Angola, West Africa. This is one of the most strategic frontiers in the American Empire. Sync Sam: With the Middle East apparently collapsing ever further into chaos. This is going to be America’s future focus in terms of its oil strategy. But already there’s a great deal of dissent because it’s the oil industry that’s the slush fund for government corruption. The American imperial grip on this part of the world is not as tight they’d like it to be.
COMM: Luanda, Angola’s capital. It got independence from Portugal in 1975. Decades of conflict followed.
Sam Sync: Just over two years ago the main civil war in Angola came to an end
COMM: Today 14 million Angolans are trying to rebuild their lives. The revenues from the oil industry should make it easy. Output is growing, the oil price is shooting up.
COMM: There wasn’t much of a peace dividend for children hanging around the city centre.
Sync Sam: What’s your name
Antonio: Antonio
Sam: My name’s Sam.
Sync Sam: This small group’s going to take me to where they live.
Sync Sam: Is this where you sleep?
COMM: The dormitory was deeper inside.
PTC Sam: Here right in the centre of Luanda just across the streets from gas stations and shishi bars is a big level lived in by about 50 or 60 children living in conditions that are fit only for rats.
COMM: The only contact these kids have with the oil industry is through the petrol they sniff.
PTC Sam: For these children the biggest threat to their lives at the moment is the police who routinely round them up, beat them. They say they occasionally get killed and dumped. Some are orphans, some are runaways, they’re just living here in the streets absolutely down town central Luanda yards from the restaurants the fancy night clubs and the good life that these people are never going to get.
COMM: One of the younger boys took me aside he begged for help.
PTC: This is Eduardo he’s never seen his parents he thinks he’s about 11 years old he’s desperate for help he says I’m eating rubbish surrounded by others who are sniffing glue, they have no support group beyond their friends – such as it is.
Hello (police arrive)
COMM: The police check our id.
COMM: When the officers had gone the boys insisted I come with them to another of their camps.
PTC: Oswaldo’s the boss of the street kids he’s taking me through their secret route apparently down some sewers where they live.
PTC: In Luanda I’ve paid about 20 quid for a steak sandwich and a cup of coffee. These guys are very proud of the wild tomatoes that grow in the human faeces that flows down the sewer that is their home. These are the only fresh vegetables they’re going to get. Ta bon?
COMM: One in four Angolan children die before they reach their fifth birthday. There are more than 5,000 street kids in Luanda – no one knows how many in the rest of the country.
Sync: That’s Oswaldo’s bed right there.
PTC: This is where Oswaldo and his friends live. Oswaldo’s been here a year and a half he says. There are beds dangling from the ceiling as far as I can see which is about 50 or 60 yards up this sewers which is in a very posh part of Luanda and above the ground that is where people who are making money from the oil industry doing very well from aid organizations the people lucky enough to get an education and benefit from urban life in Angola that’s where they’re living but down here where malaria is rife people are living...well see for yourself.
SYNC: In the rainy season which is just coming up in Luanda these boys can’t leave the sewer they actually stay suspended in their beds because the sewer becomes two or three or four feet deep in filthy water.
COMM: Some of these boys had lived this way for 10 years.
COMM: The surge in oil prices because of instability in the Middle East is fuelling a bonanza for a select few. The challenge is in how to spend it.
PTC: We’re in a very special supermarket it’s like a very smart private club you need a special membership card and you have to pay up front and everything is imported. Now the strange thing about Angola is that whether you’re rich or poor the chances are you’ll be eating imported food. The poor eat food from the World Food Programme, a gift from America usually, and the wealthy the oil rich import everything including cat food.
COMM: America needs Angola’s oil. It’s US ambassador Cynthia Efird’s job to keep it flowing.
Sync: How important is Angola’s oil, strategically, to America?
Efrin: We receive about 5.5 per cent of our non-Oped oil from Angola and there’s thoughts that over the next ten years the US will get maybe up to 20 per cent from Africa.
SYNC: You’ve got a situation in Angola where you’ve got the president building at least two new palaces. And his official monthly income is only about $2,000 bucks a month I mean you’ve got a straight conundrum there haven’t you?
