About this series
The fate of Africa's huge crude oil reserves is important not just for Africans, but also for Americans, who use millions of barrels of oil imported from Africa every day. In this three-part series, the Globe's Africa bureau chief, John Donnelly, examines the issue.
http://www.boston.com/news/specials/oil_in_africa/
Burdens of oil weigh on Nigerians
Ecological harm, corruption hit hard
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff October 3, 2005
First in a series of occasional articles.
OBEDUM, Nigeria -- Under the vast swamps of Nigeria's coastal delta sit some of the world's most productive oil reserves, a treasure coveted by the energy-hungry United States and other nations.
Nigeria produces 10 percent of the oil consumed in the United States, and the Bush administration hopes for a greater bounty soon: US energy officials forecast that oil from Nigeria and the rest of the Gulf of Guinea region will provide one-quarter of America's oil in the next decade, equal to that of the Gulf of Mexico today. Already, 30 percent of the world's newly discovered oil reserves in the past five years have come from this stretch of Africa's west coast.
But here in the serpentine creeks and boggy coastal land lie daunting obstacles to those hopes -- pirates, corruption, violent youth militias, and environmental catastrophes.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2005/10/03/burdens_of_oil_weigh_on_nigerians/
Oil spills in the delta region of Nigeria have devastated the ecosystem, killing marine life. One spill in 2003 polluted about 615 acres. (Paul Taggart/ World Picture News for the Boston Globe)
AFRICA AND ITS OIL
Burdens of oil weigh on Nigerians
Ecological harm, corruption hit hard
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff October 3, 2005
First in a series of occasional articles.
OBEDUM, Nigeria -- Under the vast swamps of Nigeria's coastal delta sit some of the world's most productive oil reserves, a treasure coveted by the energy-hungry United States and other nations.
Nigeria produces 10 percent of the oil consumed in the United States, and the Bush administration hopes for a greater bounty soon: US energy officials forecast that oil from Nigeria and the rest of the Gulf of Guinea region will provide one-quarter of America's oil in the next decade, equal to that of the Gulf of Mexico today. Already, 30 percent of the world's newly discovered oil reserves in the past five years have come from this stretch of Africa's west coast.
But here in the serpentine creeks and boggy coastal land lie daunting obstacles to those hopes -- pirates, corruption, violent youth militias, and environmental catastrophes.
Tens of thousands of ordinary villagers try to scrape a life out of the marshes, amid the oil rigs and pipelines. Among them is a man named Endurance Godbless, who is brokenhearted and angry at what he calls oil's curse.
Godbless, 18, waded through a tributary of Kolo Creek on a recent day, parting translucent orange-red waters polluted by an oil spill. He lifted a fishing net, revealing a dead fish caught in the webbing. ''Poison," he said, tossing the fish into the weeds.
This summer, two unrelated spills entering the tributaries of the Kolo from the north and south converged in the waters surrounding this village of 1,000 people, killing life in the creek. ''I feel like crying," Godbless said, walking out of the water, his pants shiny from the oil residue. ''I can only fish. But there are no fish anymore."
The story is similar from Nigeria to Angola, along Africa's restive west coast: Oil and natural gas reserves are drawing the developed world's interest and raising expectations for the region's poor of a better future through investment and growth. But environmental damage and often-violent jockeying for the spoils are fueling instability and popular resentment into a combustible anger.
This web of conflicts in oil- producing Africa is causing great concern in Washington. With oil supplies struggling to keep up with demands for energy, even a short-term disruption of African oil would trigger spikes in prices at gas stations across America.
Global ramifications
Nigeria, despite its president's aggressive fight against corruption, presents the most daunting problems on the continent and has the greatest potential to inflict havoc on global oil markets. Nigeria also accounts for about half of the Gulf of Guinea's oil.
In the southeastern part of the country, where much of the oil lies under marshland, the recent arrest of two prominent leaders of the Ijaw tribe, including the governor of one state on corruption charges and militia leader Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari on charges of sedition, has exacerbated tensions among Ijaw militant young people, oil companies, and the federal government.
Last month, Asari's followers seized two oil flow stations and sent an e-mail to news organizations threatening to ''kill every iota of oil operations in the Niger Delta" unless he was released. Authorities recaptured the stations, but the situation remains tense.
