are at a pivotal moment in terms of deciding what the commitment will be going forward.

“HIV has been slipping off the political agenda and you’ve also had the financial crisis, so its crucial that UNGASS secures that high level political will that will unlock money and commitment in the years to come.

“Without political commitment, there is no obligation for governments and donors to act and there will be serious long-term impacts from these decisions.”

In a bid to secure funding and political commitment, groups like International HIV/AIDS Alliance want to underline the benefits of ART as not just a treatment method but also as a tool to reduce transmission.

An United States National Institutes of Health reports revealed in May that if an HIV-positive person adheres to an effective antiretroviral therapy regimen, the risk of transmitting the virus to their uninfected sexual partner can be reduced by 96 percent.

This backs up a similar study published in the United Kingdom’s health journal The Lancet in late 2010 and UNAIDS has suggested that scaling up joint treatment and prevention strategies could cut new infections by half.

“Increased access to ART has not only saved millions of lives, it has also cut the transmission rate,” explained Mara Kardas-Nelson, an access and innovation officer with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

She added: “If people get onto ART early it has a community-wide impact, it’s not just an individual gain.

“People on ART are also living healthier lifestyles so the associated healthcare costs are reduced in terms of hospital time and other medicines, and they are living longer and are able to be more economically active.”

Kardas-Nelson said it was understandable that there had been a drop in support for international causes following the global financial crisis and increased domestic spending pressures.

But she urged donors to look at ART funding as an investment that would pay off in the longer term.

“ART is proven to reduce new infections so this will reduce treatment needs in the long term,” she said. “Money that is invested now will save money in the longer term.”

Finding that money though may not be so easy. Following unfilled pledges from its donors the Global Fund suspended grant allocations during 2011 and applicants who were refused money in 2010 could have to wait until 2013 to receive any cash.

The impact of a lack funding for ART programmes was one topic discussed in the MSF report “Getting Ahead of the Wave” published in May.

Looking at 16 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that account for 52 percent of the global AIDS burden, MSF evaluated the impact ART had in those countries and other developments in HIV and AIDS responses.

It found that greater access to ART had reduced HIV-related deaths, lowered infection and deaths of tuberculosis and greatly lowered healthcare costs as people were spending less time in hospital and needed fewer supplementary medicines.

In the Cape Town township of Khayelitsha, where an estimated 16 percent of the adult population of 500,000 is HIV-positive, ART was first provided in 2001 and the study notes that as ART provision increased, so new infections fell.

The study warned, however, that while 12 of the 16 countries evaluated had changed treatment protocols to get people onto ART earlier and 14 had adopted better-tolerated medicines, several, including Malawi and Zimbabwe were struggling under financial constraints.

It also noted that in most of the countries it studied still only around half of people in need of ART drugs were getting them.

MSF concluded that progress in the fight against HIV/ AIDS while positive in many aspects still remained “volatile” if ART strategies could not be sustained in the long term.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has called for a target of at least 13 million people to be receiving treatment by 2015, others, including the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, want 15 million, which they say will still offer 80 percent coverage.

Kerr stressed that all targets must also be accompanied by clear measurement indicators to allow detailed tracking and progress analysis.

He added that more effort was needed to create more innovative financing models, and build on existing schemes such as patent pools, which were working to reduce the cost of medicines.

The MSF study did note that there had been great strides in the past decade in terms of reducing drug bills and widening access.

It reports that competition from generic manufacturers has driven the price of the most-commonly- used antiretroviral combination down from more than 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 67 dollars today – a decrease of 99 percent.

Another important step forward has been the introduction of simpler diagnostic tests which can be used in remote areas without electricity and by minimally-trained health workers.

MSF’s Kardas-Nelson said medical innovation was crucial to continuing to reduce costs and increasing accessibility.

“We need innovative diagnostic tools, innovative ways to getting treatment to people and innovative new medicines,” she explained.

“Innovation goes hand-in-hand with increasing access to treatment,” she added.

Despite the advances noted by the MSF report over the last decade, some 10 million people still need ART treatment.

Tido von Schoen-Angerer, executive director of MSF’s Access Campaign, said it was crucial that June’s UNGASS delivered.

He said: “With the right policies in place, we could triple the number of people on treatment without tripling the costs.

“But if key donor governments don’t support a treatment target, they are sending a clear message that they do not intend to ever come to grips with this pandemic.”

The U.N. General Assembly Special Session, which some believe may be the last of its kind to be held, takes place in New York June 8 – 10.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 11 2011 (IPS)

Much is made about China’s footprint in Africa but what about its emerging markets rival India?

As the world’s fourth largest economy, and with a middle class of more than 400 million people (larger than the entire population of the U.S.), India is an increasingly big player on the world stage and, like China, has Africa firmly on its radar.

Although Indian companies have significant presence through much of eastern Africa due to historical labour migration, the country sees South Africa as the gateway to the continent in terms of major investment.

With South Africa part of the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) dialogue forum and joining the emerging economies BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India and China), analysts believe economic co-operation between the two countries will increase.

On a visit to Mumbai in early April, South Africa’s deputy minister of trade and industry, Elizabeth Thabethe, said bilateral trade was expected to reach 15 billion dollars by the end of the financial year, up from an original estimate of 10 billion dollars.

Tata, Reliance and Mahindra & Mahindra are among the 96 Indian firms currently investing in South Africa. Several Indian banks are also moving in, with State Bank of India, ICICI Bank and Bank of Baroda already established.

In India, meanwhile, South Africa’s SABMiller is now the second-largest beer brewer in the country with a market share of 38 percent; the First Rand Group was the first African bank to be granted a license; and South African insurance firms such as Old Mutual and Sanlam are also making inroads.

South Africa, which proved its civil engineering abilities in the run up to the 2010 Soccer World Cup, is hoping to secure lucrative construction contracts under the Indian government’s five year plan to spend 800 billion dollars on infrastructure.

Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) has already won the tender to upgrade the Chattrapathi Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai, and there are expectations more deals will follow.

Abdullah Verachia, director of Frontier Advisory, a Johannesburg-based strategy and research company, sees India and South Africa’s co-operation on a firmly upward trajectory.

“India sees South Africa as an investment gateway into the rest of Africa,” Verachia explained.

“It has solid infrastructure, stable government structures, very strong financial architecture and banking systems and a globally recognised stock exchange,” he added.

The India-South Africa relationship, Verachia noted, was based on a shared legacy of colonialism and struggle, still strongly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi who spent several formative years in South Africa, and the subsequent links between South Africa’s ruling African National Congress and the Congress Party of India.

“South Africa has a special place in the hearts and mind of Indians,” he said.

Moreover, “by leveraging traditional relations built up during the colonial period, India is ideally positioned to take advantage of its durable political ties for commercial positioning on the continent.

“India’s emerging multinationals are being welcomed into African economies and do not have to contend with the political baggage of being a former colonial power.”

Last year, South Africa’s Indian community commemorated the 150th anniversary of the first indentured labourers arriving from India in colonial Africa.

Today there are close to 1,3 million Indians living in South Africa, many fourth or fifth generation, and Verachia believes this large diaspora is another driver for Indian investment in the country.

“Culturally the ties are strong,” he explained. “Bollywood movies are shot in Cape Town and Durban and the Indian Premier League cricket tournament in South Africa last year really put South Africa on the map back in India.”

Although the South African market had been favoured by larger multinationals like the Tata car manufacturer, there was now a secondary wave of smaller investors coming in.

Most Indian investment in South Africa is through the private sector, which also sets it apart from China’s engagement on the continent which is mostly state driven and, often, in the cases of countries like Angola, tied into government credit lines.

India’s private sector approach, Verachia suggested, softened the criticism of neo-colonialism often applied to resource-hungry China, even if India’s energy needs were also a major driver of its economic expansion in Africa.

Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, director of the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), believes India’s desire to “not lose ground” against China was a key driver for its more Africa-focused investment priorities.

In a paper published last month by London-based think tank Chatham House, Sidiropoulos asks whether South Africa and India could be “development partners in Africa” and concludes that, while they share similar economic aspirations, there are key differences in their politics and how they position themselves in the international arena.

The two countries’ growing engagement was a product of the “shifts in global power” and both shared “a desire to be seen to be playing a positive development role and shouldering global responsibilities”.

South Africa faces a constant “balancing act between upholding African solidarity and differentiating itself as a regional power and an emerging market”, Sidiropoulos notes, explaining that the country often feels it has to take “the African line” when acting on the global stage. India does not have this problem.

Many will be watching closely how their relationship develops, especially with China, South Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner, sitting in the same room when BRICS meets.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 10 2011 (IPS)

An attempt to organise a mass protest against the government in Angola’s capital Luanda this week may have fallen flat, but there is no doubt that a fuse has been lit among people who for so many years have not dared to challenge authority.

Frustration is growing as rapid economic growth fails to translate into a better life for Angola's majority Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

But the fact that they turned up at all is evidence, many say, of a turning tide of feeling in a country which has been ruled by President Jose Eduardo dos Santos for nearly 32 years, and who behind Libya’s Muhammad Gaddafi and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, is the continent’s third-longest serving leader.

In the days leading up to the protest, the planned action was the main topic of conversation across all tiers of society, from the top floors of skyscraper office blocks to the mud-level slums on the peripheries of the cities.

Unhappiness on the streets

Angolan journalist and political analyst Rafael Marques said even though few people were ever going to take part in the demonstration for fear or reprisals, they supported the claims of the organisers.

“People in Angola are not happy and Dos Santos is becoming very unpopular, I would say the only guarantee from here is one of instability,” he said.

There is increasing discontent among ordinary Angolans who are failing to see the benefits of the country’s economic boom, he explained.

And he added that people were angry about reports about corruption and personal enrichment of the President and his inner circle while much of the country remained poor.

Despite its growth over the last decade (11 percent) outperforming China (10.5 percent), up to two-thirds of Angolans remain in poverty and half the population has no access to water or electricity, according to government figures published last year.

Fernando Macedo, an outspoken Angolan constitutional law expert, said there were many parallels between Angola and Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

“From the way the media is manipulated to the ruling party’s hold on the police and judiciary which are supposed to be independent, there are many similarities,” he said.

He added that the arrests also violated the newly-ratified Constitution which enshrines the right to peaceful demonstration, only served to prove the government’s lack of respect for its own laws.

Protest a ruling party invention?

Adding a trademark Angolan “confusao” to the situation are the claims and counter-claims that the Mar. 7 protest movement was in fact an invention by the ruling MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) to test out people’s reactions and be able to pinpoint troublemakers.

Many were certainly suspicious about the emails which seemed to be sent from a number of different people, one even calling himself Agostinho Jonas Roberto dos Santos, the first names of the leaders of the country’s three liberation movements and the surname of the existing president.

The main opposition party UNITA (Total Union for the Independence of Angola) said it supported the idea of change, but could not endorse a faceless organisation, warning that a disorganised event could lead to violence.