EFRIN: I don’t think any of us would argue that all of the money that’s being generated in Angola is going to the most socially productive means we’re looking at a country that’s just come out of 27 years of war. And I think one of the things we know is that after that many years of depravation people do feel a need to reward themselves. What we would like to see is those rewards go to all the Angolan people who have suffered so long.
Sam: Rather than a handful of people with jet skis on the beach?
EFRIN: Rather than those who have first call or feel they should have first call. Sam: Put simply does that mean that if you don’t get Angola right the place is going to collapse and then your strategic oil reserves won’t be safe?
EFRIN: You’re quite right we’re at a cross roads.
COMM: Eduardo dos Santos, has ruled Angola’s for 25 years. This is one of his two new palaces. Criticism of his regime can be fatal.
COMM: Close to the palace I came across a group of young men who told me about the murder of one of their friends.
PTC: Arsenio Sebastaio was walking down from having taken his lunch up on a hill here and was signing a song that was anti-government by a local a rapper a rap artist called called MCK. The song said why do we have more guns than toys more night clubs than libraries?
COMM: What followed became a national scandal.
PTC: Tony here watched as the presidential guard grabbed his friend beat him and then tied Arsenio’s elbows together tightly behind him and then forced him at gun point into the water it appears that he tried to swim without using his hands to a buoy about 50 or 60 yards off the shore. Somewhere between here and that buoy he bobbed up was seen, went down, and wasn’t seen again until the following day when his body washed up, dead.
COMM: Arsenio’s buddies took me to see his widow Angelina. She was left to care for their two young boys. Angelina told me when she was offered help by an opposition party, she was threatened by the police.
PTC: She says what can we do we haven’t got the guns, we haven’t got any guns.
COMM: Angelina’s youngest lad is deaf and mute. There was an inquiry into his father’s murder. But there have been no prosecutions.
SYNC SAM: The guy behind us has been writing in his notebook probably our number plate. No I saw him he had a notebook and he was writing in it and looking at us. The guy in the white hat.That’s the gentleman who’s been following us around the township
COMM: Angola’s elite live discretely luxurious lives.I met up with Arvind Ganesan from Human Rights Watch. He’s crunched the numbers on how much government revenue is siphoned off.
Sync Sam: So how much money is going missing?
Arvind: The most recent estimate in Angola from 1997 to 2002 about 4.7 billion dollars went missing. That’s roughly 9 ¼ per cent of the GDP per year and in comparison that’s the equivalent of $960 billion from the US economy or £80 billion from the British economy every year.
Sam: So where’s it going is it being nicked?Arvind: Well it appears that it’s a combination of total mismanagement and corruption and to a far lesser degree just poor accounting. But I would say the bulk of it has been attributed to gross mismanagement and corruption.
COMM: The government says these figures are exaggerated. But if Angola is to navigate its way to stability, and protect America’s oil interests, much will depend on how the national income is spent.I set of for Cuito in the far east of the country a town I’d reported from 11 years ago in the middle of heavy fighting. I wanted to see how the city was recovering.It wasn’t. Very little had changed since the bullets stopped flying.
COMM: I had sheltered from the fighting in this building during the war. Whats left of it is still home to dozens of families.
PTC: The government has rebuilt the local assembly, the governors mansion. But not the hospital and not the water or sewerage system.
COMM: I joined a crowd heading to a concert given by MC K, one of the country’s biggest stars he’s banned from the country’s airwaves.MC K is the voice for a generation of angry Angolans. They’ve started to ask awkward questions.
PTC: These rappers have taken the opportunity of this concert to really basically stick it to the central government very vocally. They’ve been syaing I’ve just had lunch but how come I’ve got no salt. How come we have to perform in a stadium without a roof. How come the previous governor enriched himself and built loads of farms and we got nothing and now there’s a new guys in town and he’s ripping us off they’re absolutely seething with anger..
COMM:. About 50 per cent of Angolans are under 30. They believe they’re getting ripped off by their leaders. Time to stop Angola collapsing back into anarchy and war is running out.
