Subsaharan Africa / Backgrounder
Angola: empowerment of the few
14/05/2007 By David Sogge
Western interests have coerced and brutalised Angolans for centuries, chiefly for the country’s resources. The cycles of repression and insurgency running up to 2002 took place largely at Western instigation; hence, Western political measures for peace were weak, episodic, and self-interested.
Most aid agencies align their programmes with Western powers’ wider geo-strategic purposes. But in Angola, donor agencies have not had the leverage they enjoy elsewhere in Africa.
That is chiefly because Angola’s political class has become empowered by its insulation from donor pressures (for “good governance” and “sound economic policies”, for example) by its financial and even ideological alliance with the hydrocarbon industry, and more recently by the rising importance of China as a competing mercantile power.
This paper, therefore, offers an analysis of today’s post-war trends in empowerment and disempowerment against a backdrop of earlier waves of conflict in Angola’s troubled history.
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Publishing groups
EmpowermentKeywords
Aid effectiveness Angola Development Donors Southern AfricaBio author: David Sogge
David Sogge is a Fellow at the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. He works as an independent analyst.
