The severe inequality of the Angolan oil boom.
Earlier
this year, I was invited to a barbecue at the home of a Texas oilman,
Steve Espinosa, and his wife, Norma. Their two-story house sat on an
unnamed road, nestled in a community called the Condominio Riviera
Atlantico, about ten miles from Luanda, the rapidly expanding capital of
Angola. There were no sidewalks or footpaths in the area, and there
wasn’t much movement on the street. But there were plenty of cars:
Porsche Cayennes, Audis, and BMWs, all tucked neatly into identical
carports adjacent to identical houses. Espinosa, a burly man in cargo
shorts and a Brooklyn Industries T-shirt, answered the door and held out
a beer. He steered me through a sparsely furnished living room, past a
humidor filled with Cuban cigars, and onto the patio, where several of
his friends and colleagues were snacking amiably on ostrich meat. There
was a second kitchen beside the pool in the back yard, with a sink, a
large refrigerator, and a Weber grill.
For the
past two years, Luanda—not Tokyo, Moscow, or Hong Kong—has been named,
by the global consulting firm Mercer, as the world’s most expensive city
for expatriates. Luanda’s lure, and its treasure, is oil. José Eduardo
dos Santos, who has presided over Angola for more than thirty-five
years, long ago realized that foreign oil companies were the key to
power, and he has worked diligently to accommodate them. In the past
decade, tens of thousands of American and European employees of
international oil conglomerates, fortified by generous cost-of-living
allowances, have descended on Luanda. (Multinational companies base
their overseas salaries on the comparative costs of housing, clothes,
food, and other commodities.)
The
country now produces 1.8 million barrels of oil a day; in Africa, only
Nigeria produces and exports more. The boom has transformed a failed
state into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Exxon-Mobil,
Chevron, the French company Total, and BP all have significant
operations in Angola, along with firms—Schlumberger and Halliburton
among them—that provide the complicated logistical support required to
drill and maintain deep offshore wells. Most of the foreign workers live
with their families in well-guarded suburban communities with names
such as Bella Vista and Paraíso Riviera.
At the
height of the British Empire, colonial rulers lived by a credo: “Make
the world England.’’ The oil expatriates of Luanda have taken that
message to heart. Few would work there if they couldn’t live as they do
at home, but their comforts have been hard to come by. Almost nothing is
made in Angola, so nearly every car, computer, crate of oranges, tin of
caviar, jar of peanut butter, pair of bluejeans, and bottle of wine
arrives by boat. Every day, a trail of container ships backs up from the
port through the Bay of Luanda and out into the sea.
Grotesque
inequality long ago became a principal characteristic of the world’s
biggest and most crowded cities. But there is no place quite like
Luanda, where the Espinosas’ rent is sixteen thousand dollars a month, a
bottle of Coke can sell for ten dollars, and Range Rovers cost twice
their sticker price. Per-capita income in Angola has nearly tripled in
the past dozen years, and the country’s assets grew from three billion
dollars to sixty-two billion dollars. Nonetheless, by nearly every
accepted measure, Angola remains one of the world’s least-developed
nations. Half of Angolans live on less than two dollars a day, infant
mortality rates are among the highest in the world, and the average life
expectancy—fifty-two—is among the lowest. Obtaining water is a burden
even for the rich, and only forty per cent of the population has regular
access to electricity. (For those who do, a generator is essential, as
power fails constantly.) Nearly half the population is undernourished,
rural sanitation facilities are rare, malaria accounts for more than a
quarter of all childhood deaths, and easily preventable diarrheal
diseases such as rotavirus are common.
Because
the oil companies routinely pay most large expenses for their foreign
workers in Angola, a dollar bill can quickly begin to feel like Monopoly
money. Before I visited the Espinosas, I asked at my hotel if it could
provide a car and driver for the ten-mile journey from the center of the
city to the suburb of Talatona. The clerk at the front desk told me it
would cost a hundred and fifty dollars. There weren’t many alternatives,
so I agreed. Later, I saw him waving frantically at me in the lobby. He
explained that he had been wrong about the taxi: it would actually cost
four hundred and fifty dollars, each way. I found another ride.
