World marathon record holder Paul Tergat has appealed to the international community to support the World Food Programme's (WFP) school feeding projects in Angola after the UN food agency said a cash shortage could force it to pull out of the country entirely by March. Tergat, a double Olympic medallist and WFP ambassador, was a beneficiary of a similar school-feeding programme in the remote Kenyan village of Baringo when he was just seven years old. Speaking from experience, he said a hearty meal would entice kids back into the classroom and was vital to individual success and for the development of Angola as a whole.

Angola’s government, in need of reconstruction funds after the country’s long civil war, was in the process of negotiating a new loan with the International Monetary Fund in 2004. The IMF, aware of Angola’s long history of corruption and poor governance since independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975, was keen to include measures to cut corruption and tighten the country’s economic management. But as bank officials pushed harder for a signature, the government suddenly broke off negotiations. The Angolans had received a counter-offer: a $2 billion loan proposed by China’s export-credit agency, Exim Bank. The deal from Beijing came with minimal rates of interest, a generous payback period, and none of the IMF’s “conditionalities”. The government in Luanda accepted China’s offer.

Despite being a resource rich country with 3% annual growth per year (11% in 2004), the development impacts of the activities in the oil sector in Angola have had a limited effect on the rest of the economy and poverty is widespread. Inflation is very high (31% in 2004, down from 76% in 2003), and the country has been able to develop hardly any local industry. Oil companies have therefore been criticised, particularly by NGOs, for not taking due account of the developmental impact of their extraction of resources. A report from the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway examines this issue and asks what the responsibility of oil companies in Angola is and which of these responsibilities the companies take.

The arrival of December in Cuba, as well as signalling the end of the hurricane season and the scorching temperatures of summer, is also a time for remembering one of the most dramatic periods in recent Cuban history: the country's 13-year-long participation in the war in Angola. Between 1975 and 1988, some 350,000 Cubans took part in the civil war in the southern African nation, which was also the last time Cuba's military forces were involved in an armed conflict. According to Cuban government figures, during all of the "internationalist" missions carried out in Africa from the early 1960s to the withdrawal of the last soldier from Angola on May 25, 1991, a total of 2,077 Cubans were killed.

President Eduardo Dos Santos used the occasion of Angola's independence day celebrations to deliver a speech promising elections and greater prosperity, but critics said he failed to outline a proper timetable for the polls. Thousands - including Portugal's president and several African leaders - turned up at Luanda's Cidadela football stadium on Friday for the festivities, the biggest celebrations since independence from Portugal 30 years ago. "The reality that the country is living today allows us to look with optimism to the realisation of the next elections," Dos Santos said in a rare address to the nation. "We are creating the material, institutional and psychological conditions for them to be free, transparent and with a high level of participation."

This is a key opportunity to play a leading role in influencing change in policy and practice as it relates to child protection, early childhood development, health and HIV. Responsible for the quality and effectiveness of our work in Luanda and Huambo provinces, you will lead, motivate and manage the team whilst maintaining a clear overview of the political, legal and security context. You will also act as our representative to government, the UN and other international agencies and donors, building key stakeholder relationships along the way.

The Senior Programme Manager/Representative will represent Ibis towards authorities and partners and will be driving our partnering/fundraising work support. He/she will supervise existing programs in terms of general management, administrative and programmatic issues and will spearhead program development, synergy and coherence within the Angola program and integration of crosscutting issues. He/she will refer to the Regional Director based in Windhoek and will be a part of the regional senior management structure.

With less than a year to go before Angola's first post-war elections, there are growing concerns over whether the country is moving quickly enough to be ready in time. The ballot is expected to take place in September 2006, although no exact date has been set, and the president can leave it until 90 days prior to the vote before making the date public. Politicians and members of civil society point out that there has not been much progress in preparation for the poll since the swearing in of the National Electoral Commission (CNE) at the end of August.

On October 12, 2005, the President of Angola's National Assembly accused local independent media of instigating a new civil war in the country. Roberto de Almeida said independent newspapers and radio stations should be blamed for what he considered as instigation to the return of the war in Angola. Speaking to the government-controlled National Radio of Angola (NRA), De Almeida accused the media of irresponsibility and having a politic agenda focused on "bringing a new war among the Angolans."

When a huge country is littered with mines and has seen its roads disappear during decades of war, getting refugees back to their homes is not an easy task. The 236 Angolans are the last of the 2,500 who returned in August and September in an organised manner from settlements in Kasangulu, in the western part of the DRC. They come from 15 of the 18 Angolan provinces – excluding only Zaire, Cabinda and Luanda provinces – and are headed to the south, east and west of country that is 1,246,700 square km.