COMM: Cuito is a provincial capital but there were still no regular flights. To catch a plane I had to travel five hours across country.We saw almost no livestock and most fields lay fallow. Farms animals were slaughtered in fighting years ago. Land mines prevent farmers from getting back to work.
COMM: After three hours on the road we spotted a team searching for landmines.
Sam Sync: My name’s Sam. We just wanted to check if this road is really safe and which are the safe bits on the road to drive?
PTC: The good news is that we’ve already been through a town where they found a mine this morning on the road that we’ve just travelled. The bad news is that they’ve also found some mines on the road ahead of us. Nonetheless he says that the road is pretty safe they have a mechanical device which travels the road frequently which finds mines but because many are so heavily and deeply buried over many years they float up to the surface when the roads being used if there’s road works and so on so no road is really truly safe and we’ve been through and area that’s sort of safe and we’re going in to an area that’s sort of safe.
COMM: The US wants to treble the amount of oil it imports from west Africa over the next ten years or so. And lots of this will come from Angola. Its oil fields lie mostly off the coast of an enclave called Cabinda.
COMM: The discontent brewing in the rest of the country has fuelled a separatist movement which has been fighting in Cabinda for years.They can see the oil platforms. Their beaches are black with pollution. They say they’re seeing none of the profits.
PTC: This is the fence that surrounds the Chevron camp of Malongo which is the heart of Angola’s oil industry. It’s a huge area that is completely off limits to anybody who isn’t in the oil industry and although Angola was one of the first signatories to the international ban on land mines, the oil industry is an exception to that rule. The whole Malongo complex is surrounded with a mine field.
COMM: The Angolan government recently launched a wave of attacks against the separatists.
PTC: The consequences of this increased military activity have been disastrous for the civilians who’ve borne the brunt of attempts to defend its oil interests.
COMM: Refugees have filled the villages close to Chevvron’s oil complex. Moises once farmed an area 50 miles east He told me what happened when rebels killed some soldiers near to his village.
PTC: The army came back to his village and lined up all the civilians and got in touch with their Head Quarters and he says the officer in charge was told to kill one person for every dead Angolan soldier plus two. So they selected five people.
COMM: Moises was one of them.
So you were forced to sit down. And then? A single gunman worked his way along the line. The first three were killed instantly the last two got up to run as they were being shot and Moises was hit first I the shoulder then in the hand then his side was grazed he managed to keep running away into the forest.
COMM: This wasn’t an isolated incident in the battle for control of Cabinda. We came across many terrifying stories in these villages.
PTC: They told everybody to get into their houses and stay quiet if they heard shooting outside. Andre heard shooting outside and put his head out of the door and remonstrated with the soldiers and asked them what on earth they thought they were doing. And at that point he heard his son screaming from the other side of the house that his mother was dead.
COMM:American willingness to make bedfellows of autocratic Arab regimes threatens its oil supply from the Middle East. In Cabinda its in danger of making the same mistake..
COMM: Back in Luanda the capital rocks to the sounds of wealth being consumed by the capital’s gilded youth. No one in the government was prepared to speak to me except the Maria de Luz Magalhaes who’s a minister responsible for the country’s reconstruction.
Sync: Here in Luanda I’ve seen children living in sewers hanging from the ceilings with human faeces flowing beneath them. And at the same time I’ve seen young Angolan sons of ministers daughters of ministers and people close to the president living the life of billionaires. Is there a danger that there could be a backlash against these people.”Of course, she said. “But that is one of the major tasks of this ministry to prevent that from happening.But your president who earns two thousand dollars a month is building two private palaces. His daughter owns one of the two cell phone networks and a private jet. You don’t make all that money just from a government salary do you.“I don’t know about this”“You don’t know about this? You live in Luanda of course you know about this”.How much have the American oil interests actually fuelled corruption because perhaps they feel its easier to just pay somebody and get on with the work?“I don’t know you’d better ask them directly,” she said. Chevron denies any part in corruption and this year published every details of the money paid to the Angolans.
COMM: Washington needs a stable Angola – But for all the talk of American power there are limits to its influence. There is little appetite to nation build here. Not far from the minister’s office I stopped to chat with some children I saw sorting through rubbish. We’d hardly started filming when a soldier ordered us to turn off the camera.Unstable regimes believe the worse the problem, the more the need to hide it.