Such conflict has boiled over before, shaking world oil markets. A year ago, two rival militant groups, one of them Asari's, battled each other for greater shares of oil revenues, leaving several hundred people dead, shutting down much of the oil operations in the Niger Delta, and causing oil prices to rise worldwide. President Olusegun Obasanjo entered the fray, and after talks with Asari, reached a truce.
''It is so dangerous now," said Aryakwee Nsirimovu, 44, executive director of the Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt. ''For the last five years, you've had a buildup of weapons among the militia, and you have a weak military. So if things blow up, they will be incredibly difficult to control."
For many peasants, Nsirimovu said, oil is a curse. ''We have poverty in the midst of plenty, and everyone sees that wealth every day."
After oil was discovered in the delta in 1957, Nigeria began transforming from an agriculture-based society to an oil-dependent economy. The country now has to import food, and its troubles have become so numerous and so intertwined that resolving them could take years.
Obasanjo's government has initiated ambitious changes aimed at curbing endemic corruption that analysts say reaches from the highest levels of government to low-ranking officials in the field. Without such theft, Nigerian officials said, tens of billions of dollars in spending for education, healthcare, and infrastructure could reach the poor.
Large-scale theft takes place in the open, carried out by low-level operatives who work for sophisticated crime syndicates with ties to senior government, military, and police officials.
Nigeria's crude oil is pumped to the surface in the marshlands and then to flow stations, where machines remove water and add gas. The gas helps propel the oil along pipelines to coastal farms of giant tanks. At Bonny, one of Shell Oil Co.'s two large coastal terminals, operators in a control room flick switches, which allows oil in the tanks to flow in pipelines heading out to sea and then to be pumped into waiting oil tankers.
The thefts take place in the marshlands, before the oil reaches the huge coastal terminals. Thieves use high-tech equipment to tap into the lines and divert the oil into waiting barges. The barges then bring the stolen oil to other tankers waiting offshore. Those tankers are believed to bring the oil to other West African countries.
Unmarked barges anchor in coastal creeks for days and, as local armed men stand guard, thieves tap into pipelines and take vast amounts of oil. From the air, the barges can be spotted near Port Harcourt, the commercial and traffic-choked regional hub 390 miles southeast of Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.
One day last month, helicopter pilot Captain Joseph McGlynn, a New Jersey native, headed over intensely green marshes that were interlaced with creeks and rivers.
''I don't want to get too low because we'll get shot at," McGlynn said. ''A year or two ago, they were out in the open; now they are much more sneaky," he added, referring to the thieves.
He and his copilot, Jacob Oommen, easily found two likely spots where oil was being stolen. At one point, three barges were anchored end-to-end in a narrow creek, partly camouflaged by trees.
''Look," McGlynn said. ''They're less than a mile from the Shell facility! They'll tap into the lines at night. After 6 p.m., the ants come out to play."
Shell officials and the Nigerian government said the Nigerian Navy has become more aggressive in stopping the thefts, called ''bunkering," a nautical term for supplying a ship with fuel.
In the delta, stolen oil is loaded into the barges, which then are towed out to a waiting tanker offshore. Shell officials say that an average of 100,000 barrels of oil per day were stolen from their pipelines in 2003, but that so far this year the pilferage dropped to 20,000 barrels a day. Shell produces half of Nigeria's oil.
However, US military officials who travel to the Niger Delta think the total national theft is much greater -- 200,000 barrels a day, which at $65 a barrel is a $13 million daily heist.
''Oil bunkering is extensive, pervasive -- it's part of the culture," said a senior US Department of Defense official with oversight of the region, speaking on condition of anonymity.
He said he asked his counterparts in the Nigerian Navy why they have not done more to crack down on the theft, and the Nigerians told him: ''We don't have the right boats." Nigerian Navy officials in the Port Harcourt region did not return phone calls seeking comment.
''They don't have the will to do it," the US official said of the Nigerian Navy. ''Some of the very senior members of the Navy are profiting from oil bunkering. . . . It's a Wild West atmosphere with lots of money to be made."
Two Nigerian Navy admirals were convicted this year of facilitating the theft of an oil tanker, and the former police inspector general, Tafa Balogun, is accused of stealing $98 million, some of which is allegedly related to oil profiteering.
