Pledge to allow donor monitoring of funds

Angola has assured prospective donors that they would be allowed to manage and monitor financial assistance to the country with the help of their own task teams. "Our only condition is that the administrative task team sent in by the donor country should be small, so that most of the money is available for the beneficiaries, and not spent on administration," explained Angola's ambassador to South Africa, Isaac Maria dos Anjos. Dos Anjos was reacting to the international community's lukewarm response to appeals for a donor conference to reconstruct the war-ravaged country. Since a ceasefire with the UNITA rebel movement in 2002, ending almost three decades of conflict, the government has made several calls for such a conference. International donor organisations have criticised Angola's alleged lack of fiscal transparency and human rights abuse. Last month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed that more than US $4 billion in state oil revenue disappeared from Angolan government coffers between 1997 and 2002, roughly equal to the entire sum the government spent on all social programmes in the same period. According to HRW, "an estimated 900,000 Angolans are still internally displaced. Millions more have virtually no access to hospitals or schools, [and] according to United Nations estimates, almost half of Angola's 7.4 million children suffer from malnutrition". Dos Anjos dismissed the allegations of embezzlement as "propaganda by the West against Africans". "We need assistance - we are not asking the international community to put money in our hands. We need technical assistance and resources to build our agriculture sector, which has collapsed. More than 150,000 commercial farms have closed down since 1975. Our external debt stands at US $7.3 billion, which is equivalent to our annual revenue. But we cannot pay it off, because we need the money to expand our oil exploration," he said. Angola is Africa's second largest oil producer, and a significant exporter to the United States. Petroleum exports account for 80 percent of the country's revenue. General elections are regarded as an important step in cementing Angola's peace process, and the opposition UNITA party has criticised the government's failure to set a date. Dos Anjos implied that the ruling MPLA party was caught in a catch-22 situation. "If we call for elections now, we will win and the opposition will not accept the result, saying it did not have enough time to prepare. If we delay the announcement, we are still being criticised for holding on to power," he said. The last elections were held in 1992. In the presidential poll MPLA leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos beat UNITA's Jonas Savimbi by a narrow margin. Savimbi rejected the result and resumed the civil war. The large number of weapons in private hands has also been noted as a threat to stability, with an estimated third of the country's 14 million population armed. Dos Anjos said most of the civilians had received the guns from the state to defend themselves against UNITA. He asserted that the majority of Angolans "behaved responsibly" with their firearms, "but efforts were on to find ways to get them to hand over the weapons to the government". According to Dos Anjos, voluntary return programmes had begun in Malanje and Cuanza Norte provinces in northern Angola.