Sync Glberto Neto: This used to be housing in 2002 the government destroyed everything.
COMM: Luanda, Angola’s capital. It got independence from Portugal in 1975. Decades of conflict followed.
Sam Sync: Just over two years ago the main civil war in Angola came to an end
COMM: Today 14 million Angolans are trying to rebuild their lives. The revenues from the oil industry should make it easy. Output is growing, the oil price is shooting up.
COMM: There wasn’t much of a peace dividend for children hanging around the city centre.
Sync Sam: What’s your name
Antonio: Antonio
Sam: My name’s Sam.
Sync Sam: This small group’s going to take me to where they live.
Sync Sam: Is this where you sleep?
COMM: The dormitory was deeper inside.
PTC Sam: Here right in the centre of Luanda just across the streets from gas stations and shishi bars is a big level lived in by about 50 or 60 children living in conditions that are fit only for rats.
COMM: The only contact these kids have with the oil industry is through the petrol they sniff.
PTC Sam: For these children the biggest threat to their lives at the moment is the police who routinely round them up, beat them. They say they occasionally get killed and dumped. Some are orphans, some are runaways, they’re just living here in the streets absolutely down town central Luanda yards from the restaurants the fancy night clubs and the good life that these people are never going to get.
COMM: One of the younger boys took me aside he begged for help.
PTC: This is Eduardo he’s never seen his parents he thinks he’s about 11 years old he’s desperate for help he says I’m eating rubbish surrounded by others who are sniffing glue, they have no support group beyond their friends – such as it is.
Hello (police arrive)
COMM: The police check our id.
COMM: When the officers had gone the boys insisted I come with them to another of their camps.
PTC: Oswaldo’s the boss of the street kids he’s taking me through their secret route apparently down some sewers where they live.
PTC: In Luanda I’ve paid about 20 quid for a steak sandwich and a cup of coffee. These guys are very proud of the wild tomatoes that grow in the human faeces that flows down the sewer that is their home. These are the only fresh vegetables they’re going to get. Ta bon?
COMM: One in four Angolan children die before they reach their fifth birthday. There are more than 5,000 street kids in Luanda – no one knows how many in the rest of the country.
Sync: That’s Oswaldo’s bed right there.
PTC: This is where Oswaldo and his friends live. Oswaldo’s been here a year and a half he says. There are beds dangling from the ceiling as far as I can see which is about 50 or 60 yards up this sewers which is in a very posh part of Luanda and above the ground that is where people who are making money from the oil industry doing very well from aid organizations the people lucky enough to get an education and benefit from urban life in Angola that’s where they’re living but down here where malaria is rife people are living...well see for yourself.
SYNC: In the rainy season which is just coming up in Luanda these boys can’t leave the sewer they actually stay suspended in their beds because the sewer becomes two or three or four feet deep in filthy water.
COMM: Some of these boys had lived this way for 10 years.
COMM: The surge in oil prices because of instability in the Middle East is fuelling a bonanza for a select few. The challenge is in how to spend it.
PTC: We’re in a very special supermarket it’s like a very smart private club you need a special membership card and you have to pay up front and everything is imported. Now the strange thing about Angola is that whether you’re rich or poor the chances are you’ll be eating imported food. The poor eat food from the World Food Programme, a gift from America usually, and the wealthy the oil rich import everything including cat food.
COMM: America needs Angola’s oil. It’s US ambassador Cynthia Efird’s job to keep it flowing.
Sync: How important is Angola’s oil, strategically, to America?
Efrin: We receive about 5.5 per cent of our non-Oped oil from Angola and there’s thoughts that over the next ten years the US will get maybe up to 20 per cent from Africa.
SYNC: You’ve got a situation in Angola where you’ve got the president building at least two new palaces. And his official monthly income is only about $2,000 bucks a month I mean you’ve got a straight conundrum there haven’t you?
EFRIN: I don’t think any of us would argue that all of the money that’s being generated in Angola is going to the most socially productive means we’re looking at a country that’s just come out of 27 years of war. And I think one of the things we know is that after that many years of depravation people do feel a need to reward themselves. What we would like to see is those rewards go to all the Angolan people who have suffered so long.
