The Africa Cup: Cause for Optimism, Cause for Despair

Last Friday, FLEC rebels opened fire on the bus of the Togolese national soccer team which had been travelling from their training facilities in the DRC to Cabinda for the start of the African Nations Cup. Three were killed in the ambush, and 8 were injured. And this weekend, the Togolese team flew home, to mourn their dead and await improved security.

The event is terribly sad. Angola's hosting of the Cup was meant to showcase Africa's fastest growing economy, a debut after decades of civil war. Instead it had showcased the steep domestic problems that Angola faces.

In September, I wrote a post on Cabinda. The odd geography of the Puerto Rico sized province, and its contested history interested me. Cabinda formed in the later 19th century, as three independent African kingdoms (sandwiched between Belgian, French and Portugues colonial ventures) fearing King Leopold's cruel rule, asked to be a protectorate of Portugal. Tied as a Portuguese colony to the rest of Angola, Cabinda nonetheless considered itself independent and culturally distinct from the rest of Angola. Yet immediately following the nation's independence in 1975, MLPA troops occupied Cabinda. Since then the separatist conflict has persisted. What's more the discovery of oil off the shores of Cabinda has only heightened the stakes and the fierceness of the fighting. Some might say, offshore oil is the conflict, although FLEC rebels claim that their fight is for cultural and political freedom rather than exorbitant resource wealth. Nonetheless, its necessary to acknowledge that, today, 71% of Angola's oil revenue comes from Cabinda. And as John Ghazvinian, author of Untapped, writes, while the conflict between UNITA and MLPA may have ended, there has been little resolution to the Cabinda conflict.

I revisited Ghazvinian's book, and found this quote which seems relevant:

The only people given a voice throughout Angola's history have been those with guns. Perhaps nowhere is this tortured legacy more visible than in Cabinda, where the only political discourse available to young activists is one of hatred and violence.

Crackdowns on Cabinda rebels have been harsh. In 2004, "Human Rights Watch issued a briefing paper that included reports of gang rapes, torture, and sexual humiliation carried out by the Angolan Armed Forces" (Ghazvinian, 160).

While seemingly unrelated, what I take from the tragedy at the Africa Cup, is the extreme difficulty for oil-rich nations to positively harness their resource wealth. Although Angola experienced insane growth rates (its GDP grew by nearly 20% in 2008!), a number of substantial obstacles have arisen. The cost of living in Luanda has skyrocketed to Central Park South-levels; the national government is heavily centralized and does not disclose the amount of oil money it is awash with; and, as sadly shown last week, a separatist movement that is perhaps fueled by harsh crackdowns still simmers bringing the nation's stability into question.

This is not say that Angola is doomed; quite the contrary, many African nations envy the potential Angola has. At times, it seems fitting to compare it to rapidly-growing, lusophone Brazil; in optimistic moments, BRIC seems a more likely future than MEND. But the difficulty of oil persists.

I don't want to call it a curse, but oil (combined with Angola's history which offers conflict rather than multiparty politics or democracy as a model) presents substantial political and economic challenges. And while the Africa Cup does certainly highlight the incredibly exciting potential of one of Africa's pivotal nations, it also highlights the substantial and frustratingly sad obstacles that a bright future must overcome.