The Justice Initiative and INTERIGHTS has called on Angola to comply with its international human rights obligations, following the expiry of a UN-imposed deadline on the southern African country to act to protect freedom of expression. The open letter to Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos followed a March 2005 decision of the UN Human Rights Committee that Angola had violated journalist Rafael Marques de Morais' freedom of expression, by jailing him in 1999 for writing articles critical of dos Santos. The Committee gave the Angolan authorities 90 days to compensate Marques and take steps to prevent similar violations in future. No such steps have been taken to date.

Until now, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) had been assisting the repatriation of only camp-based Angolan refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), helping more than 42,000 to return to Angola since 2003. But the 250 who inaugurated a new phase of the programme were part of a group of almost 2,000 non-camp based refugees settled in Kasangulu, south of the capital, Kinshasa.

Corruption was extreme in Angola in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Each year, about US$1 billion of Angola's oil revenues, reportedly, were disappearing. Angola provides a case study in building institutions from scratch. Both Angolans - civil-society groups and journalists - and outsiders - nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations, foreign governments, and a few of the multinational oil companies - prodded the Angolan government to reform itself. A dysfunctional state has been driven by the combination of domestic and external pressure to take some initial steps - grudging and gradual but apparently genuine steps - toward accountability.

Angola stepped up its fight against polio on Sunday, with mothers out in force to take advantage of a nationwide immunization drive after the first appearance of the disease in the African country in four years. The three-day, $3.74 million campaign, which ends on Sunday, was run by the Health Ministry, the United Nations Childrens Fund UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) and is aimed at stopping polio before it spreads.

Rafael Marques remembers three encounters during his journeying through Angola. The first sketch tells the story of Pedro, who uses his truck to take pregnant women on a four-hour, pot-holed journey to the nearest maternity hospital. In the second sketch, Almeida makes it big as a diamond digger but blows his fortune on the pleasures of life. Lastly, a train-track market in Viana, Luanda is described. “Angolans,” writes Marques, “continue to wait for something to happen. People are struggling for immediate survival, without the luxury of medium or long-term perspectives.”

Inspired perhaps, by having survived war and misery, Pedro cheerfully shared his story on how his truck had turned into a maternity hospital on wheels.

I met Pedro by the roadside, between the municipality of Cacula and Lubango, the capital of the southern Angolan province of Huíla. I was touring the south of the country by car. He was stuck in the middle of nowhere, in the evening, with his car broken down, and so I gave him a ride.

The road seemed like a long net of small and huge potholes – so awful that it took more than four hours to drive the 60 km between the two towns.

Along the way, Pedro told me a lively story about the state of the road. As the only fellow with a car in his community, for years now he has been taking pregnant women to the Lubango Hospital to give birth. He said no woman has yet made it to the hospital. All have ended up giving birth in his car due to the tortuous journey, and without a single fatality.

“It eases the burden on the maternity hospital”, he said.

On another car journey, to the east of the country, I came across Almeida Gonçalves, a young man who worked as an informal diamond digger. A single lucky stone had earned him US$250,000. I asked him how he spent his money. He shrugged his shoulders and said: “I had to spend everything on clothes, food and drinks. I did not know how to spend it on other things.”

All he had left was a motorbike – until that was confiscated by the police in an act of extortion. Yet his eyes still light up when he imagines he might strike it lucky once again.

In other circumstance, Almeida Gonçalves might well be an Angolan government minister – provided he could upgrade his tastes from motorbikes to top luxury cars. As a minister, he would be entrusted with the mission of depositing, in his personal bank accounts, incalculable amounts of state funds, as it is a common government practice.

As for Pedro, he might fare well as a provincial governor. He has the virtue of finding advantages in total chaos, in the absence of management. The former governor of Kwanza-Norte province Manuel Pedro Pacavira managed to do the same; after more than a decade of misrule, he has been rewarded with la dolce vita as ambassador to Italy.

The train of indifference

The third and last example in my sketch of Angola as it is today has to do with the informal market set on the railway tracks in Viana, Luanda. The train passes through, whistling. People, unconcerned and in no rush, remove themselves and their goods from the tracks, just enough to make space for the locomotive to get past. As the train moves on, people reclaim their places on the tracks just inches behind it, and set their businesses once again. At times one can see the rusty train in the middle of the market. Once it has passed through, it is as though the train had never used those tracks.

Angolans continue to wait for something to happen. People are struggling for immediate survival, without the luxury of medium or long-term perspectives. There is no leadership to show a different way out, to share his or her vision of the future.

