LUANDA (AFP) — Billions of oil dollars are flowing into Angola offering a lifeline to the war-ravaged country which holds landmark elections Friday, but widespread poverty and lack of transparency over how the money is spent fuel suspicions of wholesale corruption.
The ruling party's campaign message is that Angola's oil funds are being used to re-launch the country's shattered infrastructure. But analysts say revenue from the two million barrels per day production is not trickling down to the millions of poor.
"The government is not very transparent on disclosing what goes where, what it is getting in terms of oil revenues, the resources that support the economy," said Lopes Raul, a Luanda-based economist.
In 2007, Transparency International listed Angola -- now Africa's biggest oil producer -- as the 32th most corrupt country in the world.
Despite boasting the continent's fastest growing economy, Angola's people are among the world's poorest with life expectancy of just 41 years.
The World Bank is projecting economic growth of around 25 percent in the next two years, but UN figures show that two-thirds of Angolans still live on less than two dollars (1.5 euros) a day.
President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, in power since 1979, insisted last week that his government had done a great deal for Angola with roads cleared of mines and more schools and hospitals built, as the country attempts to recover from a devastating 27-year civil war.
But Raul said the reach of Dos Santos and his Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was chiefly seen in urban areas with rural populations still battling access to basic services like water and electricity.
"Though there is a lot of emphasis on national reconstruction, we are still far away in terms of responding to the cries of society," Raul said.
"When you travel in the countryside you notice that it is abandoned to itself (...) Misery is very visible."
The MPLA has dominated control of oil and diamond resources in the six years since a 2002 peace deal, allowing little opportunity for the opposition Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) to create much momentum going into Friday's elections.
Rafael Marques, an independent analyst and critic who has been imprisoned several times for his writings, pointed the finger directly at the ruling elite as the main beneficiaries of the petrodollars.
"The money is going into the pockets of the president, his family, to a few selected ministers, generals, MPLA politburo members," he said.
The capital Luanda is one of the world's most expensive cities with a modest apartment renting for 1,500 dollars (1,022 euros) a month. A bottle of mineral water costs two dollars and a bed from the local market sells for 250 dollars.
Nicholas Shaxson, author of "Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil", argues that oil had distorted the economy.
"The problem with oil is the resource curse: essentially things like agriculture cannot compete, local prices are so high that it is very difficult for any locally-produced goods to compete against imported goods," said Shaxson.
While transparency had improved, Angola still faced discrepancies in expenditure with money going missing or being skimmed off projects, he said.
"That is much more complicated to monitor, much harder to see," he explained.
The World Bank has estimated that the Angolan economy will slow by 11 percent once the country reaches the two million bpd limit imposed by OPEC.
But the southwest African state is also the world's fourth largest producer of diamonds, and announced record diamond revenues for the first five months of 2008.
Angola raked in a record 570 million dollars in diamond sales revenue and according to industry sources, the country will reach the 1.3 billion dollar mark by the end of the year.
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