Email authenticity

Whether the emails were authentic or not, and regardless of how many people turned up on Mar. 7, Marques says the episode was a defining moment because it revealed weakness among both the opposition and the ruling party.

“It exposed the fact that the opposition were too disorganised and lacking in intellectual clout to take advantage of the situation,” he said.

Marques also believes that the way the MPLA reacted to the email threat of the protest, authentic or not, and the subsequent unlawful arrests, has also done them no favours.

In the days leading up to protest, appeals from party officials filled the column inches and airwaves of the largely-state controlled newspapers and radio and television stations, urging people not to get involved.

The MPLA’s Principal Sectretary for Luanda, Bento Bembe, fired the opening salvo saying: “Whoever tries to demonstrate will be neutralised because Angola has laws and institutions and a good citizen understands the laws, respects the country and is a patriot.”

This was followed by accusations that the protest organisers wanted to restart the war, that they were being “supported” by meddling “external agents” in places like Portugal and the UK.

Bush mobilisation

Rumours even started to circulate that secret armies were being mobilised in the “bush” ready to attack the cities, dredging up dark memories of the country’s 27-year civil war and sending the country into panic.

A smaller group of opposition parties know as the POC (Coalition of Opposition Parties) tried to organise a vigil of their own for Sunday Mar. 6.

The Provincial Government of Luanda (GPL) refused on technical reasons. Fearful of a violent reaction, the group decided to obey the ruling.

POC leader Manuel Fernandes said: “The situation is very delicate and many of us have been threatened with our lives. We didn’t want a blood bath so we decided to stay at home for personal reflection about what to do next.”

The GPL however had no problem in allowing the MPLA to hold a rally which the party called “A March for Peace and Stability”.

State media claimed more than four million people took part, although the real number is probably closer to 40,000, many of whom are thought to have been forced onto public buses and made to attend.

MPLA Vice President Roberto de Almeida led a string of rousing speeches, reminding people about the gains made during peace and lambasting dissenters who wanted to challenge that and send the country back into war.

“The way the MPLA reacted was appalling,” explained Marques. “They tried to take advantage of the situation by creating confusion and fear and this has enraged people.”

Macedo agrees: “All this talk of war is ridiculous. Where is this war? There is no secret army; the war is in the MPLA’s head. How can they make so much or a deal about peace and then be threatening people?”

The government’s tactics have also drawn criticism from New York-based lobby group Human Rights Watch who have condemned what they called an “intimidation campaign”against opposition parties, journalists and citizens.

HRW Africa director Daniel Bekele said: “Angola’s ruling party should not scare people with renewed violence to deter them from freely expressing their views. Such disrespect of basic political freedoms does not bode well for Angola’s upcoming general elections in 2012.”

What happens next is not clear.

In April the MPLA is due to hold its extraordinary congress where it is likely there will be much soul searching about how to restore calm after the recent events.

Risk analysts say they do not forsee any major upheaval anytime soon, which will be some comfort for the armies of foreign investors involved in the country’s booming oil, diamond and construction sectors, but the winds of change have definitely started to blow.

Marques said he believed any change however would come not from an opposition or people’s uprising, but from the collapse of the MPLA which he said was riddled with insecurity, as its reaction this week had demonstrated.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Feb 2 2011 (IPS)

Crouched on their haunches on the edge of a crumbling pavement, a group of Chinese construction workers are eating noodles from tin bowls, wearing floppy straw hats under their green safety helmets to protect them from the aggressive midday sun.

Chinese Labourers on their way to work in central Luanda. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

Welcome to Luanda, capital of Angola, China’s largest trading partner in Africa. Walk down any street of the overcrowded and congested city and you will come across a Chinese construction site.

Even in the most remote rural areas it is not unusual to see red Chinese lanterns and hand-painted Mandarin road signs.

Chinese companies are involved at all levels of construction, from repairing roads, railways and airports, building football pitches, schools, hospitals and government offices, and even creating entire new residential suburbs.

Sino-Angolan relations took off at the end of Angola’s three-decade conflict in 2002, when the Portuguese-speaking country was desperate for cash and know-how, just as China was embarking on its “Going Out” strategy of securing natural resources and new investment markets.

In 2010 trade between the two countries was just under 25 billion dollars; in the past seven years more than 10 billion dollars of Chinese credit has been extended to Angola, with the latter paying back its debts in oil.

But as China’s presence in Angola has grown, so too has Western suspicion, and even though Brazil has also extended oil-backed credit to Angola, it is China that has been labelled in some quarters, particularly the U.S., as resource-hungry and neo-colonialist.

Lucy Corkin, a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Africa-Asia Centre, said much of the “hysteria” around Sino-Angolan ties was based on “confusion about what is Chinese investment and what is Chinese aid”.

The fact many Chinese companies operating in Angola are state-owned adds to the confusion, but Corkin said: “These billions of dollars are not direct investment, it is financing, basically a facilitation to allow an oil swap so that Angola can buy goods and services from China.”

“When people say ‘the Chinese are buying up Angola’ it is a bit hysterical because even though some Chinese companies have bought oil blocks there, direct investment into Angola is only around 70 million dollars.”

She added: “The Chinese government has made no secret about wanting to expand trade and there is a growing private sector presence, particularly among smaller supply chain operations who have come in behind the big state companies but, for now, the majority of the trade is in oil.”

In November last year, China’s vice president Xi Jinpeng (who is widely tipped to take over from Hu Jintao), visited Angola on a tour of Africa which also took him to Botswana and South Africa.

In a joint statement at the conclusion of the visit, much was made about the development of a “strategic partnership” to “jointly seize opportunities and tackle on challenges facing the new international context”.

Such “challenges” and “opportunities” were discussed on Jan 31 in Luanda at a high-level conference organised jointly by the University of Durham, the Centre for Scientific Studies and Investigation (CEIC) at the Catholic University of Angola and the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).

Organiser Dr Marcus Power, from the University of Durham, told IPS: “Although there is a lot of academic research about the relationship between the two countries, there has been a real lack of dialogue among Angolans.

“There are tensions between ordinary Angolans and Chinese people,” he explained. “We have seen some violent attacks, there is an element of racism and a lot of that stems from cultural and linguistic developments. We need to talk about this.”

Reliance on imported labour, no local job or skills creation and a lack of transparency on how the credit lines are managed, including allegations of misappropriation, are some of the major concerns being voiced in Angola.

Although most people welcome the new roads and infrastructure, questions are being asked about long-term sustainability. The new Luanda General Hospital, built four years ago at a cost of eight million dollars, had to be closed down due to subsidence.

Six months later, patients are still being treated in tents and repair works at the hospital are yet to begin.

Power, whose research has examined a number of Chinese housing projects in Angola, also has his concerns: “There seems to have been little consultation with Angolan people and communities about many Chinese construction projects.

“With these new residential developments, you get a sense that in some cases Chinese models are being applied to Angola but not developed with Angolan people or their needs in mind.”

He added: “A lot of Chinese building projects in Angola are being billed as aid or development but they are not — they are business transactions.”

Whenever criticised about its Africa policy, China’s response is that the set up is “win-win”, that China benefits as much as the African country where they operating.

Angola, while rarely taking the bait of international criticism, highlights the amount of physical reconstruction it has been able to achieve while, between the lines, it hints that other countries had the chance to get their foot into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, but chose not to.

The question is, said Power, “where will this relationship be in 20 years, how long will Angola’s oil last and how long will they continue to have this bargaining power with China?”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Sep 7 2010 (IPS)

As darkness falls on a cool evening in Luanda, a group of women sit huddled under threadbare blankets outside one of the city’s few maternity hospitals. “I have to be here,” Paula Silva, 45, said, shivering slightly.

A new survey states that 36 percent of Angolans live in poverty - a significant reduction from the former World Bank estimate of two-thirds. Credit: Louise Redvers

“I also have to take in some food (to her daugther), otherwise my daughter will get nothing to eat.” The hospital has inadequate catering.

Silva gave birth to most of her children without any medical assistance. One was stillborn, and another died at six months. She is lucky to be alive after complications during her last pregnancy.

Nine years ago Silva may not have been so lucky. Preliminary results of a government study yet to be finalised, Inquerito Integrado Sobre o Bem Estar da Populacao (IBEP) or Well Being Survey, shows that both maternal and child mortality have decreased since 2001.

Angola, which lived through three decades of civil war that only ended in 2002, may be rich in oil and diamonds and have one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, but the country struggles to supply basics like water, sanitation and electricity to its people. And its social statistics make grim reading.

However, the Well Being Survey shows that some progress is being made.

Compiled from interviews with 12,000 families across the country, it analyses results according to levels of education, age and sex and looks at the differences between life in rural and urban areas. It is the most comprehensive set of social statistics to be complied about Angola since 2001 (before the end of the war) and it has been welcomed by policy makers.

The report was compiled by Angola’s Ministry of Planning and National Institute of Statistics, and supported by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank.

The good news of the survey showed that maternal mortality has fallen to 600 deaths in 100,000 live births, compared to 1,400 in the last count in 2001, and the overall child mortality rate is down to one in five from one in four.

According to the IBEP two-thirds of expectant mothers had at least one pre-natal consultation with a health attendant during their last pregnancy but less than 50 percent of births were in health facilities or attended by a qualified health worker.

In a bid to improve these figures and reduce mortality rates, a National Committee for the Prevention of Maternal and Peri-natal Deaths has been set up by government.

Local committees are to be set up around the country to analyse the reasons for maternal and infant deaths and to find practical means for their prevention.

However, Alcides Sakala, the spokesman for Angola’s main opposition party UNITA (Union for the Total Independence of Angola), dismissed the campaign’s launch as “just another piece of propaganda.” “What we really need is to change the policies, and to change the policies, you need to change the people who are leading the country,” he told IPS.

Elio Cotado, World Bank country manager for Angola, told IPS that the results of the study will help government target its interventions. He said the previous estimates used were based on assumptions that were in some cases outdated. “I think these new results really will tell us the true story, so this is very welcome. It is also timely because we’re in the process of designing a new country strategy with the government of Angola and this will help definitely help in terms of targeting our interventions.”

Allan Cain, head of the NGO Development Workshop, which specialises in urban poverty issues, said the study was “remarkable”. He praised the government’s “honesty” in reporting frank statistics like the fact that 90 percent of the urban population were living in unsuitable conditions and revealing the extent of the gap between the rich and the poor. According to the report the 20 percent of the “most rich” had an income which was 19 times that of the 20 percent “most poor”.

Hans Lunshof, Chief of Social Policy and Child Protection for UNICEF in Angola, added: “It gives a clear indication about where the poverty is, the different poverty factors, therefore it will be very helpful in developing policies and implementing policies that better target the poorest and the most vulnerable.”

The IBEP notes that just over 36 percent of the country live in poverty, although this figure is higher in rural areas – around 58 percent. This is a significant reduction from the former World Bank estimate that two-thirds of Angolans live in poverty, the findings of which were similar to a recent study by the Catholic University of Angola. However, IBEP authors stressed they had used a “new and different calculation method.”

