Can Profits Promote Democracy in Africa?
LUANDA, Angola — The United States is expected to import 25 percent of its oil from Africa by 2015. Whether it will export democracy and stability in return is another question — one that will most likely be answered by the way in which American oil companies and the United States conduct business with countries like Angola.
Although Angola is finally at peace after decades of catastrophic civil war, its oil riches don't appear to be doing the country much good. Despite the production of almost a million barrels of oil a day, the vast majority of Angola's 10.7 million people live in grinding poverty. Government officials and oil executives live in villas behind security walls and barbed wire. But most Angolans — even here in Luanda, the capital — stay in crumbling cement-block huts without electricity or running water. Along the streets, children pick through mountains of roadside garbage while their parents hawk sundries from car to car or sell produce in the dirt alongside open sewers. The average life expectancy is around 40; the country has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.
The United States, eager to strengthen its ties with Angola, last year spent more than $100 million on the country's humanitarian emergency. It is expected to add $40 million more for 2003. But that's nothing compared to the oil revenues that disappear from government coffers each year. The International Monetary Fund has found that about $1 billion went unaccounted for each year in Angola from 1997 to 2001.
That kind of money could go a long way toward providing emergency food, water and medicine to help the country heal from a civil war that left half a million dead and millions more homeless and ravaged the country's economy. It could also help revive Angolan agriculture, which before the war produced enough maize, beans and cassava to feed the country. (That war, it should be noted, was financed in part by the United States during the cold war. The Reagan administration supported the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, in its effort to overthrow the country's Marxist, Soviet-backed government.)
While the State Department condemns Angola's "persistent fiscal mismanagement and corruption," the United States has, at least publicly, stayed quiet about the uses of Angola's oil money.
American officials say it is not their job to tell Angola what to do. "It's more a process of persuasion, trying to defend a commonality of our relationship," said an embassy official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "It's a partnership."
That partnership was underscored last year when President Bush welcomed President José Eduardo dos Santos to the White House, and when Secretary of State Colin Powell made an official visit to Angola. The United States is cementing its ties with a mammoth new $40 million fortified embassy perched high on a hill above Luanda.
It is a growing partnership that gives the United States unfettered access to Angola's oil. Sixty percent of Angolan oil is now pumped by ChevronTexaco; the United States buys more than half of all the oil Angola produces. And Angola is expected to expand its exports. Recent discoveries of deep-water reserves off the coast will probably double production within five years.
But will anything change? Will oil wealth in Africa spread beyond a powerful few? In a recent report, the Central Intelligence Agency was not optimistic, predicting that "the pattern of oil wealth fostering corruption rather than economic development will continue."
In Angola, the United States has the opportunity to prove the agency wrong — if it takes several concrete steps. First, the United States should insist that its aid contributions be matched by funds from Angola's treasury. Angola has to invest in its own future.
Second, the United States should promote accountability in Angola by restoring aid to local pro-democracy and independent media organizations. (This aid, administered through the United States Agency for International Development, was reduced significantly three years ago.)
And third, the United States should compel American oil companies to make public what they pay to Angola for its oil. Right now, those payments are secret — as they are elsewhere in the world. As a result, no one really knows what the government earns from oil. That makes it impossible for Angolans to respond to their leaders' claims that oil revenues are being spent wisely. The Securities and Exchange Commission should therefore insist that publicly traded oil companies publish their payments to governments. If that happened, it could encourage real democracy.
As the United States searches for ways to promote its professed values the world over, it could do far more to see to it that oil profits enrich an entire country, not just a chosen few. Angola would be a good place to start.