Fighting corruption
Nigeria's new anti-graft watchdog, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, estimates that 45 percent of the nation's oil revenues are stolen, wasted, or siphoned away in the marshes.
That means few delta residents realize any oil benefits. A World Bank report last year estimated that as much as 80 percent of Nigeria's oil revenues benefited 1 percent of the country's population. Last year, Nigeria received $27 billion in oil revenues; this year, with the price of oil skyrocketing, the revenue could double, analysts say.
Much of the burden of fighting corruption falls on several crusaders in Abuja, the capital, including Obiageli Ezekwesili, a Harvard-educated member of Obasanjo's Cabinet and an evangelical Christian. She chairs the National Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a government program that audits and publishes data on oil revenues and spending. Still, the anti-corruption process is in its infancy.
''What do you expect? A silver bullet?" Ezekwesili said. ''We are making progress at every level of our initiative to fight corruption."
But some communities are so disillusioned that they want oil companies to cap their wells and leave. One is the community of Bille, about 20 miles south of Port Harcourt, where the first oil flow station was installed in the 1950s.
''We have no electricity, no running water, no hospital," said Socrates Dokubo, 37, a fashion designer. ''For more than 48 years, they have been fooling us with promises. No more. We want them to leave."
Most, though, hold out hope they can reap an oil windfall.
In August, members of five communities near Port Harcourt seized Shell's Agbada I station. The protesters said they knew of no other way to get fair compensation for a spill that polluted their land in December 2003. The protesters, who carried no weapons, occupied and shut down the Shell Petroleum Development Co. station for six days, blocking about 267,000 barrels of oil from reaching Shell's terminals -- a loss of almost $17.4 million at today's oil prices.
Villagers remain angry. The 2003 spill, which was found to be accidental, polluted about 615 acres. Shell said it spent $1.4 million on cleanup efforts. It offered the five communities about $500 each for the damage to the land. Shell spokesman Donald S. Boham defended the amount, saying that communal land covered a tiny portion of the land and Shell planned to negotiate with individual landowners later.
But local leaders contended that much of the land was communal agricultural land and fisheries.
''Our fish, our land for vegetables, our major source of living, has been devastated," said Azunda Aaron, 40, chairman of Reukpokwu's community development council, standing on the polluted land, which still smells strongly of oil. ''We will not be violent. We shut down the flow stations because what we heard from Shell was so distressing, that they would pay us so little in compensation."
But another villager, Tike Wopara, 25, whispered that many residents planned to sabotage Shell's pipes because of the low compensation offer. ''That's why I'm here, day and night," said Wopara, who is being paid by Shell to oversee part of the cleanup. ''The place needs to be secured. The anger against Shell is so great."
Even greater anger flowed from the recent arrest of Asari, the Ijaw tribal militia leader who has attracted several thousand followers with his populist rhetoric and his willingness to distribute weapons and small amounts of cash. Last year, he declared he would wage ''all-out war" on the state from his hide-out in the bush. He eventually reached a truce with the government, but his arrest has reignited the conflict.
In an interview with the Globe a month before his arrest, Asari, 41, seemed more agitated at the lack of contracts for his numerous start-up companies than the plight of poor villagers. Sitting in his Port Harcourt mansion, Asari said he has at least two construction companies, a consulting firm, and a telecommunications company.
''Government promised me six contracts!" he said. ''But only two contracts are moving. If government cannot kill me outright, they will try to kill me economically."
Asari denied that he was involved in stealing oil from the pipelines, as many have asserted. But he said the practice was not illegal.
''People have the right to take what belongs to them. But who is doing the bunkering? Who pays for the vessels that take the oil away? Villagers? People doing it sit in Abuja," he said.
Nicolas V. Gortzounian, a Tufts University student, helped research this report. John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2005/10/03/burdens_of_oil_weigh_on_nigerians?mode=PF
In oil-rich nation, charges of skimming
Congolese officials said to reap profits
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff November 25, 2005
Second in a series of occasional articles.
DJENO, Republic of Congo -- It was one of hundreds of such transactions along the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea this year -- a shipment of 950,677 barrels of high-grade crude, loaded at this steamy port on the African equator and bound for the United States.