Sam: Rather than a handful of people with jet skis on the beach?
EFRIN: Rather than those who have first call or feel they should have first call. Sam: Put simply does that mean that if you don’t get Angola right the place is going to collapse and then your strategic oil reserves won’t be safe?
EFRIN: You’re quite right we’re at a cross roads.
COMM: Eduardo dos Santos, has ruled Angola’s for 25 years. This is one of his two new palaces. Criticism of his regime can be fatal.
COMM: Close to the palace I came across a group of young men who told me about the murder of one of their friends.
PTC: Arsenio Sebastaio was walking down from having taken his lunch up on a hill here and was signing a song that was anti-government by a local a rapper a rap artist called called MCK. The song said why do we have more guns than toys more night clubs than libraries?
COMM: What followed became a national scandal.
PTC: Tony here watched as the presidential guard grabbed his friend beat him and then tied Arsenio’s elbows together tightly behind him and then forced him at gun point into the water it appears that he tried to swim without using his hands to a buoy about 50 or 60 yards off the shore. Somewhere between here and that buoy he bobbed up was seen, went down, and wasn’t seen again until the following day when his body washed up, dead.
COMM: Arsenio’s buddies took me to see his widow Angelina. She was left to care for their two young boys. Angelina told me when she was offered help by an opposition party, she was threatened by the police.
PTC: She says what can we do we haven’t got the guns, we haven’t got any guns.
COMM: Angelina’s youngest lad is deaf and mute. There was an inquiry into his father’s murder. But there have been no prosecutions.
SYNC SAM: The guy behind us has been writing in his notebook probably our number plate. No I saw him he had a notebook and he was writing in it and looking at us. The guy in the white hat.That’s the gentleman who’s been following us around the township
COMM: Angola’s elite live discretely luxurious lives.I met up with Arvind Ganesan from Human Rights Watch. He’s crunched the numbers on how much government revenue is siphoned off.
Sync Sam: So how much money is going missing?
Arvind: The most recent estimate in Angola from 1997 to 2002 about 4.7 billion dollars went missing. That’s roughly 9 ¼ per cent of the GDP per year and in comparison that’s the equivalent of $960 billion from the US economy or £80 billion from the British economy every year.
Sam: So where’s it going is it being nicked?Arvind: Well it appears that it’s a combination of total mismanagement and corruption and to a far lesser degree just poor accounting. But I would say the bulk of it has been attributed to gross mismanagement and corruption.
COMM: The government says these figures are exaggerated. But if Angola is to navigate its way to stability, and protect America’s oil interests, much will depend on how the national income is spent.I set of for Cuito in the far east of the country a town I’d reported from 11 years ago in the middle of heavy fighting. I wanted to see how the city was recovering.It wasn’t. Very little had changed since the bullets stopped flying.
COMM: I had sheltered from the fighting in this building during the war. Whats left of it is still home to dozens of families.
PTC: The government has rebuilt the local assembly, the governors mansion. But not the hospital and not the water or sewerage system.
COMM: I joined a crowd heading to a concert given by MC K, one of the country’s biggest stars he’s banned from the country’s airwaves.MC K is the voice for a generation of angry Angolans. They’ve started to ask awkward questions.
PTC: These rappers have taken the opportunity of this concert to really basically stick it to the central government very vocally. They’ve been syaing I’ve just had lunch but how come I’ve got no salt. How come we have to perform in a stadium without a roof. How come the previous governor enriched himself and built loads of farms and we got nothing and now there’s a new guys in town and he’s ripping us off they’re absolutely seething with anger..
COMM:. About 50 per cent of Angolans are under 30. They believe they’re getting ripped off by their leaders. Time to stop Angola collapsing back into anarchy and war is running out.
COMM: Cuito is a provincial capital but there were still no regular flights. To catch a plane I had to travel five hours across country.We saw almost no livestock and most fields lay fallow. Farms animals were slaughtered in fighting years ago. Land mines prevent farmers from getting back to work.