“There have been significant improvements since 2001, the time of the last data collection. Some of the economic development has trickled down and we can see that from the results of this survey,” Cain said, but added there remain big challenges ahead.

Codato told IPS that he believed there had been significant progress in the years of peace, but noted: “I think Angola should be more demanding with itself in terms of using the wealth of the country and the endowment of natural resources for the benefit of its own people.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Jul 1 2010 (IPS)

While BP struggles to contain an oil spill that U.S. government estimates indicate is now the largest ever in the Gulf of Mexico, questions are being asked about how well prepared Africa’s oil-producing countries are for a similar incident.

Taking the high end of U.S. government estimates, as much as 532 million litres of crude oil have gushed into the Gulf since the Apr 20 blowout of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig operated on behalf of oil giant BP.

Angola, which vies with Nigeria for the title of the continent’s largest oil producer, pumps close to two million barrels of oil per day, with significant current and future operations offshore in deep and ultra-deep waters.

According to Vladimir Russo, former National Director at Angola’s Ministry of Environment, the country is prepared to respond to a spill.

“We have the National Oil Spill Contingency Plan which was created in 2008 which makes it compulsory for all the companies operating here to have their own mechanisms and means to address oil spills,” he explained.

Under national legislation, the operators themselves are responsible for dealing with incidents, as has been the case with BP and its blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico. All companies are required by law to help with relief efforts.

Angola is a member of the Global Initiative for West and Central Africa, a partnership between the International Maritime Organisation and the International Petroleum Industry Environment Conservation Association.

The idea behind the initiative is to enhance the capacity of countries to prepare for and respond to marine oil spills through workshops and inter-country exchange.

“We have had small oil spills in the past and it has worked – the companies were ready, the government was also ready and it got international help,” said Russo. “It might take some time to get here, but within 24 or 48 hours equipment will be available for the cleaning up that is needed.”

Russo said that work was ongoing to create sensitivity maps of the coastline to help improve response to any oil leaks that might occur.

He said that where fishing communities were affected by spills in the past, they had received compensation in the form of nets and boats by the oil companies involved.

But Elias Issac, Angola director of human rights and governance watchdog the Open Society Institute, believes there is lack of environment-specific legislation and enforcement procedures that leaves not just small communities but the whole country vulnerable to a major incident in Angolan waters.

“I don’t believe that Angola is prepared. What happened in the Gulf of Mexico is a big example of the huge dangers of the extractive industry, especially the oil industry,” he told IPS.

“What would be good is if the Angolan government made a specific law on the environment, a law which regulated the oil companies in environmental terms and the effects and impacts of this industry on local and traditional communities.

“What we have at the moment is legislation from the Petroleum Ministry, but this is not enough.”

Issac also does not believe previous arrangements to compensate communities affected by the oil industry have been sufficient, and in May joined campaigners from around the world at a shareholders’ meeting in Houston to lobby U.S. oil giant Chevron over its environmental record in Cabinda, an oil-rich northern enclave of Angola separated from the country by a sliver of Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to Issac, beaches in Cabinda have been left blackened by oil washed up on shore, killing fish and other marine life. He says several lakes have also been polluted.

Chevron declined to respond to IPS about Open Society’s claims about its environmental and social record.

Like several other international operators with projects in Angola, the company, which operates locally as CABGOC (Cabinda Gulf Oil Company), also declined to speak about its safety plans in light of the Deepwater Horizon incident.

The extent of oil-related damage to Angola’s waters and coastlines is unclear. Campaigners like Issac say the impact on the country’s environment is far greater than most people realise.

Russo admitted there was no public database listing spills and impacts.

“This tends to be analysed on an ad hoc basis,” he said, “But for the spills that I know of, there have been cleaning campaigns and things have been restored.”

He added that as oil companies were now required by law to carry out environmental audits of their operations, he was confident that more detailed information on spills would be collected and stored in the future.

The United States was, until now, regarded as a country with stronger enforcement of legislation than most, but it appears there were too many holes in their safety nets.

The U.S. Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce attributes the Deepwater Horizon incident to a catalogue of bad decisions stemming from financial and time pressure, combined with the accidental aspect of the “blow-out preventer” not activating.

The chances of similar event occurring in deep water elsewhere cannot be ruled out and the gaps in Angola’s legal framework and regulation appear to be much larger.

“As everyone knows, it is a high risk industry,” said Russo, “but it provides high profits, large numbers of jobs and of course it’s the driving force of the Angolan economy, so one needs to put all this in the balance and decide what to do.”

BP is currently producing oil from Block 18 in deep water off Angola’s coast and is also running the world’s first Deep-ocean Environmental Long-term Observatory System. DELOS is monitoring changes in the water and ocean floor and fish populations in the block for a period of 25 years using state-of-the art cameras and research tools.

The company is about to start the development phase of the ultra-deep water Block 31, in depths of between 1,500 and 2,500 metres.

Asked whether it was reviewing safety arrangements for Block 31, a BP spokesman in Luanda said he was unable to comment directly but told IPS: “Safety remains our highest priority and we are committed to ensure safe and reliable operations wherever we operate.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, May 15 2010 (IPS)

Think small to overcome big problems – that was the message to African governments being urged to do more to increase food security and reduce hunger and malnutrition on the continent.

Angola has invested heavily in rural development, but some say programmes should be adjusted to better support small-scale farmers. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told delegates at the regional conference for Africa staged in Luanda in the first week of May that there needed to be a focus on “small producers” and “family farming”.

His message was welcomed by delegates from a variety of African civil society groups, farmers’ co-operatives and rural campaigners who gathered in Luanda for a parallel meeting in order to lobby FAO and government policy makers to support small-scale producers.

In 2009, Angola’s oil-dependent government, badly hit by the plunge in oil prices due to the global economic crisis, launched a major stimulus plan to improve farming opportunities and improve services outside of major towns and cities.

The idea was to stimulate the non-oil economy by returning the agricultural sector to its pre-independence profitability when Angola was a major producer and the world’s fourth biggest coffee exporter.

Another key aim for the government was to create rural jobs and long-term sustainable industries, while also reducing reliance on imported food and boosting food security.

One billion dollars of investment, announced with much fanfare in Angola’s state media, also focussed on repairing roads to boost access to markets, introducing new irrigation technologies and promoting techniques such as crop rotation and storage.

Economy Minister Manuel Nunes Júnior reported in April that the agricultural sector expanded by 29 percent during 2009. The March 2010 Angola Country Brief from GIEWS (Global Information and Early Warning System), noted a maize harvest of 1.2 million tonnes, up 87 percent on the 2008 figures, and the first surplus in two decades.

Caution over apparent success

But Sergio Calundungo, who heads Angolan NGO Action for Rural Development and Environment (known by its Portuguese acronym ADRA) says the government growth figure doesn’t tell the whole story. He cautioned that the majority of investment has been in large-scale infrastructure and public/private initiatives, not schemes benefitting small-scale famers.

“It’s hard to know exactly how these growth figures are calculated. And even if there was a 29 percent growth, it has come from a very low base,” he said.

“Our concern is that the bulk of the money has gone to one-off, large-scale infrastructural projects which bring large profit to a small number of people, but which can be hard to sustain.

“If we really want to address food security issues and reduce rural poverty, we must help small-scale farmers directly, because they are the ones who produce more than two-thirds of the country’s agricultural output.”

Filomena Delgado, secretary of state for rural development, was adamant that money was reaching Angolans on the lowest rungs of the economy.

“In the social area we are investing in schools, access to drinking water, water for animals,” she told IPS.

“We are starting to work as well with new irrigation techniques, so we can reduce the dependence on rainfall and have more consistent production, and we’re supporting rural training.

“And in economic terms we are working seriously to increase the capacity of the small producers, and family farmers, particularly in terms of entrepreneurship and commercialisation.”

Delgado spoke proudly of a $350 million micro-credit scheme (run in conjunction with commercial banks) which will give small and medium-scale farmers better access to seeds, fertilisers and equipment.

Originally proposed in 2009, the scheme has finally been activated and farmers and co-operatives should soon start to be able to access the loans of between $150 and $200 at an interest rate of five percent.

Calundungo said: “The principle of providing the money is good. It’s brilliant that small-scale farmers can access credit, and it’s a considerable amount of money – but we need to make sure the process is administered in the best way and that we learn from mistakes of the past when credit schemes have collapsed.”

He also called for clarity over who would get access to the money and how problems with distance to banks, and a widespread lack of identity cards and land registration documents would be overcome.

“Angola is in a better position than most because it has money available to spend,” said Calundongo, “we must make sure this money is spent on the people who need it, not just for the sake of it being spent.”

Excerpt:

By 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.

Flooding in Cazenga, near Luanda: govt has neglected infrastructure in informal settlements. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

“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.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Apr 30 2010 (IPS)

Crouched on an upturned plastic box, Eva Angelino bounces 11-month old Odelina on her knee, trying to stop her crying. Mother and daughter are waiting in line outside a public health centre not far from the city centre of Angola’s capital Luanda.

“You have to be very patient here,” sighed 24-year-old Eva. “I was here yesterday from 8 am to after 2 pm waiting to get a malaria test for us both and then they told us we would have to come back again today.

“They only have one microscope to do the tests so that’s why it takes so long.”

If Odelina’s test is positive, it will be the third time she’s had malaria in her short life, her mother explains, resigned to the hold the disease has on Angola and its people.

“What’s important is that you get the medicine in time,” she said, “Then it’s ok, but if you don’t get it quickly, then you have problems.”

There are estimated to be just over three million cases of malaria each year in Angola which has a population of just 17 million.

This is a low level compared to other African countries like Mozambique, where there are an estimated 7.4 million cases a year or the more than 11 million cases annually in Tanzania.

But no-one is really sure of the exact numbers of malaria cases in Angola due to weaknesses in reporting systems.

Waiting across the road from the health centre while his wife and son crammed into the queue inside, Ricardo Barros, told IPS that malaria was just part of everyday life for most people.

“I’ve grown up with malaria, it was part of my childhood. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been infected,” the 30-year-old said. “It’s killing a lot of people and we need to find a way of reducing it.”

Pointing at the heaps of litter nearby, unemployed Barros said: “The government needs to do more to invest in places like this, to improve conditions to get rid of the litter and stop all this dirty water lying around, then I think we will see less malaria.”

Large amounts of money are however already being spent on fighting malaria in Angola.

The Portuguese-speaking country, which emerged from a 27-year civil war in 2002, is one of 15 countries benefiting from the President’s malaria Initiative (PMI), a five-year, $1.2 billion programme led by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented together with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The cash is being spent on training health workers in the correct use of artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT – often referred to by the brand name Coartem) and in laboratory diagnosis procedures, as well as indoor residual spraying and the free distribution of mosquito nets.

The Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria also allocates large sums to anti-malaria initiatives in Angola, with the money split between the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and U.S. healthcare organisation PSI (Population Services International).

Improving the system Population Service International’s Nana Frimpong said that in the past stockpiles of artemisinin-based combination therapy had been left in warehouses and not given out, another symptom of lacking capacity, he said, which was a further reason for the deep economic burden of a disease like malaria in Angola. “When you have just one person in a company who knows, for example how to do the books at the end of the month, and he or she is off sick with malaria, it creates problems for the firm,” he explained. “And then you have the financial impact on the sufferer themselves if they cannot work and take money to their families, and so the economic burden of malaria in Angola is significant.” The Angolan ministry of health has a policy of dispensing free ACT at public health centres, but these are not always available as Eva Angelino knows to her own personal cost. “Sometimes they have the medicine here and we get it free, but last time they ran out so we had to go to a pharmacy and pay for it,” she said. A prescription can be as much as 2,500 Kwanzas, $25 U.S. “You can pay less if you buy it from the women on the street,” she added, “They only charge around 500 Kwanzas (five dollars) but you don’t know if it is ok to use so I don’t like to take the risk.” Angelino is luckier than most because she lives within a few kilometres of a public health centre. But the public health network serves less than half the population, others turning to expensive private clinics which have sprung up to fill the gap. And in rural areas, there have been cases of public health staff charging patients for ACT medicine instead of giving it out free. UNICEF’s Kone Vanormelingen said: “Sometimes there are capacity issues and perhaps when you have people who have been working for months without receiving salaries, it can lead to problems. “But this is all part of a process of Angola’s health services growing and improving. It will take time.”

Dr Kone Vanormelingen, UNICEF representative in Angola, believes good progress is being made in the country’s fight against the disease, which is financed in partnership with the Angolan government and ministry of health.

He said Angolan malaria statistics were unreliable, especially because as services have improved, so has reporting. But through monitoring “indicators” such as distribution of bed nets and medication, pre-emptive treatment of pregnant women and indoor residual spraying, a positive pattern was emerging.

“International evidence has shown that with 80 percent coverage with mosquito nets and treatment of cases with combination therapy, then morbidity (number of cases) is reduced by 50 percent and mortality by 20 percent,” he explained.

Dr Vanormelingen said that during 2008 and 2009 UNICEF had distributed 2.5 million mosquito nets. This year the organisation has given out 500,000, with 300,000 more to go.

He added that the latest studies showed that close to one fifth of pregnant women and children under five were reported to be using insecticide-treated nets. But while the net distribution scheme has been a major step forward, not everyone with a net is using it, according to Nana Frimpong, PSI’s Angola country director.

He said focus studies had revealed some people didn’t sleep under the nets because they thought it would make them too hot. Others simply didn’t know how to hang them up properly.

“Knowing this,” Frimpong explained, “We now make sure we give net-hanging demonstrations when we distribute the nets because there is no point in people having nets in their homes if they don’t use them.”

But Frimpong feels things are moving in the right direction.

“We were in Cunene last week in the south of Angola and they told us that in one municipality there no-one had died of malaria in the last three months.

“This is a start and a move in the right direction,” he said.

Outside the health centre in Luanda, people continue to wait patiently for their turn.

Excerpt:

More than 30,000 Angolans are stranded in transit camps after being abruptly deported from the Democratic Republic of Congo and there are growing fears of a cholera outbreak as the rainy season begins.

Angolans at the Mama Rosa transit camp in northern Angola. Credit: Save the Children Angola

The families – around two thirds of whom had official refugee status in DRC – were booted out earlier this month in retaliation for Angola expelling thousands of Congolese migrants in recent years.

As of October, the U.N. reported 160,000 Congolese ehad been expelled and there are accounts from aid agencies of many women being raped, often in the process of body searches for smuggled diamonds.

Both governments have agreed to stop the deportation. The focus has now turned to the tens of thousands homeless in northern Angola.

“You have the compounding factors of not having latrines and people drinking possible contaminated water and with the rain coming, this is a recipe for disaster,” said Yolande Ditewig, a Luanda-based protection officer with the United Nations Commission for Refugees who returned from the border camps late Monday.

“Already we have been getting reports of vomiting and diarrhoea which they think is linked to the water and we saw for ourselves a number of people lying sick in tents,” said Ditewig.

According to Angolan state media, the government is spending $15 million dollars assisting the returnees with shelter, medical care and processing their identity documents.

Last Friday the Ministry of Welfare and Social Reinsertion made a direct appeal to the UNHCR in Angola for assistance, particularly for medical kits, cooking utensils and 10,000 tents for the families stuck in the transit camps.

Various agencies, including the International Federation for the Red Cross, the Angolan Red Cross, the International Organisation for Migration and U.N. agencies including UNHCR and the Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have or have had teams in area to assess the needs of the people.

Blankets, soap, mosquito nets, plastic sheeting and other non food items have already been dispatched by road up to the camps and more is expected to follow on specially-chartered aid planes.

While there is an urgent need to resettle people out of the crowded camps where conditions are bad, there is also concern about the social aspect of the reintegration. Two thirds of those rerturning have been away so long they no longer speak Portuguese.

“The family members that are receiving these people are themselves very poor or destitute.” Ditewig warned. 
”Many do not have the means to suddenly support an extra five or 10 people. The social impact of this process needs to be carefully monitored.”

A number of senior United Nations representatives were due to fly into Luanda on Wednesday to help co-ordinate the multi-agency response.

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Sep 29 2009 (IPS)

Angelina Silva doesn’t remember the exact dates when her sons died. She just remembers their ages.

Many Angolan children don't reach their fifth birthday. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

The 30-year-old, who has five other children and lives in a shantytown on the outskirts of Angola’s capital Luanda, is unsentimental.

Balancing her 11-month-old on her lap as she sits among litter by the roadside, selling fruit to passers-by, she said: "It is normal here that children die young. Malaria is everywhere. What can you do?"

Angola is ranked 16th in the world for child mortality. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one in six children here die before they reach their fifth birthday – the main causes of death being malaria, respiratory infections, diarrhoea and other infections.

The ranking, although dire, is at least some improvement from the 2001 count of one in four – which had Angola ranked worst in the world – but there is still some way to go if the country is to reach the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing child mortality by two thirds.

Angola’s high child mortality rates are a direct hangover from the country’s three-decade-long civil war, which ended in 2002.

The few health services which existed for Angolans before they gained independence from Portugal in 1975 when the conflict began were soon decimated, and despite its enormous oil and diamond wealth, the country was wracked by poverty.

Millions fled the countryside, where landmines rendered agricultural land useless, and moved to Luanda, now home to an estimated seven million people. The majority lives in shantytowns, known in Angola as musseques, with little access to running water or sanitation.

No sanitation

Since the end of the war, government has undergone a programme of national reconstruction, literally rebuilding or building from scratch all public services.

In addition to building new hospitals and clinics, there has been a focus on training community health workers to promote basic household health, such as hand-washing, water treatment and sleeping under a mosquito net.

New statistics from UNICEF, Angola’s Ministry of Health and the World Bank are due to be published jointly later this year and will be the litmus test to see if government spending has been making a difference.

It will also help government hone in on the worst problem areas and target its spending.

Koen Vanormelingen, UNICEF representative in Angola, believes there has been tremendous progress: "The government is really committed, and it is putting its money where its mouth is. There is of course a time laps between the moment interventions are implemented and when you see the results in terms of lower mortality."

"We are strong believers that Angola will be able to meet their MDGs for reducing child mortality," he said optimistically.

The everyday reality of poverty in Angola's musseques, where children play among piles of litter and stagnant water breeds diseases, seems a long way off Vanormelingen’s colourful statistical bulletins, however.

Acknowledging this, he said: "There is so much to be done at the same time that it gives the impression of anarchy and inefficiencies, but I do believe there is a sense of strategy and direction."

Human capacity, he said, is Angola’s biggest challenge. He cited a visit to a rural municipality in Huila province where a new hospital has just opened, requiring a staff of 250.

"In this municipality, the total head count for health staff is 195, so how can you staff that hospital overnight? These things take time," Vanormelingen explained.

Long wait

In the 2008 African Report on Child Wellbeing, Angola was rated 35th out of 52 countries in the continent for "child-friendliness" and 45th out of 52 for provision of basic services, such as health and education.

However, in its 2009/2010 spending plan, one third of the $33 billion dollar national budget will be allocated to social programmes, including health and education.

According to the World Bank, Angola’s public expenditure on health is about $70 per capita, significantly higher than in most African countries, with Tanzania for example, spending just $10 per capita.

Because it takes time for investment to trickle down, a question mark remains over how much of this money is actually reaches the intended beneficiaries. Until then, most Angolans struggle on.

Outside one of Luanda’s maternity hospitals, women huddle on the crumbling pavement. Not allowed into the hospital to see their sick children and grandchildren because of overcrowding, they wait outside for news, for days, sometimes weeks, putting their own health at risk while they sit among dirt and mosquitoes.

Adelina Job is on her seventh day of sleeping in the street. "My grandchild is inside with my daughter," she said. "I have to stay here because they need me to take them food as there is none inside. Also, they come out to tell me what medicines I need to buy from the pharmacy, because often they run out at the hospital."

The hunched 50-year-old, now mother to two daughters after losing five sons in the civil war, says she doesn’t know what is wrong with her one-month-old grandson or if he is likely to survive. By the time this article is published, he may have become another statistic.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Sep 17 2009 (IPS)

A chauffeur guides a shining 4×4 BMW out of a gated condominium, ferrying a smartly-dressed executive and her three uniformed children out into another morning in the Angolan capital, Luanda.

Rapid economic growth is not translating into a better life for Angola's majority. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

A few miles away, another woman sits on the verge of a dusty street, one of many selling dented tins of palm oil and bruised tomatoes. They sit on the ground or on upturned plastic water containers, just metres from a trench of rotting rubbish.

Oblivious to the stench and swarms of flies, she braids another woman's hair and watches her malnourished children play in the murky puddles nearby.

Both these women are Angolan, but they will never meet nor are they ever likely understand each other’s reality.

Since the end of Angola’s three decades of civil war in 2002, the country has enjoyed unprecedented economic growth – an average annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increase of 15 percent – thanks to high oil prices and billions of dollars of foreign investment, particularly in construction.

Pumping around 1.8 million barrels of oil a day, Angola has overtaken Nigeria as Africa’s largest oil producer and become the world’s fifth biggest exporter of diamonds.

But while the country has gained international recognition for its rapidly expanding economy, two thirds of its population continue to live on less than two dollars a day, according to the World Bank.

The Centre of Studies and Scientific Investigation (known by its Portuguese acronym, CEIC) at the Catholic University of Angola records unemployment at around 25 percent, but notes more than half of the population rely on the informal sector to generate income, and in rural areas most remain dependent on subsistence farming.