On June 29, the Nikator, a supertanker registered in Greece, left Djeno for Philadelphia.
The seller was identified as a private company called Africa Oil & Gas Corp. The middleman, Geneva-based Vitol S.A., bought the shipment for nearly $53 million.
Of that amount, the government of Congo received $48.8 million, according to an international auditing firm. Africa Oil & Gas pocketed as much as $4.2 million, according to US private creditors who are trying to collect unpaid debts from the Congo government.
This might have been run-of-the-mill corporate profit taking, except that the person who runs Africa Oil & Gas is no ordinary businessman. He is Denis A. M. Gokana, head of Congo's national oil company and special adviser to President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, according to court and government documents. And the bill of sale ended up listing the seller as the government's National Oil Company of Congo, not Africa Oil & Gas.
Gokana declined an interview request made at his oil headquarters in Brazzaville and did not return telephone calls seeking comment on where the $4.2 million went.
From gold to diamonds, copper to uranium, corruption involving Africa's natural resources has a long, sordid history. African leaders, their cronies, European traders, foreign heads of state, and American middlemen, among others, have reaped billions from the continent's oil resources over the last four decades.
West Africa supplies the United States with about 15 percent of the oil it consumes, and the US National Intelligence Council estimates that the region could provide 25 percent in a decade.
Such resource riches could help West Africa climb out of poverty by funding better education, healthcare, roads, and other essential services. But financial specialists warn that as the United States, Europe, China, and other energy-seeking nations pour money into the region in a global competition for oil contracts, billions more dollars could simply disappear into the web of skimming and self-dealing.
Ironically, the Republic of Congo -- often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from its larger neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire -- had seemed to be the first African nation poised to break the cycle of oil corruption that enriches only the ruling class.
The International Monetary Fund last year called Congo-Brazzaville's efforts at greater public disclosure on oil deals a ''model" for the rest of the continent. The government has published hundreds of documents on oil transactions over the Internet, hoping that financial openness would persuade the IMF, World Banks, and others to cancel billions of dollars in debt.
Instead, the disclosures seemed to confirm that corrupt practices were still taking place. US creditors and the Publish What You Pay campaign, a coalition of 270 organizations that promote transparency of oil revenue and spending, say their investigations indicate that dozens of recent oil transactions, including the payment for the Nikator oil shipment, have enriched senior Congolese officials.
International creditors had been on the verge of rewarding Congo for its steps toward public disclosure. On Aug. 1, a month after the Nikator deal, the IMF Executive Board in Washington laid the groundwork for possible cancellation of as much as three-quarters of Congo's public debt, which had been estimated at $8.6 billion in 2003. A final decision is expected in the next few months.
At the August board meeting, Agustin Carstens, IMF deputy managing director, cited Congo's ''steps to enhance transparency with regard to oil sector transactions" and declared, ''There has been a welcome improvement in governance."
IMF officials think granting debt relief will spur further reforms in the Congo as well as encourage nearby countries such as Angola and Equatorial Guinea to start transparency efforts. But private creditors and activists say Congo-Brazzaville has only become more clever in hiding oil revenues and warn that once it secures debt relief it will have little incentive to change its ways.
According to creditors and Publish What You Pay, about $300 million in oil revenues identified by independent auditors last year did not show up in the country's budgets. That was nearly one-third of Congo's $974 million in oil money. This year, because of the rise in oil prices, the government is expected to take in about $1.5 billion.
A senior Congolese official reacted angrily to suggestions that government officials were stealing oil money.
''I don't know of any country in this world that has done what we have done in publishing our information," said Michel Okoko, an adviser to the finance minister. ''It is easy to fire on a country like the Congo. We are doing the best we can."
In an interview in Brazzaville, Serge M.A. Ndeko, Congo's director general of hydrocarbons, said the government has ''nothing to hide." He added that the public disclosures of oil transactions on the Internet could simply be confusing people.
''Sometimes people are lost because we have put so much out there," Ndeko said.
But KPMG, the auditor assigned by the IMF and Congolese government to review financial documents related to oil, has battled Congolese officials for more documents.
After finding that the records of the national oil company -- Société Nationale des Pétroles du Congo -- were progressively improving from the company's inception in 1998 until 2001, KPMG said no noticeable improvements have occurred since then.
