Die meeste mense van Zimbabwe is swart. En kyk net hoe lyk die land.
Die meeste mense van Angola is ook swart. En kyk net hoe lyk die land (aanhaling):
With $53-billion in foreign direct investment and with oil revenues estimated to increase to $20-billion by 2010, Angola's economic growth is galloping ahead at a whopping pace. The International Monetary Fund estimates that economic growth will top 40% over the next two years, making it one of the most happening economies in the world.
According to the IMF in 2005 Angola recorded a GDP of $37,2-billion, with the economy growing at 20,6%, mostly due to huge foreign investment in its hydrocarbon industry, which has overtaken Nigeria's as Africa's biggest oil producer. Exports - mostly hydrocarbons, diamonds, gas, coffee, sisal, fish, timber and cotton - brought $24-billion into the economy, while imports of machinery, electronic equipment, vehicles, spares, medical supplies, military equipment, food and textiles cost $15,1-billion in 2005.
But the economy is growing so fast that economic data is overtaken by reality as soon as it is published. Heavily subsidised fuel prices - a litre of petrol costs about $0,50, and diesel $0,38 - and an exchange rate that has remained stable for the past three years have contained, but could not completely suppress, the inflation rate, which is running at about 23%.
Flush with cash from high oil prices and with an eye on elections, the Angolan government has embarked on a multibillion dollar rehabilitation of the country's war-ravaged infrastructure on a scale that is often breathtaking.
Blessed with prodigious natural resources of oil, diamonds, and rich agricultural land, the country has the potential to become one of the richest nations in the world.
Its ambitions in this regard are thought to be the main reason why Angola has so far declined to sign the SADC free-trade agreement. Not wishing to do so from a position of relative weakness, Angola fully intends to become a counterweight to regional economic juggernaut South Africa - once it has built up the requisite economic muscle.
Brand-new, dual-lane highways, built by Brazilian, Chinese and South Korean contractors, snake through the country, connecting Luanda with cities in the interior, which could once only be reached by airplane or days of bone-jarring driving over rutted roads.
State-of-the-art fibre-optic telecommunications facilities are now being installed in most of the major cities. Where physical connections are not possible, smaller rural areas can now connect to the outside world via satellite-based communications systems. The government recently signed a $327-million agreement with a Russian company to put its own communications satellite into space, allowing it to beam national television programmes to even the smallest of villages.
The most significant infrastructural development, and the one which has the greatest potential to affect a shift in the regional balances of power - is the rehabilitation of the Benguela Railway Line. An estimated 30 000 Chinese workers have been imported to completely rebuild the line, originally built between 1899 and 1924 and which runs from the Atlanticport of Lobito to the highland plateau surrounding Huambo.
By 1934 the line had been extended all the way into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and its immensely rich copper and cobalt deposits in southern Katanga. The Chinese, who in a separate deal a year ago extended a $500-million soft loan to Kinshasa to rehabilitate the Congolese section of the 3 500km-long railway line, clearly have big ambitions for the Congolese mining industry, and Angola expects to benefit handsomely.
In Luanda, which is creaking under an overburdened and over-crowded infrastructure designed for 400 000 people but home to an estimated five-million Angolans, the scope of reconstruction borders on the audacious. To create more office space in the city centre, an international construction consortium is filling in half the Bay of Luanda while dredging the rest to accommodate cargo ships lined up 50-deep in the outside bay. To reduce the congestion and overcrowding in the city, a satellite city with thousands of apartments and houses is under construction outside Viana, on the south-eastern outskirts of the city, in an oil-for-financing agreement with Beijing. In just one such development an estimated 5 000 apartments in a dozen 20-storey blocks are rising from the raw red earth, resembling something from the sci-fi movie Brazil.
The city itself resembles one huge construction site, with construction cranes - manned by thousands of Chinese imported as part of the $8-billion oil-backed Chinese loan scheme - racing to complete luxury office blocks, condominiums and recreational areas such as cinemas and gymnasiums. In anticipation of all these new homeowners, shops offering the latest in European interior decor and flat-screen television sets abound.
Êrens in die verte hoor ek ʼn koor van baie "maar, maar, maar's." MAAR, wil ek sê, as die verbysterende syfers van Zim se inflasiekoers jou depress, moenie vergeet dat "the economy (in Angola) is growing so fast that economic data is overtaken by reality as soon as it is published."
Afropessimiste, neem asseblief kennis.
Groetnis
Francois le Roux (HA!Man)