LONDON: Step inside the air-conditioned lounge of the Viking Club and Luanda’s squalor could be another universe. Here the oil executives and engineers sip beer and discuss geological reports, deals and money.
Beyond the shattered skyline of Angola’s capital, buried beneath the Atlantic, is a vast store of oil, and their job is to extract it. The accents are British, Australian, French and, increasingly, American.
The “big whities”, as the taxi drivers call them, have been coming for years but now the flights are fuller than ever: new offshore discoveries are expected to double output to 2 million barrels per day, prompting talk of a drilling El Dorado.
Angola’s government, adept at playing off rival oil companies to maximise its revenue, expects an investment boom of $50bn in the next decade.
A US contractor will help build an oil refinery in Lobito harbour, 250 miles south of Luanda, to process the light crude suitable for American cars. Now that Washington wants west African oil to cut US dependency on the Gulf, its envoys are beating a path to the capital.
Walter Kansteiner, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, visited last July, followed two months later by his boss, the secretary of state, Colin Powell.
The US is apparently beefing up its security presence: some of the Viking Club’s newer customers have crew-cuts and muscles, and not much insight into crude. There is also another problem: corruption. According to a leaked IMF report $1bn vanished last year in what is seen as the Bermuda triangle between the Angolan presidency, the central bank and the state oil company, Sonangol.
Pressure groups want oil companies to publish their accounts to limit such graft but Washington’s thirst for African oil means that they will not come under pressure from the US, one western diplomat lamented.
“It is in the enlightened US self-interest to ensure the money is well spent to promote a stable democracy but the administration is sub-contracting relations with these states to the oil companies,” the diplomat said.
“The flag is following commerce but the companies are just plumbers, they act without corporate responsibility on the basis of the good ol’ boy network.” Angola’s government used to be Marxist but that did not impede alliances with western oil giants. During almost three decades of civil war, Cuban troops guarded the installations.
The end of the conflict last year should mean yet smoother operations and bigger profits for the oil executives sitting in penthouse offices on Lenin Avenue.
Aid agencies doubt whether the bonanza will benefit ordinary Angolans. Luanda is a study in poverty: open sewers, crumbling, unfinished buildings filled with squatters, street children competing with dogs to scavenge from mounds of rubbish.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.