The
trip took two hours. It was a Friday afternoon, and the single rutted
road that runs south toward Luanda Sul was jammed with commuters,
trucks, tractors, and a stream of the unregulated Toyota minivans—candongueiros—that
pass for public transportation. Children worked the roadway, selling
soccer balls, popcorn, phone cards, toilet seats, and multicolored
polyester brooms. I stopped at the Casa dos Frescos, a grocery store
favored by expatriates, to buy some Scotch for my hosts, but a fifth of
the Balvenie cost three hundred dollars, so I settled for a mediocre
bottle of wine, for sixty-five. The woman in front of me, juggling an
infant and a cell phone, unloaded her groceries on the checkout counter.
She had a couple of steaks, a few pantry items, and two
seventeen-dollar pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, along with juice and
vegetables. The bill was eleven hundred and fifty dollars. She didn’t
seem fazed, and I later learned that the store was famous for its
prices. A few years ago, the Casa dos Frescos had been the site of what
locals refer to as “the incident of the golden melon.’’ An enraged
French customer, having paid a hundred and five dollars for a single
melon, sued the store for profiteering. The case was thrown out of
court, in part because the man not only bought the melon but also ate
the evidence.
For
dinner, Espinosa grilled steak and part of a thirty-five-pound tuna
that he’d caught the previous week on the Kwanza River. When oil people
leave Angola, he told me, they often sell their freezers, packed with
American beef, to their successors. “People can charge ten thousand
dollars for a well-stocked freezer,’’ he said. He mentioned that a
friend once tried to sell him a roll of aluminum foil for a hundred and
forty dollars. Espinosa grinned and rolled his eyes. “That crazy
Randy,’’ he said. “In the end, I think I paid thirty dollars.’’
“T.I.A., man,’’ he said, shrugging his shoulders and using a favorite acronym: “This is Angola.”
Angola
endured four centuries of servitude and slavery before gaining
independence, in 1975, and Luanda was once the world’s busiest slave
port. The National Museum of Slavery, about an hour from the city, is
housed in a spare colonial structure that sits on a promontory
overlooking the Kwanza River. There isn’t much to see—drawings of slaves
crammed into steerage for the trip across the Atlantic, a display of
shackles, and some brief historical notes—but the simplicity is powerful
and disturbing. The building is the last place that slaves came before
they were blessed by a priest, put on a boat, and shipped to the markets
of Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, and the Dominican Republic. Millions
passed through the region, many of whom died before they reached their
destination.
The Portuguese arrived in 1575,
took control soon afterward, and remained in power until 1974, when a
military coup finally toppled the government in Lisbon. Nationalists had
been fighting in Angola for more than a decade, and when the colonists
pulled out of the country the fleeing citizens took everything that
could be moved. Ryszard Kapuscinski, in “Another Day of Life,’’ his
memoir of that time, described the efforts to cram the entire city into a
series of wooden crates and ship most of it to Lisbon. “I don’t know if
there had ever been an instance of a whole city sailing across the
ocean, but that is exactly what happened,’’ he wrote. “On the streets
now there were only thousands of cars, rusting and covered with dust.
The walls also remained, the roofs, the asphalt on the roads, and the
iron benches along the boulevards.”
Angola has
millions of acres of rich, arable land and an unusual abundance of
mineral wealth, particularly diamonds. One Brazilian businessman told me
that turning Angola into a farming nation and lowering its dependence
on oil revenues should not be that difficult. “My country sells many
thousands of tons of crops to China each year,” he said. “Angola is
closer to China, and the countries have a strong relationship. The land
is tremendously fertile. Why not grow those crops here and steal the
Brazilian market?” With spectacular waterfalls, some of the world’s most
elusive bird species, miles of untouched beaches, and what surfers
regard as nearly perfect conditions, there are also promising
opportunities for tourism.
But Angola lacks the
infrastructure for any of those industries; the roads are so poor that
the biggest farms often burn crops, because they cannot get them to
market before they rot. Chevron began drilling during the
nineteen-fifties; before independence, and even after oil became the
nation’s most valuable commodity, exports of sisal, maize, coffee, and
cotton as well as diamonds and iron ore contributed significantly to the
country’s economy. That ended with the exodus of the Portuguese; few
Angolans had been trained to manage factories or farms. Trade vanished,
the communications systems fell apart, and the economy collapsed.
