The current furore about the wealth of ‘Africa’s richest woman’, Isabel dos Santos, and how she acquired it, is only the latest part of a long-running saga of corruption and oligarchy in Angola.
In a very real way, Angola is one side of a trans-Atlantic sphere of inequality. Brazil is the other. Both countries were Portuguese colonies and Portuguese remains the official language of both, and both countries uphold propaganda language to communicate to the people. As a result, Angolan elections have television advertising campaigns almost entirely crafted by Brazilian agencies. They are slick and psychologically astute, always appealing in a soap-like fashion to the everyman and the underdog. The idea is that the chasm between rich and poor can be bridged – although it never is, as Angola’s wealth disparity is a mirror of Brazil’s.
This does not mean the country is not rich. It is. So much so that, during the 2008-9 banking crisis that almost crippled the West, Angola offered to bail out Portugal. And it had the means to do so. The schadenfreude, if the offer had been accepted, would have been immense. How ‘the worm has turned.’ So there is pride in Angola, but this does not mean there is any attempt realistically to uplift the condition of the poor. To the contrary, the emphasis on the part of the ruling elite – which dovetails with the business elite – and which intersects with a knowing but cynical international corporate elite, is on acquisition and reinvestment for more acquisition.