The auditor has not certified the 2002 and 2003 accounts of the national oil company because of multiple problems, including the company's refusal to release bank statements and other documents, Alexis Majnoni d'Intignano, a KPMG director who has overseen the Congolese audits, said in an interview in Johannesburg. KPMG found the accounts in 2003 were not auditable for multiple reasons, among them a ''grave incoherence between the accounting books and the financial statements" as well as ''major weaknesses in internal controls regarding bank accounts."
These red flags raised by KPMG seem tame compared with findings by two New York-based private creditors -- FG Hemisphere Associates and Kensington International -- which are trying to collect a combined $300 million in debt from the government.
The creditors say the thousands of pages of documents they have compiled reveal hidden identities, multiple sham traders for every deal, and the son of President Sassou-Nguesso overseeing most of the sales as a private businessman. The transactions were designed to ''loot the Congolese national economy," according to a lawsuit filed by Kensington in New York this past May.
In a highly unusual approach, Kensington bases its case on the civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which generally is used to fight organized crime in the United States. It essentially charges that Congolese senior officials are running the oil business as a mob would -- cornering the market and creating dummy companies to launder profits, for instance.
The case was brought against Congo's national oil company; the oil company's former president, Bruno Jean-Richard Itoua, now Congo's Minister of Energy and Hydraulics; and BNP Paribas, a French bank involved in financing some Congo oil deals. Lawyers for the three accused parties have filed motions to dismiss the claim, saying the charges were groundless and that the US court has no jurisdiction.
In the meantime, the national oil company has tried to sidestep the creditors by expanding its deals to a growing number of companies, almost all of which are registered in the British Virgin Islands, which has laws that allow corporations to keep their ownership secret.
Some of the transactions, though, have become public, thanks to the creditors' investigators.
Gokana, the special adviser to the president, draws much of the creditors' attention because many of the transactions involve three of his companies -- Africa Oil & Gas Corp., Sphynx Bermuda Ltd., and Sphynx UK Ltd.
In a court case in London brought by creditors and heard this month, Gokana acknowledged that he owns and controls all three companies.
The paper trail on Sphynx reveals great profits for Gokana's companies.
In 2003, Sphynx purchased six cargos of Congolese oil at an average of $2.65 per barrel less than the government's fixed price, resulting in a $15.3 million loss in revenues to Congo, according to KPMG and Congolese documents published on the Internet.
Sphynx also provided short-term advances to the government, at an annualized borrowing rate of 81 percent, which cost the government an additional $4.9 million that year, according to documents.
Kensington, FG Hemisphere, and Publish What You Pay earlier this year separately wrote to IMF officials about the alleged misappropriation of public money. None has received a response.
''The IMF effort is inherently flawed -- they are not getting any verifiable information to back up their conclusions," Peter J. Grossman, a managing director of FG Hemisphere, said in a telephone interview from New York. ''If the information is analyzed by anyone genuinely interested in the bottom line, they will see that hundreds of millions of dollars of Congo's oil revenues are not accounted for. So where is the money?"
Asked in a telephone interview whether the missing millions in revenue was a result of corruption or sloppiness, Dhaneswar Ghura, the IMF's mission chief for the Republic of Congo, replied, ''We really can't answer this question; the audit reports didn't look into this angle."
He said the Congolese government is working to deal with the weaknesses exposed by its new openness. ''The point here is that the government is taking the bull by the horns and doing its best to correct these problems," Ghura said.
But in Pointe-Noire, Congo's oil capital on the Atlantic coast, former national treasurer Joseph Mandzoungou has said he had little hope that oil money would ever help most people in his country.
In this port village, nearly 2,000 people live among the overpowering smell of the enormous tanks that hold oil the rest of the world covets.
The people of Djeno get little benefit from the billion-dollar business, Mandzoungou said.
''Oil has brought poverty among our people," he observed one day recently in his office at a vocational school, which he runs. ''Oil has brought corruption, hate, arrogance. Oil is at the base of our misery."