For
the next twenty-five years, Angola fell into one of the most
destructive civil wars in modern history. At least a million people
died. By most estimates, roughly ten million land mines were buried—many
of them remain active—scarring a territory twice the size of Texas and
making large-scale agricultural planning nearly impossible. The war was
fought as much for oil and diamonds as for ideological reasons, but it
also served as the last major proxy battle of the Cold War. The United
States, still struggling to accept the loss in Vietnam, refused to cede
the territory to the Russians, who were equally committed to retaining a
foothold in southern Africa. The UNITA rebels, backed by
the C.I.A. and South African mercenaries, were led by Jonas Savimbi, a
murderous despot who embraced Maoist principles. The Marxists—the
Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.)—with support
from the Russians and led by Agostinho Neto, who later became the
country’s first President, relied on an unusual mixture of Eastern
European economic advisers and Cuban soldiers. Both sides often
condemned the influence and the power of Western oil companies, but Neto
understood that his regime and the country probably wouldn’t survive
without them. He made sure that American oil companies were protected
and, in turn, won financial backing from companies such as Chevron.
“It
was a true witches’ cauldron,” one foreign official who spent years in
Angola told me. The hostilities ended only in 2002, when assassins shot
Savimbi in the head. (“The best use of bullets in the history of
munitions,’’ another longtime resident of Luanda said.) President dos
Santos, who is seventy-two, became the head of the M.P.L.A. in 1979,
after Neto died. The Party still uses that acronym, although it
officially abandoned Marxism more than twenty years ago.
After
hundreds of years of strife, Angola has been a peaceful country for
little more than a decade. No society forged in that kind of conflict
can quickly find its footing. “I spent my first two years here hunting
for water,’’ Nicholas Staines, who until recently served as local
director of the International Monetary Fund, told me one afternoon, as
we sat in the garden outside the I.M.F. office. “And I mean hunting. I
would walk out of my house with a fistful of cash, and my wife would
say, ‘Don’t come back till you find some water.’ So I would hunt for the
nearest water truck and say, ‘Where are you going? How much is that
person paying you? I will double it.’ That is how you got water in
Angola just a few years ago.’’
Then, suddenly,
there were hundreds of people with unimaginable wealth and few
restraints. Tales of excess became commonplace, and often they are told
with pride. One businessman famously distributed Rolexes to guests as
party favors at a wedding. Each member of parliament recently received a
new hundred-thousand-dollar Lexus. Isabel dos Santos, the President’s
forty-two-year-old daughter, is typically described as the richest woman
in Africa; Forbes puts her net worth at more than three
billion dollars. She was educated in London, at King’s College, and owns
the biggest building, with the most expensive apartments, in Luanda. In
2011, as president of the Red Cross, dos Santos paid Mariah Carey a
million dollars to perform for two hours at the organization’s annual
gala. The show was sponsored by Unitel, Angola’s principal mobile-phone
company, which she also owns.
Dos Santos is one
of the city’s most ambitious restaurateurs. One day, I had lunch at
Oon.dah, on the first floor of the Escom Center, another of her
properties; the house specialty, the Wagyu Beef Hamburger, sells for
about sixty dollars, and a half pound of tenderloin goes for twice that.
A bottle of Cristal champagne costs twelve hundred dollars. Displaying
such wealth in a country as impoverished as Angola can be a challenge.
One member of the President’s inner circle owns a Rolls-Royce, but there
are few good roads in Luanda. So every Sunday he loads the car into a
trailer, takes it to the Marginal—a recently renovated two-mile-long
promenade along the South Atlantic—drives it for a while on the
capital’s only smooth road, loads it back into its trailer, and has it
hauled away.
Angola is widely regarded as one of
the world’s most egregious kleptocracies. The bulk of the country’s
wealth is controlled by a few hundred oligarchs—Presidential cronies,
generals, and their families. “The default position of Angolan
businessmen is above the law,’’ Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an associate
professor of politics at Oxford University, writes in “Magnificent and
Beggar Land,’’ his comprehensive new account of Angola’s recent history.