Notwithstanding three years of peace, society has simply given up the quest for common ground. Each person has become an island in search of individual peace and stability. To do so, one has to pledge allegiance to the families who control the chaos that we call the state.

The social and civic dynamics of 2001-2003, which seemed to have the potential to build common interests and ensure the fair participation of all sectors in bringing about changes, have crumbled.

Nowadays, war is no longer an argument to excuse people’s inertia. By the same token, the regime’s repression is also not a justification for inaction.

During the most violent and difficult years of our history, several names and values emerged out of the struggle for independence, for peace, for freedom of the press and of expression.

Repression has been replaced by corruption, by evil laughter at someone else's suffering, as the source of the real personal power in our society. Such a notion of power mirrors our own lack of purpose.

The regime, stretched in two directions between the ruling MPLA and its leader, José Eduardo dos Santos, has exhausted its ability to reinvent itself and to do better for the country. It has become a family feud that sustains itself on the apathy of the society at large. It survives by swallowing up the opposition. The regime also enjoys comfort in the belief it has secured itself through means of patronage rather than by its own merit or civic and political achievements.

For some time now, President dos Santos has been a little more than a chess player who entertains himself. He plays against himself. When it comes to addressing social problems, he has notoriously little authority over the executive that he supposedly leads.

Meanwhile, his prime minister, Nandó, may as well not exist, except when he becomes the laughing stock of the independent media for his gaffes, and for the regular public beatings that his sons inflict upon defenseless citizens.

I see peace and the opportunity for a serious and transparent democratization process in just the same way as I see the train making its way through the market. I note:

- The absence of social solidarity in the struggle for the common good and people’s indifference to the anomalies of the State;
- The collapse of forces such as opposition and organized civil society that ought to stand between the people and the regime;
- The stagnation and even backward movement in the development of the independent media outlets, which ought to be instrumental in the setting of a new culture of democracy, tolerance and transparency;
- The vast gulf between the ruling class (the plundering elite) and the proletariat and peasant classes (reclassified as simply "poor" or "the rest of society" and put at the mercy of the poverty reduction strategy programmes of the international community – World Bank, et al.)
- A political culture of postponing political and social problems to the extreme limit (e.g. civil disarmament, reducing unemployment, dealing with resource use, violence and social exclusion in the Lunda diamond fields, and the oil-rich Cabinda province, et al.)
- The potential for social upheaval, aggravated by the worsening of people’s living conditions, in times of peace. Even the alternative forms of survival such as street vending are being brutally crushed by the police.

As an Angolan, I feel defeated by my own weaknesses and limitations. I live in torment for not being able to do more for the society, for the country I love. In anguish, I seek refuge in my loneliness to digest the bitterness for a lost battle in the pursuit of human dignity in Angola.

I assume defeat. I face the reality and I prepare myself for the triumph of my own consciousness and that of the society, against the evil that inhabits in and destroys us.

Agostinho Neto once said, to Angolans, “we shall come back...”

So be it.

* Rafael Marques is an Angolan journalist.

* Please send comments to

Some 320,000 refugees have returned to Angola since the 2002 peace accord was signed, and the focus of aid agencies is shifting from repatriation to reintegration. But significant challenges remain: the country is still plagued by landmines, there have been reports of crop failures in some provinces, and access to basic social services remains poor for the majority of people.

Angola's main opposition party, UNITA, said it was unfazed by a Supreme Court ruling on Monday allowing President Eduardo dos Santos to stand in the country's first post-war election. On Friday the Supreme Court ruled that parts of a new electoral law, reportedly preventing the veteran leader from seeking re-election, were unconstitutional. The legislation will have to return to parliament for amendment.

Angola is likely to produce diamonds worth nearly US $900 million this year, but little of that money will be spent on development in the diamond producing areas, according to a new report. The report by Partnership Africa Canada noted that "three years of peace is enough time for an oil-rich, diamond-rich government to have made wider social investments in the diamond areas and to have produced development policies that are more supportive of Angola's artisanal miners".

Journalist Celso Amaral, the former director for the government-controlled national radio in the northern province of Huila, was arrested on a charge of mismanagement and has been languishing in jail for the last month. The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Angola learnt of Amaral's arrest when it undertook an information trip of some of Angola's regions at the end of June.

News that President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether sections of a new election law are unconstitutional has raised concern that Angola's first general election since 1992 could be delayed. According to the official Angop news agency, Dos Santos promulgated most of the laws in the so-called 'electoral package', but the crucial "Electoral Law has not been promulgated" because there were doubts over whether certain sections complied with the country's constitution.