No jobs

Angola’s oil boom may have brought millions of dollars into government coffers, but it has created few jobs, and the thousands of construction sites around the country – signs that the country is rebuilding itself after many years of war – mainly use imported labour from China and other Asian countries. As a result, few Angolans have benefited from these job opportunities.

According to Alcides Sakala, spokesman for Angola’s main opposition party UNITA (Union for Total Independence of Angola), the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen.

"What we are seeing is a small minority of people getting richer, while there is a majority of people getting poorer and poorer and poorer," he told IPS.

The chasm between the rich and the poor is evident everywhere, particularly in Luanda, where beggars roam outside city centre apartments which command rents of more than $25,000 a month and land mine victims spend their days helping people park their oversized Sports Untility Vehicles (SUVs) in the hope of a few bucks for an evening meal.

According to the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), which measures citizens’ wealth, education and life expectancy, Angola is showing little sign of life improvement, despite its oil riches.

The index goes from zero, meaning no human development, to one, meaning full human development.

At the latest count, Angola’s HDI was 0.484, compared to 0.670 for South Africa, 0.664 for Botswana, and 0,541 as the average across all the countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

While there is enough money in the country to build private hospitals for those who can afford the fees, most Angolans struggle to access even basic health care, which lacks trained staff and infrastructure, particularly in rural areas.

And while private schools rake in astronomical fees to educate the children of the elite, one third of the country’s children are outside of the school system. Many are kept at home to work to support their families.

Douglas Steinberg, country director for Save the Children in Angola, explained: "There is an enormous gap between the rich and the poor here, and a lot of people are not really aware of how rich Angola is. People who live in the rural areas or central areas, they don’t see the oil rigs offshore, they don’t know just how much money is there, they don’t see all the new construction and the flash cars and expensive restaurants."

"And I think this is part of the problem – if people don’t know how wealthy the country is, it’s harder for them to hold the government to account for how it spends that money," he added.

In its 2008 Economic Report, CEIC noted a continuing level of poverty, which was in direct contrast to the country’s growing wealth.

"GDP increased fivefold from 2003 to 2008, from $959 to $4961 in 2008," the report said. "But despite this, the large majority of the population remain in a permanent state of poverty, having to survive on little more than two dollars per day."

Widening gap

Sister Domingas Loureiro, runs a charity that helps poor families in Luanda’s crowded Cazenga neighbourhood, a maze of self-built homes with no electricity and little access to water or sanitation.

"People here are literally fighting to survive and many children are being forced to work from a young age. The reality of life and the level of misery in these bairros is not something the government really knows about," she said.

Angola’s president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, however, claims to know about the poverty in his country. In March, during a speech alongside Pope Benedict XVI, Dos Santos, who marks 30 years in power, acknowledged the "tremendous challenges" the country faces to overcome poverty and unemployment and pledged continued investment to address them.

During the visit of United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Angola in August, foreign minister Assunção dos Anjos was asked by a Washington Post reporter to explain how Africa’s largest oil producer scored so low on the HDI.

The minister responded by saying: "Give us time to resolve this problem. We have mechanisms, we have the will and we have the structures to be able to guarantee to our people that they can live in dignified conditions. Unfortunately poverty can’t just be overcome by waving a magic wand."

For the estimated five million Angolans who live in slum conditions around Luanda, a magic wand may seem like their only hope.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers

LUANDA, Aug 18 2009 (IPS)

Free primary education for all is an Angolan government policy, but unfortunately this has not translated into a reality that sees all children receiving education.

Classes offer girls aged 10 to 18 an accelerated learning programme that covers two grades in one year to make up for lost time. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

After the end of the war in 2002, the situation slowly started to change as high oil prices caused an economic boom in oil-rich Angola. Some of the profits are being converted into investment in education. 

The government claims to have recruited and trained more than 70,000 teachers, and glossy videos shown on state television tell of an ambitious programme to rebuild hundreds of schools destroyed during the war and train up more teachers to work across the country.

Despite these efforts, however, the demand for education is not being met, and under-qualified teachers are taking on up to 60 pupils per class. This lack of capacity means that although schools don’t charge fees, some teachers have been known to accept financial or other gifts to guarantee pupils’ enrolment. With the average Angolan family having five or more children, few can afford to secure all their children places.

Girls, it seems, are the biggest victims, often missing out on their chance for education because they are kept at home by their parents to run the household and look after siblings.

“When my father died, my life stopped and I had to stop going to school to help my mother,” said 15-year-old Aminosa Miranda, who has recently started attending classes again. “Now I’m here studying again, and I really like it because I have learnt how to do lots of things, like make baskets and do crochet,” she added.

The fact that girls are expected to help with household responsibilities is opening up a gulf in literacy rates between the two sexes. According to 2007 figures from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 84 percent of boys and only 63 percent of girls were literate.

In addition, high teenage pregnancy rates are perpetuating the problem, trapping many young women in a life of poverty. More than half of Angolan girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have at least one child, noted a United Nations Development Programme draft report in 2009.

“There is a definite gender inequality,” Douglas Steinberg, national director for Save the Children in Angola, told IPS. “What we are finding is at the first enrolment and in the early grades, it’s pretty equal in terms of boys and girls. But by fourth grade, we are seeing a lot more girls dropping out, often because of family pressures and taking on household responsibilities.

“And many girls who do make it to middle school are getting pregnant and drop out anyway,” he added.

Girls who drop out while still barely literate or numerate have little opportunity of improving their economic situation and mostly end up as informal street traders.

Dominga Carla Consumala, a teacher in Cazenga, one of Luanda’s poorest and most overcrowded neighbourhoods on the edge of the capital, works at the Adolescent Girls’ Education Project that gives girls who have dropped out of school a second chance.

She says the cycle of girls staying out of school and getting pregnant had to be broken: “We are fighting to change this. Our country is in peace now. There are lots of opportunities to work and if girls don’t study, they won’t have a future,” said Consumela.

The classes, for girls aged 10 to 18, offer a free of charge, accelerated learning programme that covers two grades in one year. There are also additional literacy classes held in the evenings for those who don’t have time to attend during the day.

Structured by Save the Children, the programme is supported by Brasilian Catholic mission Congregação Irmãs Catequistas Franciscanas, Angolan NGO OSCI (Children’s Organisation of Saint Isabela) and American oil giant ExxonMobil.

As well as basic literacy, high up on the curriculum are questions of sexual and personal health, as well as nutrition. Teenagers who have children can bring them to the classes, where they are being looked after while the young mothers are taught.

Apart from school education, the girls learn to make bags and household linen to generate a small income. “The idea is to give the girls skills for the future,” Consumala explained. “So they can have a sustainable income when they leave school.”

For these girls the classes are a second chance at life. One pupil, Maria de Fatima Manuel Antonio (16) said: “I had measles and it affected my memory, so I stopped going to school. But then I found out about these classes and it’s helping me learn to read and write again.”

Aminosa and Mara are among 490 girls who are part of the programme. This, of course, only scratches the surface. With nine million people under the age of 18 and three million under the age of five, who all need education, pressures on Angola’s school system are going to grow.

The challenge has been recognised by government, which has pledged one third of its 2009 $33.3 billion budget on social spending, including education.

But Steinberg remains cautious. “There’s been huge improvement and investment,” he said, “But the problem is that the quality of education is still quite low. A lot of the teachers don’t have a lot of education themselves, and they haven’t been adequately trained.”

He believes Angola won’t be able to turn around the education system in the next couple of years, as government promises. “Two or three years is too short to see major improvement. I think we’re really looking at a much longer-term transition to the education programme.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Aug 10 2009 (IPS)

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is using her trip to Africa to promote agricultural development as an approach to food aid which she has described as a “signature element” of the new Obama administration’s foreign policy.

Angolan potato farmers: "If you don't do agriculture, you don't eat," says Clinton. Credit: IRIN

Adding: “If you don’t do agriculture, you don’t eat, and that’s the most important goal of any society.”

In South Africa, Secretary Clinton said the focus should be on agricultural productivity.

Things like new irrigation techniques and drought-resistant seeds were as important as access to markets, to ensure sustainability for even the smallest farmers, she said.

The theme of the small farmer continued in Angola where Clinton witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between U.S. oil giant Chevron, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Cooperative League of the United States of America (CLUSA) focussing on supporting smallholder farmers.

“Helping small farmers in Africa is not only about giving those farmers a better life by increasing more local production of food and jobs and therefore economic development in the countries of Africa,” Secretary Clinton told an audience in the Angolan capital Luanda.

“It also helps the rest of the world, because most of the arable land left in the world is on the African continent.

“Countries in Africa that are now importing food can become exporters. Countries that cannot now feed themselves will once again be able to do so.”

Pre-independence Angola was a major food exporter but decades of civil war destroyed the fertile countryside leaving it littered with landmines and sent millions to seek refuge in the cities.

The Angolan government has pledged to re-launch agriculture as a way of diversifying the economy away from oil and to reduce the reliance on expensive food imports.

Millions of government dollars are being invested to set up commercial farms and create rural jobs, while NGOs and groups like USAID and CLUSA are working on a bottom-up approach targeting Angola’s subsistence farmers.

Chevron and USAID cash is already funding CLUSA to carry out its $5.6 million Agriculture Development and Finance Program (Pro-Agro) which began in 2006, working with smallholder coffee and banana farmers, helping them to increase their yields and market share.

This latest MOU builds on a 2002 MOU between Chevron, USAID and others for the $56 million Angola Partnership Initiative supporting education, food security, capacity building of government institutions, and small business development in the country.

Secretary Clinton told reporters: “With the signing of this new Memorandum of Understanding, we are making a down payment on the future, the revitalisation of small- and medium-holder farming in Angola.

“It will raise the income of Angolans and turn back hunger,” she added.

Secretary Clinton also stressed the significance of the type of support the partnership represented and said it represented a “new approach to development assistance” on the part of the Obama Administration.

“While we will continue to provide emergency food aid to address immediate crises,” she said, “we are focused on helping countries build mechanisms that sustain progress in agriculture over the long term.”

And she added that smallholder farmers were a key part of that strategy, with an emphasis on providing access to credit and financial support, linking farmers to harvest facilities and markets, and extending the benefits of research and technical assistance to increase crop quality and yields.

Of course U.S. interests are not founded on altruism alone; there is a commercial driver too, because as Clinton said, Africa is one of the few places left with land to spare.

In Angola, banana giants Chiquita and Dole Food are hoping to set up plantations in the with a view to growing for export to Europe. Earlier this year a group of U.S. businesses visited Angola to look at, among other things, opportunities for exporting agricultural equipment.

Travelling with the delegation in May was Heather Ranck, an international trade specialist from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

She said: “There is a huge amount of potential in the Angolan market for American companies, particularly as the government is driving this diversification into Agriculture right now.