“Whether it is a matter of capital flight, money laundering, the
unilateral abandonment of partnerships with foreigners, the non-payment
of loans and import duties, conflict of interest between public and
private roles . . . These are not occasional whims, but the very stuff
of Angolan private sector life.’’
Last
year, the nation ranked a hundred and sixty-first out of a hundred and
seventy-five countries on Transparency International’s corruption scale
and a hundred and eighty-first on the World Bank’s most recent Ease of
Doing Business index. In one category, resolving bankruptcies, Angola
came in last. Twice in a week, my driver was hustled for money by
traffic cops. The officers were patient and polite, but they lingered in
a way that made it clear that it would be wise to hand over a hundred
kwanzas, the equivalent of about a dollar. One night, as I pulled into
the parking lot of a popular restaurant, a man suddenly appeared at the
door. “We pay him,’’ my companion said. “This way, we will probably get
the car back when we leave.” We then paid another man to seat us in a
nearly empty restaurant, and another to bring us a fifteen-dollar bottle
of Evian. That was before we ever saw our waiter.
The
next afternoon, I needed batteries for my tape recorder. The only store
I could find that carried them charged sixteen dollars (and gave me a
handwritten receipt). Then the salesman punched the official figure, six
dollars, into the cash register; the extra ten dollars was for him.
Angola has several dozen universities, more even than South Africa. But
few have functioning libraries, and degrees are bought as often as they
are earned. More than one person told me that in order to graduate from
Agostinho Neto University, the largest academic institution in Angola,
even some of the most talented students are forced to pay bribes.
Antonio, an official of a major oil company who was educated at several
of Luanda’s best international schools, said that he had entered the
university but quickly dropped out. “It was a giant step backward,” he
said. “A complete waste of my time.” (Few Angolans were willing to be
identified by more than a first or middle name. The constitution
protects freedom of speech and assembly, but the government has grown
increasingly intolerant of criticism.)
Antonio
is a thin, contemplative man with an oval face and a head of loose,
springy curls. He and two of his friends, Pedro and Marisa, joined me
one night for dinner at La Vigia, a popular restaurant where diners can
select fish from a tank near the cash register. “It is really hard to
find honest people here,’’ Pedro said. “Everywhere you go, even every
small business, somebody is trying to cheat you.” Like Antonio, Pedro
had graduated from premier schools, and, despite his comments, he
expressed optimism about the country’s long-term future. Marisa, who
attended college and business school in Europe, said that when she is
stopped by the traffic police she simply refuses to pay—“and eventually
they go away.’’ The three, all in their thirties, agreed that although
they might prefer to live abroad, there has never been a better time to
be a well-educated Angolan. The government requires foreign oil
companies to hire local residents, and, for those who are qualified, the
prospects for lucrative jobs are excellent.
“We
can function effectively in a foreign environment,’’ Pedro said. “That
makes us unusual.’’ His English, which he said he learned from watching
American police shows on TV, was letter-perfect. He told me that he and
his colleagues often see job applicants who, despite having graduated
from the country’s best tech programs, “barely know how to turn on a
computer.” The three friends stressed more than once that, owing to
their education and relative prosperity, they were far from typical. Yet
they represent the vibrant and promising new Angola that is struggling
to emerge. None of them have known any leader other than dos Santos.
International human-rights groups regularly denounce him, but his power
remains absolute. “A lot of people see him as the King of Angola,’’
Pedro said. “He kind of owns the country. People almost can’t look him
in the eyes—he’s that powerful.’’
Marisa added,
“It’s like your father who is very mean to you. You go to dinner every
day, and he shows up, and you smile and say, ‘Hi, Daddy.’ You say
nothing instead of saying, ‘What have you done to me, you are
horrible.’ ’’ Marisa, who is single, runs the procurement operation at
an oil-services firm. Just that day, she had interviewed a
twenty-five-year-old prospective employee who was the father of seven
children. “That’s pretty normal,” she said. “Not necessarily seven kids,
but having children by the time you’re in your early twenties.” Marisa
lives in the center of town and commutes through heavy traffic to an
office on the outskirts of the city. She rises at five, a driver arrives
by six, and she is at the office shortly after seven. “There is
tremendous pressure to have at least one child before you hit thirty,’’
she said. “But things are changing.’’ She said that she recently heard a
woman explain on a radio show why lesbians exist: they weren’t loved by
men, and therefore looked to their mothers—or perhaps a sister or a
cousin—for a model of what love should look like.