Globe correspondent Laura Hambleton contributed to this report. John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com A previous article in this series appeared Oct. 3.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2005/11/25/in_oil_rich_nation_charges_of_skimming?mode=PF
Oil wealth helping few of Angola's poor
Vast reserves cannot undo legacy of war, corruption
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff December 11, 2005
Last in a series of occasional articles
LUANDA, Angola -- Here is Africa at its richest, visible from a hilltop balcony: 11 giant construction cranes swiveling in midair, a gawky ballet of steel and concrete, building skyscrapers story by story. On a street below, carpenters shoot wood through a power saw, quickly finishing an apartment building where three penthouses have just been rented for $26,000 a month each.
Here, too, is Africa at its poorest, just a mile away, as night falls outside the emergency room at Luanda Pediatric Hospital: 81 children and their parents waiting to see the lone doctor on duty. Some babies are softly crying, many are feverishly hot, and a few unlucky ones have waited more than 14 hours. Just a day before, 18 children died at this hospital, all from preventable diseases.
And here is a chance to narrow the extremes of Angola: Unprecedented billions of dollars in oil money are filling government coffers. The most pressing questions are whether the country can wisely spend and save this windfall.
Many doubt it. Because of wars, dictatorships, and thieves, Angola and other oil-rich African nations have failed so far to turn their natural wealth into better lives for their citizens.
Angola's history is particularly bleak. During a quarter-century of war, the national oil company acted as a national bank, disbursing millions to ministries and ministers. One nongovernmental group, London-based Global Witness, says $8.4 billion in public money from 1997 to 2001 remains unaccounted for.
But even skeptics believe that these countries rich in oil have great opportunities to build their economies, as the price of crude oil soars. The United States and other developed nations will depend even more on Africa's oil in the next decade; some predict that a quarter of US oil imports will come from Africa in the next decade, up from the current 15 percent.
Angola's situation, in particular, is ripe for change. Its relatively small population of 13 million means that the oil wealth per person is far greater than that of Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, which has more than 135 million people. Angola's infrastructure is in such bad shape from the war, which ended in 2002, that basic improvements will help win the hearts of many. And it will have the cash, reaping as much as $10 billion this year in oil revenues, which would be $4 billion above projections.
Almost overnight, Angola's capital, Luanda, has become a boomtown reminiscent of scenes from the television show ''Dallas," which reflected the historic oil boom that helped build gleaming towers of steel in several US cities. Just five years ago, Angola produced 700,000 barrels of oil a day. Today the figure is at 1.3 million barrels, and in two years it could be 2 million, thanks to a series of deep-water offshore discoveries.
The country's gross domestic product grew by 16 percent last year and is projected to grow by 25 percent this year.
In Luanda, hotel occupancy is pegged at 96 percent, but it may even be higher. A visitor last month could only find rooms that were let out by the hour, settling for a single that cost $40 an hour.
But such prosperity does not reach the majority of Angolans. Seventy percent of its population lives on less than $2 a day. Roads in the countryside are ruined. The railway system has collapsed, and the agricultural base is in tatters. The country imports almost all its sugar, after once being one of the world's largest exporters.
''It is rare to see a country that has so many challenges and also has so many possibilities of dealing with those challenges," Finance Minister José Pedro de Morais said, loosening his pink tie, during in a late-night interview in his office. ''The two extremes are here."
The questions for Angola echo in every African country with oil: Can it reform corrupt practices, expand the pool of wealth, and improve schools, health clinics, and roads? Can it grow from a highly dependent oil economy into one that also boosts agriculture and other industries, allowing a broad-based expansion to continue far into the future?
''It's like a household that wins the lottery," Charles P. McPherson, the World Bank's senior adviser in its Oil, Gas, Mining & Chemicals Department, said in an interview in Luanda. ''Do they spend the money right away and buy a luxury car? Or do they save it? They need to park part of it, so they can meet the day when they don't have the oil."
Asked whether other oil-rich countries in Africa have planned well for the future, McPherson replied, ''There are no good examples of this, although there are promising signs."
De Morais, the finance minister, compared his country to a four-wheel-drive vehicle with only the front two wheels doing the work. ''Ten years from now, we will have four-wheel-drive. People here need everything: housing, food, education, medicine. The challenges are immense."
President José Eduardo Dos Santos, who may next year call the country's first elections since 1992, is making almost all the decisions on rebuilding. Government outsiders, from the World Bank to activists in the country, are rarely listened to.
