ECAS 2013

Regardless of political differences, governments from Angola to South Africa have promised to increase the supply of affordable housing and allocated public finances for new housing projects. Yet, despite a professed commitment by African governments to provide housing for the poor, residential development is governed by a cruel paradox: those most in need of shelter continue to live in overcrowded and informal dwellings that lack essential services, while the provision of luxury housing continues to grow apace. This pattern of supply characterizes not only post conflict, authoritarian countries such as Angola or Rwanda, but also more democratic countries such as Tanzania and Ghana.

The paper explains the paradox by arguing that the stress on home ownership and the provision of high end housing are critical components of state building across Africa in the 21st century. They result from the pressures of diverse domestic and foreign actors and they seek to satisfy multiple motives by those in power. Especially in Angola, luxury residential developments and the expansion of home ownership are means to secure legitimacy for the regime from a well connected, highly informed, and mobile contingent of the population who are well placed to pressure the government for public and private goods and to contest it if the government does not deliver. By including Angola in cross national comparison, the paper identifies the commonalities and differences in housing provision across Africa.

Over the past decade, Angola, China's largest trading partner in Africa, has engaged in a tremendous campaign of post-war reconstruction in which China plays a crucial role. As has occurred elsewhere on the continent, the signing of bilateral agreements between China and Angola has been accompanied by an influx of Chinese labor, commodities, and entrepreneurs. Drawing on data collected over six weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in Luanda in 2012, this paper destabilizes conventional perceptions of 'the Chinese' in Angola by examining the fraught encounters of Chinese citizens with both the Angolan state and their own government. Many Angolans perceive Chinese residents of Angola as representatives and beneficiaries of China's increasing political and economic influence in Angola, and some critics link Chinese investment directly to corrupt practices within the Dos Santos regime. In contrast, Chinese workers and entrepreneurs view themselves as victims of petty crime, extortion by the Angolan police, and neglect by the Chinese embassy. Chinese migrants may benefit from state-led commercial initiatives. However, they lack the basic guarantees of citizenship while nonetheless remaining subject to forms of state regulation that fall outside the realm of transparency or even legality. Several illustrative examples demonstrate how Chinese residents of Luanda negotiate relationships with the Chinese and Angolan states, and with what political and social effects.

Angola became the main destination of portuguese migrants outside Europe in the last decade. The majority of these migrants are moving to Angola in result of portuguese enterprises strategies that identify the implementation of national reconstruction governamental programmes as a good business and work opportunity. In fact, these programmes include the rebuilding and construction of a multiple kind of infra-structures and the creation of several services that order the need of significant quantities of material and human resources.

This paper tries to caractherize portuguese enterprises (size, activity sector, workmarket integration strategy, course, local relationships and parteners, expectations etc.) and workers (socio-demografic caracteristics, professional integration, expectations etc.) evolved in Angola reconstruction process and reflect about the importance of these actors role in its economic growth and social development.

Notwithstanding the great importance of an efficient transport system for a country like Angola where poor and scattered communities extend over great distances, its reconstruction has an ambivalent character in Benguela. On the one hand, it is an indispensable part of the process of economic reconstruction and development where it is possible to identify complementary linkages influencing the dynamics of road and railway reconstruction that can reduce poverty. On the other hand, the post-war transport economy, like the war transport economy, is a site of private accumulation and change where social stratification goes in parallel with increased socio-economic inequality and unfavourable conditions in the labour transport market. The infrastructural reconstruction process is not fulfilling its potential for generating domestic linkages or multiplier effects through wage employment of Angolans. Despite the creation of employment and other income earning opportunities they have been limited meaning that communities might lack the financial capacity to make use of the transport network. The ambivalent character of the modernisation of the transport system was already a featured in the first half of the 20th century as the transport network´s creation of regional and national spaces with new centres and peripheries established a new hierarchy of social groups and gave rise to significant cultural changes. The effects of roads, railways, and other new means of transport were experienced in very different ways by different actors (means of wealth as well as poverty; inroads of repression as well as paths to personal liberation and as tools of fragmentation as well as of unification).

(continuation of short abstract) It asks the following question: why is Angola's extractive sector frantically disputed by oil majors and largely ignored by mining majors?

Using data collected during interviews with Angolan officials, the paper begins by addressing three conventional explanations. Firstly, colonial legacy shapes the nature of relations between the companies and the state in the post-colonial period. Secondly, the nature, value and geographic location of the resource extracted determine the importance of the company for the state. Thirdly, the background and training of bureaucrats define the corporate culture of each of the companies.

The second half of the paper moves beyond conventional historical, geographical and cultural explanations. It emphasises that while SONANGOL and ENDIAMA are rightly perceived as the "successful" and the "failed" models of Angola's post-colonial business management, respectively, both are key in serving the interests of the state in very different ways. While SONANGOL is characteristic of the centralisation of power in the hands of a small elite, ENDIAMA is emblematic of the pervasive clientelism that structures the relationship between each body of the state and the society.