COMM: After three hours on the road we spotted a team searching for landmines.
Sam Sync: My name’s Sam. We just wanted to check if this road is really safe and which are the safe bits on the road to drive?
PTC: The good news is that we’ve already been through a town where they found a mine this morning on the road that we’ve just travelled. The bad news is that they’ve also found some mines on the road ahead of us. Nonetheless he says that the road is pretty safe they have a mechanical device which travels the road frequently which finds mines but because many are so heavily and deeply buried over many years they float up to the surface when the roads being used if there’s road works and so on so no road is really truly safe and we’ve been through and area that’s sort of safe and we’re going in to an area that’s sort of safe.
COMM: The US wants to treble the amount of oil it imports from west Africa over the next ten years or so. And lots of this will come from Angola. Its oil fields lie mostly off the coast of an enclave called Cabinda.
COMM: The discontent brewing in the rest of the country has fuelled a separatist movement which has been fighting in Cabinda for years.They can see the oil platforms. Their beaches are black with pollution. They say they’re seeing none of the profits.
PTC: This is the fence that surrounds the Chevron camp of Malongo which is the heart of Angola’s oil industry. It’s a huge area that is completely off limits to anybody who isn’t in the oil industry and although Angola was one of the first signatories to the international ban on land mines, the oil industry is an exception to that rule. The whole Malongo complex is surrounded with a mine field.
COMM: The Angolan government recently launched a wave of attacks against the separatists.
PTC: The consequences of this increased military activity have been disastrous for the civilians who’ve borne the brunt of attempts to defend its oil interests.
COMM: Refugees have filled the villages close to Chevvron’s oil complex. Moises once farmed an area 50 miles east He told me what happened when rebels killed some soldiers near to his village.
PTC: The army came back to his village and lined up all the civilians and got in touch with their Head Quarters and he says the officer in charge was told to kill one person for every dead Angolan soldier plus two. So they selected five people.
COMM: Moises was one of them.
So you were forced to sit down. And then? A single gunman worked his way along the line. The first three were killed instantly the last two got up to run as they were being shot and Moises was hit first I the shoulder then in the hand then his side was grazed he managed to keep running away into the forest.
COMM: This wasn’t an isolated incident in the battle for control of Cabinda. We came across many terrifying stories in these villages.
PTC: They told everybody to get into their houses and stay quiet if they heard shooting outside. Andre heard shooting outside and put his head out of the door and remonstrated with the soldiers and asked them what on earth they thought they were doing. And at that point he heard his son screaming from the other side of the house that his mother was dead.
COMM:American willingness to make bedfellows of autocratic Arab regimes threatens its oil supply from the Middle East. In Cabinda its in danger of making the same mistake..
COMM: Back in Luanda the capital rocks to the sounds of wealth being consumed by the capital’s gilded youth. No one in the government was prepared to speak to me except the Maria de Luz Magalhaes who’s a minister responsible for the country’s reconstruction.
Sync: Here in Luanda I’ve seen children living in sewers hanging from the ceilings with human faeces flowing beneath them. And at the same time I’ve seen young Angolan sons of ministers daughters of ministers and people close to the president living the life of billionaires. Is there a danger that there could be a backlash against these people.”Of course, she said. “But that is one of the major tasks of this ministry to prevent that from happening.But your president who earns two thousand dollars a month is building two private palaces. His daughter owns one of the two cell phone networks and a private jet. You don’t make all that money just from a government salary do you.“I don’t know about this”“You don’t know about this? You live in Luanda of course you know about this”.How much have the American oil interests actually fuelled corruption because perhaps they feel its easier to just pay somebody and get on with the work?“I don’t know you’d better ask them directly,” she said. Chevron denies any part in corruption and this year published every details of the money paid to the Angolans.
COMM: Washington needs a stable Angola – But for all the talk of American power there are limits to its influence. There is little appetite to nation build here. Not far from the minister’s office I stopped to chat with some children I saw sorting through rubbish. We’d hardly started filming when a soldier ordered us to turn off the camera.Unstable regimes believe the worse the problem, the more the need to hide it.
Sync Glberto Neto: This used to be housing in 2002 the government destroyed everything.