“The
same principle applied to homosexuals or violent people,’’ Marisa said.
“You become violent because your parents are violent—that is the view.
You become a lesbian because you didn’t have a father figure. This is
ridiculous and offensive. But it’s also a great step forward, because we
are speaking in broad daylight, on the radio, about lesbians and
homosexuals. They are not accepted, but they are not going to be killed.
This is an advance.”
Luanda
aspires to become the Dubai of Africa, but it has a long way to go. In
1975, the city had half a million residents; today there are almost six
million. Hotels, luxury apartment buildings, shopping arcades, and
modern office complexes compete for space in the city center with
shantytowns made from corrugated tin and heavy cardboard and with tens
of thousands of people who live on mounds of dirt, in the scrapped
remains of rusted and abandoned vehicles, or out in the open, next to
fetid, unused water tanks. To make room for development, President dos
Santos has cleared many slums in the past decade, usually without
warning or compensation. He has promised to provide displaced occupants
with housing farther away from the city center, but the government has
struggled with the furious pace of population growth.
Construction
cranes are visible everywhere. (It pays to look up as you walk the
streets: there are no scaffoldings to protect pedestrians from falling
debris, and workmen occasionally toss empty water bottles from the
skyscrapers.) The city often smells of sewage and stagnant water, but it
has grand ambitions. After almost a decade of delays, the nearly
completed Intercontinental Hotel and Casino, a ziggurat of glass, steel,
and reinforced concrete, hovers over the harbor. An eight-lane
highway—Luanda’s first genuinely modern road—runs along the city’s
horseshoe-shaped port. Between the highway and the water, pedestrians
amble along the Marginal, enjoying spectacular sunset views. Across the
bay, connected to the city by a causeway, ostentatious night clubs with
names like Chill Out and Miami Beach line the shores of the neighborhood
known as the Ilha, which for many years was an abandoned strip of sand
used mainly by local fishermen.
Most expatriates
leave Luanda after a few years, but some choose to stay. One afternoon,
I visited Tako Koning, a Canadian petroleum geologist, who lives on the
seventh floor of an older building in the center of Luanda with his
wife, Henriette, an energetic and engaging English teacher. Koning is
sixty-five, with a thick mustache, heavy-lidded blue eyes, and slightly
shaggy hair. He worked for Texaco for thirty years, first in Canada and
then in Indonesia and Nigeria; in 1995, he and Henriette moved to
Luanda. Koning retired from Texaco when it merged with Chevron, in 2001,
and now works as a consultant. The couple’s apartment is comfortable
but not luxurious. (Because power failures are so common, Henriette
refuses to enter the elevator, preferring to climb the seven flights. “I
don’t do African elevators,’’ she told me.) The rent—six thousand
dollars a month—is reasonable for a place in the center of the city with
excellent views.
From
their terrace, the city looks like an archeological cutaway. Henriette
pointed to a building across the street. “You can see they are not well
off, because during power outages the building is dark,” she
said—meaning that they lacked a backup generator. In another nearby
building, occupied by diplomats and oil executives, a three-bedroom
apartment rents for as much as twenty thousand dollars a month. I could
see the new BP headquarters, a twenty-five-story building called Torres
do Carmo, and the massive glass headquarters of Sonangol, the state oil
company. “That’s the French Embassy,” Henriette said, pointing to a
stolid town house. “And now look straight down.” Below us, rows of tin
roofs were wedged tightly between apartment buildings. “They were
displaced during the civil war,” she said. “Now they live on the street
right next to the diplomats and millionaires.”
The
Konings often entertain young Angolans, including the three I had
recently met. The couple has supported students, and Tako, who was born
in the Netherlands but lived mostly in Canada, contributes his time to a
variety of schools and engineering societies. “You quickly realize that
you can make a bigger difference here than in a place like Toronto,’’
he said. “It can be very satisfying.’’ I asked what he thought of
expatriates who seemed to avoid interacting with Angolans. He shrugged.