“From a US point of view, it is good timing because many traditional markets for American machinery have been hit by the credit crunch and exports have ground to a halt in some places. Angola offers a new export opportunity.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Jul 24 2009 (IPS)

"Amiga, amiga," the women shout out, "Apples, pears, pineapples…" their cries fading into the beeps and growls of the traffic noise.

In search of a deal at a Luanda warehouse: Angola has one of the highest rates of early-stage entrepreneurs. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

Most of these products are imported in giant sacks by groups of women who travel by plane to South Africa, China and Brazil, buying up cheap produce. Other items like canned food and electronic appliances are brought in by ship.

The imported goods are then taken to the many warehouses known as "armazens" around the sprawling Roque Santeiro market.

These armazens service the myriad traders in Roque, but also supply street vendors who carry their produce into town on Angola's trademark blue and white taxis – known as "cadongueiros", literally meaning "carrying sellers" in Portuguese.

In the city centre, away from the mud and mayhem of Roque, among the glass skyscrapers and oil executives in shiny 4x4s, the price of items is doubled and, depending on the buyer's skin colour, often doubled again.

Decades of conflict and Marxist-style economic governance killed off Angola's private sector, replacing it with bloated and inefficient state institutions which drove commerce underground.

Roque Santeiro, named after a Brazilian soap opera with cult following in Angola, grew up in the early war years and was formally made a market in 1986.

But its formality stops there. Today stretching over two square kilometres, Roque is home to tens of thousands of vendors and their diverse wares.

The end of Angola’s 27-year civil war in 2002 launched an economic boom – double digit GDP growth every year since 2004 – thanks to large oil and diamond reserves.

This economic boom however has failed to create jobs for most Angolans: two-thirds still live on less than two dollars a day.

This growth has so far failed to put money in the pockets of most Angolans; two-thirds still live on less than two dollars a day. The boom has created very few formal jobs and the informal sector – believed to account for more than 60 percent of Angola’s economy – continues to thrive.

According to the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), carried out in 43 countries across the world and published this month, Angola has one of the highest rates of early-stage entrepreneurship. One in four Angolans, the study found, were involved in start-ups, significantly higher than other economies GEM describes as production-driven, like India and Colombia.

"Being seen to be an entrepreneur is a very good thing in Angola and people respect businessmen," explained Professor Augusto Medina, president of SPI (Portuguese Society of Innovation), which carried out the study in Angola in conjunction with the Catholic University of Angola (UCAN) and the country’s largest private bank, Banco Fomento Angola.

But, he added: "This spirit of entrepreneurship is one born out of necessity.

"People cannot find jobs so they have to go out and make their own work by selling on the streets."

Informal commerce has its advantages: the most attractive element is that anyone in Angola's fractured society, be they displaced by the war, a demobilised soldier, or an illiterate woman mother running a household, can have a go. There are no entry requirements and no piles of paperwork.

On the other hand, buying in small quantities can push up costs; lone sellers often don’t have secure storage, for example; and some may feel obliged to give family or social discounts which reduce long-term profitability.

Informal entrepreneurs in Angola also struggle to access bank credit which continues, despite some improvements, to be reserved mainly for the wealthy elite with the right family ties.

In a report on Angola's informal markets, the Canadian NGO Development Workshop (DW) noted: "While entry into the informal market economy is open to anyone, regardless of their level of literacy or previous experience, those who succeed need to acquire business skills and sufficient capital to build sustainable enterprises."

A major sticking point was, DW observed, a lack of access to credit which led to people taking private loans with extremely high interest rates which left them in chronic debt.

DW and local partners have been instrumental in establishing micro-credit in parts of Luanda. The Sustainable Livelihoods Project (SLP) was based on a model of micro-finance originally developed by the Grameen bank in Bangladesh.

Groups are made up of between 20 to 30 members and have democratically-elected officials, a constitution and regular scheduled meetings.

Each group begins with a 10-week training process to strengthen trust, solidarity and leadership which must be completed before loans are made. Then the loans are made to individuals but guaranteed by the group.

By 2004, SLP had nearly 5,000 clients in Luanda and a second city, Huambo, and the project – which has since adopted a new name, KikiCredito – has been hailed as a first-rate example of a successful micro-finance initiative.

Access to support like this is needed in Angola.

The GEM survey found that while Angola has a very high start-up rate, it also has the highest failure rate, with a fifth of new Angolan companies closing down within 12 months. This was the highest failure rate in the 43 countries surveyed.

The GEM authors made a number of recommendations on how to support small businesses through access to credit, education and training, as well as making technology like the internet more accessible.

Back on Luanda's streets however, on the very bottom rung of the entrepreneurial ladder, life is harder than ever, thanks to the provincial government's new ban on street vendors.

Teams of police patrol the crumbling pavements, chasing women from their patches, sometimes seizing their precious goods. The legislation was introduced to "clean up" Luanda and concentrate sellers in designated market areas like Roque Santeiro.

But despite the high risks, traders are defiant.

"I will continue selling here," Paulo Silva, 18, said, clutching a cardboard sheet covered in sunglasses, "People aren’t going to Roque as much anymore, our customers are here and we can make more money here."

In Angola, where the trickle down of oil riches doesn't quite reach the bottom, these vendors are likely to continue fighting for a share in their country's economy for many years to come.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Jul 8 2009 (IPS)

The fourth largest river in Africa, the mighty Zambezi, is a lifeblood to 32 million people, from land-locked Zambia to Mozambique on the Indian Ocean. But its blessing is also its curse.

A Namibian Red Cross volunteers talks to flood-displaced people. Credit: IFRC/IPS

In recent years, hundreds of thousands have lost their homes, livestock and livelihoods, leading to severe food insecurity, an increase in water-borne diseases and long-term environmental degradation in an area already steeped in high levels of HIV and associated poverty.

Counting the cost

The start of 2009 saw some of the worst flooding in the area's history.

In Namibia more than 100 people were killed, 55,000 displaced and more than 350,000 lost their livelihoods prompting the government to declare the floods a "national disaster".

In Zambia, where annual rainfall has risen from 900 mm to 1,300 mm in recent years, communities who used to be able to judge when to vacate the flood plains each year are now being caught out. This year, tens of thousands have been left homeless, and the floods, which have destroyed harvests, are being described as the worst in 150 years.

And in Angola, still recovering from a three-decade-long civil war which ended in 2002, more than 222,000 families were left homeless by flooding which swept away houses, sank roads, ruined 228 hectares of crops and killed thousands of goats, cows and livestock.

Vulnerable communities

A British Red Cross team dispatched to Moxico province in the southwest of Angola found people living in a desperate situation with little access to food, medical supplies and having lost all their crops due to flooding and with little hope of getting back on their feet without external assistance.

Linda Hitchcox told IPS: "This is a province still very affected by the war. It's a wild environment, people living gathering and subsistence existences, relying on basic fishing just to get through each day. Now they have lost their homes, their livelihoods and their livestock.

"It's not that people don't know it's dangerous to live by the river, of course they do, but they choose to live there because their livelihood is so vulnerable. They need to be close to the fertile soil to grow food and be close to water to fish."

As monitored in Zambia for example, traditional rain and dry season cycles, are no longer predictable and existing community warning systems are no longer enough to protect those living in the Zambezi basin area.

Finding solutions

In a bid to address the impact of climate change and its effects on these communities, the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) and Red Crescent Societies have created the cross-border Zambezi River Basin Initiative (ZRBI).

Conceived in 2008 and launched last month, the ZRBI aims to bring long-term disaster management to the region.

The initiative will include the six countries where the Zambezi runs, plus Malawi, whose Shire River, one of the Zambezi's largest tributaries, is regularly subject to backflow and subsequent flooding.

A similar cross-border initiative involving Kenya, Uganda and Tanzanian Red Cross Societies has been tried and tested since 2003 on the shores of Lake Victoria in East Africa.

"In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the numbers of floods along the river basin," explained Farid Abdulkadir, the IFRC's disaster management coordinator for the Southern Africa region.

Breaking the cycle

"For many communities, these events are now annual crises – leaving them in an almost perpetual cycle of disaster, displacement and recovery.

"The Zambezi Initiative aims to break this cycle; to help communities be prepared for these disasters, and to encourage them to take steps to reduce the devastating impact that they have on their lives."

One strand of the initiative is longer-term planning, the implementation of robust early warning systems, and creating a more integrated approach across the region between Red Cross volunteers and branches.

Karen Hvid, IFRC's Angola representative, said: "The important thing is to give the communities tools to be able to react in time to the hazards and how they react in those first 48 hours before help can arrive.

"If a community knows its vulnerabilities and its capacity, it can learn to support itself."

She added that even basic tools such as drums and coloured flags can help people communicate risk and save lives.

Surveys carried out by Red Cross branches in the area found flooding and subsequent displacement and loss of harvest had led to extreme health, social, economic and psychological vulnerabilities.

These were due to a number of factors including a lack of safe water supplies and sanitation facilities, stagnant water increasing water-borne diseases like cholera and mosquito breeding leading to more malaria, dependency on maize with limited alternative sources of income, food insecurity, high levels of HIV and AIDS, a large number of women-led households and even hippo and crocodile invasion due to increased water levels.

The idea is to address these issues together, not in isolation, and before, not after the floods have struck each year.

It begins with the creation of community hazard maps to understand risks better, disaster management to know how to react when it floods and health and sanitation training to reduce disease spread from high water levels.

Then there is the better post-harvest food storage for the crops that do survive, advice on soil maintenance, seed nurseries, crop diversification and nutritional training.

Environmental consideration is also key, and the idea is to work to prevent long-term degradation of the area by promoting tree planting to reduce deforestation and subsequent soil erosion.

The ZRBI aims to directly benefit 235,800 people over a three-year period – mostly women and children.

A further 464,000 people who live nearby the most-affected districts are also expected to gain indirectly from a programme of training in early warning systems, disaster preparation, and malaria and HIV prevention measures taking the scope to 700,000.

Such initiatives don’t come cheap of course, and the IFRC is appealing for close to eight million dollars to fund its work.

It claims that aid money buys four times as much humanitarian impact if spent before a disaster rather than on a knee-jerk relief operation.

It also hopes that one day the Zambezi can fulfil its potential for tourism, arts and crafts, cultural exchange, cross-border trade, electricity generation and environmental conservation.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Jun 6 2009 (IPS)

In an attempt to reduce rural poverty, Angola’s government plans to diversify its oil-focused economy by trying to restore the country’s once-booming agricultural sector.

Thousands of Angolan small-scale farmers are trapped in poverty. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

The country now depends on expensive food imports, mainly from South Africa and Portugal, while more than 90 percent of farming is done at family and subsistence level.

Seven years into peace, Angola wants to reduce this dependence on food imports and encourage people to move back to the rural areas. To achieve this, government has launched a major stimulus plan to improve farming opportunities and increase services outside of major towns and cities.

The plan is also aimed at reducing overcrowding urban areas – particularly the country’s capital Luanda which was designed by the Portuguese for 800,000 people but is now home to over five million.

