Walter In Denver

Politics Matter

Yesterday's NY Times op-ed noted that in spite of selling a lot of oil and having few inhabitants, Angola is still a place of widespread poverty.

Although Angola is finally at peace after decades of catastrophic civil war, its oil riches don't appear to be doing the country much good. Despite the production of almost a million barrels of oil a day, the vast majority of Angola's 10.7 million people live in grinding poverty. Government officials and oil executives live in villas behind security walls and barbed wire. But most Angolans — even here in Luanda, the capital — stay in crumbling cement-block huts without electricity or running water. Along the streets, children pick through mountains of roadside garbage while their parents hawk sundries from car to car or sell produce in the dirt alongside open sewers. The average life expectancy is around 40; the country has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.

To which Randy Paul adds:

Angola, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is extraordinarily rich in natural resources. Poverty should simply not exist there.

Which reminds me, again, that poverty and wealth in any given country have little relationship to the natural resources present. As one might suspect, Angola has a national oil company, Sonangol. That government officials and oil company executives are both living well, then, is no coincidence.

Contrast Angola with Hong Kong, with no natural resources to speak of, and draw your own conclusions as to the sources of wealth and poverty.

Posted by Walter at December 5, 2003 08:26 AM