“The thing about Americans that I always loved is that you jumped in and
got things done,’’ he said. “You rolled into Europe after World War II
with the Marshall Plan. The countries were destroyed, but you put them
back together. I understand that the U.S. wanted to hold off the
Russians—there are always geopolitical reasons. But what matters is what
you did.”
In Angola, he added, “you can’t
simply hit a switch and say everything is normal just because the war
has ended and the country has oil.” China essentially provided its own
Marshall Plan: as the world’s biggest oil consumer, it buys nearly two
million barrels a day from Angola, more than from any other country, and
Chinese firms are building schools, roads, bridges, ports, and one of
the largest housing developments in Africa, in nearby Kilamba. The
buildings, designed for middle-income residents, are still mostly
unoccupied, but they take up thousands of acres—pastel high-rises, just a
few miles beyond the city limits, that look like a sub-Saharan Co-op
City.
“We never planned to stay here forever,’’
Koning said. “We have two children and a grandchild in Toronto. But the
longer you stay the deeper your roots go down. And we know people.’’ I
went to a local place for a beer with him one night. Many of the street
people waved, and several approached, eagerly but pleasantly. Koning
says he doesn’t think it makes sense to hand out money, but he pays a
man to watch his car, more as charity than for security. When people
need medicine and clothing, he and Henriette often chip in.
The
political landscape is troubling, though. In Luanda, security forces
regularly stop protests and arrest those who try to attend them. In
2012, two activists disappeared after an anti-government protest. For
more than a year, Angolan officials denied any knowledge of their fate.
Late in 2013, after sustained protests by human-rights workers, the
attorney general admitted that the two men had been kidnapped and
probably murdered. Residents of Luanda are understandably afraid to test
their freedom. When Koning and I got to the bar, we were joined at a
table in the garden by a Russian diamond dealer. “We produce more
diamonds than anyone else on earth, my dear,’’ he said in a very slight
Russian accent. “But keep it to yourself.” There was also a dance
teacher, a couple of other journalists, and an American woman who did
not give her name or discuss her profession. The weather was dry and
clear, and at night the air became softer, more fragrant and inviting.
The others were relaxed, but the woman, who I later learned worked for
an international N.G.O., looked anxious. “You can’t write about me,’’
she said, when I told her that I was a journalist. “It’s not safe. I
will get death threats.’’ After a few moments of awkward silence, she
stood up, said she couldn’t trust me, and walked out.
Foreign
embassies routinely warn their citizens about crime in the capital.
“Avoid walking around Luanda, especially after dark,’’ the British
Foreign Office advises. One should also avoid “wearing jewelry or
watches in public places” and “walking between bars and restaurants on
the Ilha do Cabo,” as well as “crowded places like markets.’’ The U.S.
State Department is even more blunt: “The capital city, Luanda,
continues to maintain a well deserved reputation as a haven for armed
robberies, assaults, carjackings, and overall crimes of opportunity.
However, reliable statistical crime data is unavailable in Angola.’’
Many foreign workers are forbidden by their employers to drive cars
there; those who want to spend a weekend in the countryside need to get
permission well in advance. One afternoon, about an hour before I
planned to meet some people near my hotel, one of them called. “What
time should we pick you up?’’ she asked. I told her that I would walk
the five hundred yards to our meeting spot. She tried to dissuade me,
but when I insisted she urged me to lock my bag, passport, and wallet in
the safe in my hotel room. “Bring a Xerox of the passport page and some
money,’’ she said. “And do not show your phone on the street.” I made
it to the meeting and back without incident.
Most
expatriates said that their concern about crime was the main reason
they avoided the city. At times, though, the fears seemed exaggerated.
Not long after I arrived, I had dinner in the suburbs with a French
journalist and some Americans. My colleague told one of the guests that
she lived in the center of Luanda, a block or so from the Skyna Hotel,
which is on the Avenue de Portugal, the city’s version of Fifth Avenue.
The Skyna is enormous, extremely well known, and readily picked out of
the skyline. “Where is that?” the guest, who had lived in Angola for
more than a year, asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”
Americans
can earn twice their usual salary in Angola, but there are few easily
accessible cultural institutions or opportunities for entertainment.