Currently, oil is Angola’s main money-spinner, accounting for 83 percent of national income. Revenue has taken a huge dip over the past twelve months, however, with brent crude prices falling by more 100 Dollars.

“Dependence on just one or two products, like oil and diamonds, makes the economy extremely vulnerable to the forces of international markets and has an impact on the long-term development of a country,” explained Ricardo Gazel, senior World Bank economist in Angola.

“Diversifying the economy into labour-intensive areas like agriculture is key for Angola’s long-term development,” he added.

The Angolan government has been thinking along similar lines. Its Integrated Rural Development Plan aims to improve roads, schools, health services, access to micro-credit for farming cooperatives, training programmes and building new homes.

During a series of high-profile government conferences, heavily promoted by state-controlled media, politicians have pledged to invest millions of dollars into rural areas, with the hope of encouraging city dwellers to return to the countryside.

Said Filomena Delgado, secretary of state for rural development: “Much of our countryside was sacrificed during the war. But now we’re at peace, and while it’s not going to be easy, we’re going to do all we can, politically, socially, economically and culturally to assist rural communities to combat poverty.”

Building more schools and health points will be, government hopes, a way to encourage city dwellers to go back home and work in newly-revamped rural farming sectors.

Douglas Steinberg, country manager for Save the Children in Angola, however, believes government’s plans are unrealistic.

“The best government can hope for is to slow the stem of people migrating into the cities to find work,” he told IPS. “I can’t see these new schemes making people want to go back. Families have settled in cities, they have married people from different provinces, so where would they go back to and what do they have to go back to if they left 20 years ago?”

Steinberg welcomes government’s commitment to reduce rural poverty, but is sceptical about its ability to deliver on its promises: “I think it is important to have better agriculture and stop being so dependent on imported food, but I don’t think we can see agriculture as the only approach.”

He believes government should also provide vocational training to young people in rural and semi-rural areas to create a variety of work opportunities in other sectors, such as mechanics or carpentry.

Sergio Calundungo, director general of NGO Action for Rural Development and Environment (known by its Portuguese acronym, ADRA) is also concerned about government’s top-down approach to rural poverty.

“In Angola, I don’t think the problem is lack of investment,” he said, “I think it is lack of engagement with communities where the investment is being made. We need to hear the voice of the people, not just government talking in their name, telling the people what they need.”

According to Caundungo, suddenly pouring money into rural communities could possibly do more harm than good: “You might have a scheme to give some farmers a tractor, but who will drive it? Who will service it? What will the workers do now that the tractor does the work, and how will the community cope with the increased productivity?”

He says although ADRA welcomed the discussion about improving rural lives but said it was key that approaches were made based on needs like training and infrastructure, instead of a broad brush approach that might not be suitable for all communities.

Despite widespread scepticism, rural farmers place their hopes in government’s rural development plan.

Twenty kilometres outside Luanda, where shantytowns start to thin and stretch into vast fields of green, most live off subsistence farming, working small patches of crops like cabbage and corn.

They sell they the little surplus they produce on roadside markets, hoping to catch trade from passing motorists. At one of the stalls, 28-year-old Teresa Jose, a mother of six, sits next to a makeshift table of bruised tomatoes and unripe corn.

“We need all the help we can get, and I hope these promises just aren’t in the government’s head,” she told IPS.

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By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, May 27 2009 (IPS)

The flood waters are starting to recede as the rainy season ends for another year, but while the emergency is over in southern Angola, the long term outlook is bleak.

Flooding in Cunene: relief workers are working with affected people to cover their vital needs in a way that helps future recovery. Credit: IFRC/IPS

More than 222,000 families were displaced by heavy rains and flooding which swept away houses, sank roads, ruined 228,000 hectares of crops and killed thousands of goats, cows and livestock.

The provinces of Cunene and Kuando Kubango on Angola’s southern border with Namibia, and Moxico in the east next to Zambia, bore the brunt of the water damage.

It is to these provinces that teams from the British Red Cross and the World Food Programme (WFP) have now been despatched to assess the seriousness of the situation and the threat posed to food security in Angola’s poorest provinces.

The challenges are vast: communities living in traditional family structures in remote areas, hundreds of kilometres from towns and relying mainly on subsistence farming now need food and need it fast.

Cunene, which also has the country’s highest prevalence of HIV – 10 percent compared to 2.1 percent nationally because of its proximity to the border with Namibia where the disease is more widespread – is where the food insecurity risks are highest.

Karen Hvid, Angola representative of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), told IPS: “May and June are traditionally harvest months but this year the harvest will yield little because the flooding damaged 60 percent of agricultural land.

“Even the crops on higher ground which escaped the flooding suffered from a lack of sunshine and rain and wind damage.

“This is the fourth year in a row with a compromised harvest, the second year of flooding, which comes after two years of drought.

“The families in these areas have used up their reserves, people are now right on the basic limit.”

According to Dom Fernando Kevano, the Bishop of Ondjiva, the humanitarian situation is extremely difficult and many families are trying to cross the southern border into Namibia to find food.

“Many families are having to live in tents and the movement within the interior of the province continues to be restricted,” he said.

“There is a lot of work that is needed in the province to help these people and improve their situation.”

During the worst of the rains, Angolan military helicopters and boats had to be drafted in to rescue the thousands cut off by the water.

Countrywide more than 70 people died, most from drowning, but some were crushed in collapsed buildings, others electrocuted and a number of children were taken by crocodiles.

The relief effort was led by the Angolan Government, working in partnership with, among others, IOM (International Organisation of Migration), CRS (Catholic Relief Service), USAID (United States Agency for International Development), UNICEF (The United Nations Children’s Fund) and the Angolan Red Cross.

International and local funding appeals were launched and the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) provided 2.3 million dollars for the recovery.

The emergency money has been spent on providing shelters, health kits, blankets and other basic items.

The Ministry of Agriculture responded by providing 1,000 tons of millet and UNICEF despatched a shipment of 84 tons of plumpy nut, a supplement used to treat severe malnutrition.

In the coming weeks the WFP and Red Cross teams will be carrying out evaluation studies in the worst-hit areas to assess the full extent of the rain damage to crops and livestock and make assessment on the food security situation.

Pete Garratt, British Red Cross disaster relief manager, said: “It’s about making smarter decisions when it comes to relief, looking at the context the household is facing and working with them to identify ways to cover their vital needs in a way that helps their future recovery.”

She added: “We also want to help families meet their social and cultural needs. Sometimes after a disaster people can adopt damaging coping mechanisms.

“For example, a family may end up selling their cow, which is their main source of income, because they need to pay for a funeral. We will work with families so they can avoid damaging their long-term prospects.”

The Angolan Government’s Commission for Civil Protection is also working with the UN and OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) to help establish a national contingency and strategic disaster plan.

Hvid said: “The Government is extremely committed to this and they are co-ordinating all the relevant ministries.

“One aspect that is extremely important is enhancing people’s knowledge about selecting safer ground to build their homes one.

“If families are building their homes next to rivers, they are vulnerable the next time there is flooding.”

Angola’s heavy rain began late February and in three weeks as much rain fell as it would normally do during the whole rainy season of December to April.

Water poured down from the country’s central highlands collecting in the southern flats.

This caused flooding among the Cuvelai Basin and the dyke protecting the provincial capital Ondjiva, home to around 60,000 people could not withstand the pressure and cracked.

As part of their plan to support the affected families and avoid a repeat of this scale of flooding next year, the Angolan Government announced this week it has created a special committee to focus on the problems in the Cuvelai Basin.

The idea is to help the displaced in the short term but also bring in technical experts to study the rivers and water sources in the province which led to the flooding.

The impact climate change has had on the additional rainfall in this part of Africa is yet to be fully investigated but the extent and severity of the flooding in Angola and across the borders in Namibia and Zambia certainly caught the authorities off-guard.

According the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) the Chobe, Zambezi and Okavango rivers reached water levels not recorded since 1963.

In Namibia more than 100 people were killed, 55,000 displaced and more than 350,000 lost their livelihoods.

For these victims and those to the north in Angola, whatever caused the floods, they have a long wait until the next harvest.

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By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Apr 29 2009 (IPS)

Teresa Barros’ problems started last year with the death of her baby.

OMA advisor Odelina de Almeida speaks to survivors of domestic violence outside a support centre in Angola. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

"My family won’t do anything. They said my other children need their father, and I must stay with him. But it’s desperate, I can’t go on like this," she added.

Julieta Paulino has been forced to move in with her 24-year-old son after not falling pregnant by her husband.

"We have been together for seven years," the 42-year-old sighed. "We built our house together, and I run a small restaurant there, but now I am not welcome."

Although Paulino has a seven-year-old daughter from her first husband, her second husband holds her responsible for not having had a child with him. "He blames me for this and has threatened to kill me," she told IPS.

"Last month he locked me in the house for two weeks, and when I was freed, I took my daughter and ran. I have nothing but these clothes I am wearing," Paulino explained.

Barros and Paulino live in the slums of Angolan capital Luanda, where domestic violence is so common, it is tolerated as part of marriage.

There are no official statistics on the level of domestic violence in the country, but a survey by the Angolan Women’s Organisation (OMA), the women’s wing of the country’s ruling party, Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, in peri-urban Cazenga noted nearly 4,000 incidents in 2008 – about ten attacks a day.

Moreover, a preliminary study, referred to in the 2009 United States State Department Human Rights report on Angola, recorded that 62 percent of women living in poor suburbs of the capital have experienced some form of household violence.

In a bid to tackle high levels of domestic violence, government, media, non-governmental organisations, churches and local civil society groups have teamed up to launch an awareness and education campaign against domestic violence.

"For us, the question of domestic violence is a priority, because violence is an evil, which affects all of society. Children who are raised in violent environments turn into adults with traumas and continue to practise violence because for them it is normal," Ana Paula Sacramento, vice minister for Family and the Promotion of Women (MINFAMU), told IPS.

Violence normalised

Domestic violence is not illegal in Angola – and on the rare occasions it reaches court, it is prosecuted under rape, assault and battery laws. There is, however, a bill lodged in parliament for a new law, but Sacramento says it might only be passed by 2012.

Katila Pinto de Andrade, a gender expert at civil society organisation Open Society, welcomes the law but says legislation alone is not enough: "It’s not enough just to have a law to punish people. It needs to make sure victims have access to protection. We need shelters, and we need to ensure the perpetrators get psychological assessment."

Adele Kirsten, executive director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) in Johannesburg, South Africa, believes Angola’s high incidence of domestic violence is linked to the legacy of its three decades of civil war, which ended in 2002.

CSVR, in conjunction with Luanda-based Canadian NGO Development Workshop (DW), in April produced a draft of the first comprehensive assessment of Angola’s post-war reconciliation process for the International Centre for Transitional Justice.

The study notes that "little has been done with regard to the ‘reconstruction of minds’ as a result of violence, particularly at the socio-psychological level" and refers to an "amnesia approach" linked to the decision not to engage in a truth and reconciliation process, leaving unresolved traumas.