Kinsukulu Landu Kama, the coordinator of an organization that promotes openness in the government, held up a draft of a letter to a senior government official, demanding a meeting.
''They won't meet with us," Kama said. ''We want full disclosure of the oil money. We are trying to find out how the money is being used, but they won't tell us anything."
But in Luanda's swanky hotels, bits and pieces of information are passed over coffee and cocktails to those with the right connections. The lobbies are full of South Africans, Brazilians, Portuguese, and a smattering of Americans, all looking for Angolan partners to strike deals.
At Tropico Hotel one night recently, Isaac F. Maria dos Anjos, a former minister of agriculture and ambassador to South Africa and now a member of Parliament, couldn't string together three sentences without being interrupted by friends and acquaintances: oil executives, diamond explorers, and government officials.
''I've been traveling around the country for the last three months, and I couldn't believe what I saw," said dos Anjos, putting down his espresso and raising his hands in excitement. ''There are the Chinese building roads, bridges, houses. Former generals in the army are actively looking for farms. Everyone is looking for farms!"
He stood to hug a friend. ''Do you know who that is?" he whispered, sitting down. It was an Angolan oilman. ''BP," he said, referring to the man's affiliation with the oil giant. ''They're doing great."
Dos Anjos, though, was more interested in his own plan. He hopes to start a 345,000-acre eucalyptus timber plantation in the interior highlands.
''I will sell them for power-line posts or timber for homes," he said. ''I can get a long-term concession for the land; the government gives it free of charge for 50 years! And in five, seven, or 10 years, the roads and railways will be rebuilt. It's perfect!"
But Dos Anjos became defensive when the discussion turned to the country's overall economic prospects and, in particular, the fruitless negotiations between the government and the International Monetary Fund. The government wants an IMF seal of approval that the country's economics are sound so that it can attract investors, while the IMF wants more openness in the country's oil business.
''Even if we have a lot of corruption in this country, we pay back all the loans we get from overseas, so give us a chance," Dos Anjos said. ''If the IMF closes the doors on us, other guys will open the doors."
The others already are. Last year, the Chinese export bank extended a $2 billion line of credit, in exchange for 10,000 barrels of oil a day. Angolan officials are now wrapping up a $2.25 billion loan from a French bank that will allow the country to restructure debt payments with lower interest.
The Chinese loan is funding projects around the country, including housing developments, roads, railways, and hospitals.
But Luis Bernardino, director of the Luanda Pediatric Hospital, said that while the country needs hospitals, it needs small health clinics even more.
Around his hospital, there are no small clinics that offer free care. As a result, parents often do not obtain basic prevention for their children, such as childhood immunizations, and they seek medical care for the young at the hospital only when they are severely sick.
In the crowded emergency room later that day, a single doctor faced a crowd of patients. ''Can't you see I am doing triage?" she snapped, waving a visitor out of her room.
Outside, several mothers despaired at their children's illnesses and the long wait. Julianna Dominguos, 37, said she had arrived with her 19-month-old daughter, Cacia, at 4 a.m., or 13 hours before, and had finally seen the doctor. But the doctor said she couldn't do much for the child, who has had heart problems.
The doctor said a cardiologist must see the child, ''so I made an appointment," Dominguos said, pulling out a piece of paper. ''They said come next year. Look, it says Sept. 12, 10 months from now! In this country, we are nothing."
Next to her, another mother, Phillippa Maito, 25, joined in. ''We can't ask for anything in this country," she said, clutching her child, Luzned, 18 months. ''We have no money, and this country is full of money. Why is that?"
She turned toward the doctor's examination room, pleading softly: ''Call me. Call me, please."
Outside the Luanda Pediatric Hospital, BMWs, Hummers, and Toyota Land Cruisers bounce along potholed streets, carrying the moneymen, engineers, and nouveaux riches of modern Angola.
In an energy-hungry world, oil resources are Africa's great hope for breaking out of endemic poverty. Maito and millions like her can only quietly pray that one day the oil boom will make their lives better, too.
Previous articles in this series appeared Oct. 3 and Nov. 25. John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2005/12/11/oil_wealth_helping_few_of_angolas_poor?mode=PF