There’s the Slavery Museum and the Portuguese fortress of São Miguel,
which overlooks the port, but in Luanda there’s not a single commercial
movie theatre. “It’s all Netflix here,” Steve Espinosa told me. “If your
Internet connection is good enough—otherwise you are out of luck.”
There are more significant challenges. Exxon-Mobil, among other
companies, carries out random urine tests on its workers, and those who
fail are sent home. The company isn’t really looking for drugs such as
cocaine, heroin, or marijuana; rather, it wants to make sure that
employees are taking their malaria medicine. (The concern is
understandable, but long-term use of malaria preventives can cause
serious liver damage.)
Foreigners typically stay
for two or three years; the Espinosas have been there for six. Two of
their children attended the Luanda International School, which is only a
couple of miles from where they live. The campus is beautiful and
modern, with computer systems and well-kept playing fields. The staff is
made up largely of foreign teachers, who tend to move every few years
among the world’s élite international schools. Fees, which are almost
always paid by oil companies, come to about fifty thousand dollars a
year. Some companies even pay when they don’t have a student who needs
the seat. “If Chevron or BP wants to transfer somebody in the middle of a
year,’’ one teacher said, “these companies have to be certain that
children can attend a good school.”
Students are
typically driven to school, waved through a security gate, collected
after class, and then driven back to the safety of their housing
cluster. Nobody takes a bus, rides a bike, or walks. There are also many
local students at the international school—mostly children of Angola’s
élite, which can be a problem in civics classes, given the government’s
deplorable human-rights record. A few weeks earlier, the mother of an
important minister spoke at the school. “It’s hard for people like that
to admit the truth about issues like free speech and hard for us to
ignore it,” one teacher told me. “So we try to walk a line.” (One
report, released in March by the International Federation for Human
Rights, which represents more than a hundred and seventy human-rights
groups throughout the world, found that journalists and human-rights
workers in Angola are subject to “judicial and administrative
harassment, acts of intimidation, threats and other forms of
restrictions to their freedom of association and expression.”)
For
those who prefer the protected life, the cocoon can extend all the way
to Houston. The Houston Express, operated by Atlas Air, flies three
times a week between George Bush International Airport and Luanda’s
Quatro de Fevereiro Airport. Tickets are usually available only through
the oil companies. Most seats, which sell for about ten thousand
dollars, are in business class. People who fly on a commercial airliner
from the U.S. typically change planes in Paris or London. On my flight,
there were about two hundred and seventy-five passengers, all but a few
of them men. It felt like a military transport.
Nobody
is sure how long Angola’s expat exceptionalism can last. The plummeting
price of oil has already forced Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and
Schlumberger to cut thousands of jobs throughout the world. So far,
Angola has mostly been spared. (No official from any oil company would
agree to talk to me about its presence in Angola.) But if the United
States stops buying Angola’s oil, and if China’s rate of economic growth
continues to slow, major foreign companies would be unable to sustain
their current staffing levels and expenditures.
Oil
revenue accounts for more than ninety per cent of Angola’s
foreign-exchange earnings, and there are many risks for a country that
relies too heavily on one commodity. Economists call it the resource
curse. For years, oil experts predicted that by 2020 Nigeria and Angola
would account for twenty-five per cent of America’s crude imports; the
shale revolution in Texas and North Dakota put an end to such
speculation. Within a few years, the United States might not need any
Angolan oil. The current price of a barrel of oil is about fifty
dollars, but just a few months ago the Angolan government, for the
purposes of its 2015 budget, assumed that the average price would be
eighty-one dollars. That gap will prove hard to close. The dos Santos
government announced earlier this year that it would cut the budget by a
quarter, and it has said that it will work harder to diversify the
economy. Few economists who study Africa believe that it will be easy.
“They
say that they will diversify the economy all the time,’’ Gustavo Costa,
the Luanda correspondent for the Portuguese newspaper Expresso,
told me. “There has always been that opportunity. And in theory, at
least, it’s still there. But the government has built a certain kind of
society—for themselves. You can call it prosperity if you want, but it
is incredibly fragile. It all could end tomorrow.”
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