Another major finding from the interviews conducted as part of the study with all levels of Angolan society – from government ministers to street vendors – was post-conflict normalisation of violence, aggravated by continuing poverty and social injustice.

Despite the country’s vast oil and diamond riches, the World Bank estimates that two thirds of the 16 million Angolans live on less than two US dollars a day, and according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one in four children die before their fifth birthday, 10.5 million people have no access to sanitation, and 12,000 maternal deaths are recorded per year.

"During the war, women became the main breadwinners and heads of households," Kirsten explained. "When the men started returning home, they found family and community situations fundamentally altered and their role and place questioned, and this has bred frustration."

"Nearly everyone we spoke to talked about high levels of household violence, and there is also a growing sense of other violence, in urban crime and gangs," she added.

Little support

The day-to-day support of survivors of violence is left largely to OMA, which runs the country’s only safe house with space for four families at a time, leads community-based discussions on domestic violence and operates the bulk of advice centres that provide counselling to women, offer emergency credit and facilitate conciliation sessions.

Eulalia Rocha Silva, OMA secretary general in Luanda, told IPS: "We do what we can, but we would like more money from government to be able to help more women."

Rocha says tackling illiteracy, educating families to stop keeping girls at home instead of going to school and giving women better chances at finding employment through schemes, such as micro-credits, are key to improving Angolan family life.

More such initiatives are urgently needed, because the new domestic violence law will come too late for Barros, Paulino and Angola’s tens of thousands of women who, like them, live in fear of violence or are destitute because they have been forced to leave their homes.

For now, all they have is the support from OMA volunteers and the faint hope their lives will one day get better.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Nov 18 2008 (IPS)

She was orphaned by Angola's liberation struggle against Portugal, but through it she found a new family and a life-long inspiration.

Luzia Inglês Van-Dúnem -- plenty of powerful women in Angola Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

Inglês was returned to Parliament in Angola's second-ever elections in September. She is also the secretary-general of OMA (Organização da Mulher Angolana), the women's wing of the ruling party MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola).

Her father, a Methodist pastor, was tortured to death by the colonial regime. Her mother died shortly afterwards – she says of a broken heart. Inglês, aged 13, joined the MPLA guerrillas in the bush near her home in Bengo, north of the capital Luanda.

Later she studied telecommunications in the former Soviet Union, did a stint in Tanzania with an MPLA cell, returned to Angola just before independence in 1974, and between 1976 and 1991 ran the presidential telecoms service.

Married for 38 years to former MPLA minister Afonso Van-Dúnem, with four children and several grandchildren, Inglês took the reins of OMA in 1999.

From laws to votes

Formed in 1962 to support MPLA fighters, OMA has evolved, through a 27-year civil war that ended in 2002, from struggle group into a campaigning tool. In the recent election, Inglês and her team toured the country, wooing the female vote.

Netfa Freeman, of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, links Angola's respect for powerful women to the legendary Queen Jinga Mbandi, who resisted the Portuguese invasion in the 17th century.

Tradition entwined with socialist ideas. "In the liberation movement, not just in Angola but all over Africa, you saw a new recognition of the need for equality between men and women," said Freeman.

During the one-party state of the 1980s, OMA lobbied for progressive laws that recognized non-married partnerships and children born out of wedlock.

"Many of the achievements we have today as women in Angola are the fruits of OMA," says Genoveva da Conceição Lino, minister for family and the promotion of women.

But is today's OMA any more than an MPLA campaign machine that allows a government flush with petrodollars, in Africa's fastest growing economy, to get away with slow progress on social issues?

Angola's appalling social statistics rank it 162 out of 177 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. Life expectancy is 41 years. Only three out of ten rural women are literate. Infant and maternal mortality are among the world's worst. Angola has one of the lowest levels of health spending relative to GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Eunice Inacio, a gender expert with the non-governmental group Development Workshop, is reserved in her assessment: "OMA is very much part of the MPLA."

Inacio praises OMA's work on literacy, micro-credit and domestic violence. "But they are funded by the party and have a lot of money to do these things, opposition women's groups don't have those opportunities," she adds.

Children to live

Petite, approaching 60, with a discreet hearing aid she inserted for the interview, Inglês speaks passionately about OMA's work.

"We need to increase the number of health posts in our communities so mothers don't spend whole days with their children waiting to see a doctor," she says.

Family planning is important here, where a woman has an average of six children.

"In extreme poverty, people think that if you have 10 children, four may die, so it's better to have more. But we shouldn't be having children to die; we should be having children to live. Bringing a child into the world when you know they will be hungry, this is a crime," she comments.

Regardless of contrasting views on the MPLA's performance, activists agree that Inglês has battled for Angolan women.

"She is assertive, with strong views. She is always the same, whomever she's talking to, you feel you can trust her," says Inacio.

Inglês's fellow parliamentarian Adélia Maria Pires da Conceição de Carvalho, describes her as "a very strong lady. Being an orphan definitely shaped her approach to life. She had to grow up very quickly."

Inglês is proud of the number of women in the new parliament, rising from 26 to 81 of a total of 220 MPs, and from two ministers to 10.

"Things have changed a lot," she said. "I believe we can reach the Southern African Development Community target of 50 percent representation by 2015."

Carvalho believes that Inglês should take credit for this: "She fought a lot at party level to get more women elected."

IPS met Inglês in her office, off one of the rabbit-warren corridors at the MPLA's headquarters in central Luanda. All round her desk are party symbols and pictures.

Asked if she's one of Angola's most powerful women, she laughs and says thankfully these days there are plenty powerful women in her country.

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Oct 1 2008 (IPS)

Angola may be emerging as an African super power with its plentiful oil exports and a booming property market. But look behind the façade of this boom and real entrenched poverty continues to blight millions of lives.

In spite of its huge mineral wealth and escalating GDP (24 percent last year) Angola has the second worst child mortality rate in the world, only outdone by Sierra Leone.

According to “The State of the World’s Children” report published in September by the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, 260 out of every 1,000 Angolan children die before their fifth birthday. The same UNICEF report reveals just 31 percent of Angolan children have access to adequate sanitation, a key factor in the country’s high rate of cholera and other diarrhoeal diseases, the second biggest killer of children after malaria.

Some of the worst sanitation can be found in the capital Luanda, where families fled during the three decades of conflict.

Six years after peace came to Angola, more than a million of these displaced people still remain, cramped onto hillsides prone to collapse during the heavy rains and living without many basic facilities, including access to clean and safe water.

Many rely on unprotected and shared wells, hand pumps, unprotected springs or tanks filled by trucks to get their water.

The trucked water is supposed to be treated, but its communal delivery and its transportation back to homes in open buckets doesn’t always guarantee this and many families treat their water with chlorine solutions before it’s drunk or used for cooking. Of course many do not, which accounts for the high levels of water-borne diseases.

The Angolan government is investing 650 million dollars through its “Agua para todas” (“Water for everyone”) scheme which is focusing on these peri-urban areas, building more wells and boreholes and improving supply.

But while some African countries face drought and mounting debt, Angola is a rich country with a wet climate for half the year. Its problem is not a lack of resources, physically or financially, it is a lack of human and institutional resources to manage the water supply.

This is where the World Bank and its Water Sector Institutional Development Project comes in. A recently approved seven-year “credit” is worth 113.2 million dollars and will be spent on helping Angola get its water systems working better.

But as Luiz Tavares, a lead water and sanitation specialist and the World Bank’s project task team explained: “This is not about hydraulics and water pumps, it’s about the management of systems after the civil works finish.

“Angola has asked the World Bank for our expertise and we’re transferring our international experience to Angolans.

“This project is about creating and improving institutions that can be sustained. It’s important that the system is there for the long term and that’s what we’re doing here.”

A delegation from Angola was invited by the World Bank to attend a two-week event in Washington where they were exposed to lessons learned and new ideas, exchanging experiences with representatives from Europe, Latin America, Asia and other parts of Africa.

Tavares, who is based in Mozambique, said: “We’re here for the day after – so the water system has been put in, now how is it going to be operated and maintained?

“Water systems aren’t like roads which are built and then just you drive through. It’s like a hospital, you build it but then you need to open it every day with medicines, doctors, nurses, and supplies to make it useful.

“With water systems, you can physically expand the piping and distributions but you need to ensure the quality of the services continues, in terms of treatment and quality of the water, and in terms of pressure in the distribution.”

He added: “What we’re building here with Angola is institutional development – creation of agencies which can handle the work.

“We’re not telling Angola how to do things, we’re giving them options of how it could work based on lessons learned from other countries. This project will make a critical difference to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Angolans, by providing the water in a sustainable base, in the long run.”

As well as expanding water access, the Angolan government is also decentralizing the operation of the system to create provincial water and sanitation utilities. The idea behind this, Tavares explained, is to give more local ownership of systems to make them run more effectively for the people they serve with high economy of scale.

He said Angola faced large challenges for expanding water access to particularly the over-populated peri-urban areas of Luanda, but also in Malange, Huige, Kuito and other cities and this needed to happen quickly to meet growing demand and reduce disease.

But he said it was important there was quality to these new services and prices were managed at break-even points, otherwise the increase in demand could push up the monthly spend on water.

By creating regulation systems to oversee the service, the idea is to avoid these delivery problems and maintain a constant supply at balanced prices that covers the costs of operation. Otherwise, the systems will slowly stopping to work properly.

Some World Bank water schemes have however attracted the wrong kind of headlines. In Tanzania for example, there were allegations that money was mis-spent and promised pipe development was not carried out.

Tavares said the model used in Tanzania had been reviewed along with models used in 12 other countries.

He said Angola’s system was closer to the Brazilian experience, using public enterprises, with regulatory aspects which have been successful in Mozambique. Tavares also defended the Bank against criticism that a wealthy country like Angola should not be encouraged to get into debt to the World Bank when it has enough money to hire the services itself.

“I cannot respond on behalf of the Government of Angola, but they see the benefit of our involvement to bring the experience of the Bank from other continents to the table as well as our network of peer reviewers.”

Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at the London-based think tank Chatham House, said: “Supplying clean water to Angola is a very important investment and Angola needs this work to happen.

“I don’t see this credit as a tremendous risk to Angola, considering the price of oil at the moment and the budget surplus they have recorded.

“In terms of problems with previous World Bank water projects, I think lessons have been learned and here the focus is more on the human resource rather than the physical water structures and this human capital is something which Angola really needs.”

UNICEF Angola Representative Angela Kearney said: “We support any improvement to water and sanitation here in Angola and this credit is particularly timely because 2008 is the international year of sanitation.

“Studies show that every $1 you spend on sanitation, it gives you $9 back in terms of benefits for health and care in children.”

Kearney said the will was certainly there within the Angolan government to improve the country’s water and sanitation but agreed the challenge was procurement and achievement of these aims.

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