Yearbook 2004
Angola. Although the oil price doubled during the year, giving the state unexpected extra billion in revenue, the vast majority of Angola’s residents remained in utmost poverty.
The total population in Angola is 32,866,283 people in 2020. Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed that more than $ 4 billion of oil revenues, equivalent to 9% of GDP, disappeared in 1997–2002 through corruption and mismanagement. The government dismissed the report as baseless, but HRW later returned with a new report on how the extra oil money was mostly used to repay expensive government loans rather than for investments in infrastructure and social investments.
In many ways, the government found it difficult to convince the outside world of its ambitions to exploit the newly won peace to build the country. State bureaucracy occasionally blocked important food shipments in Luanda’s port and stopped UN air traffic with humanitarian aid. The UN also claimed that the government’s refusal to accept donated genetically modified maize threatened the supply of a few million people.
In trying to gain control of diamond mining, the government formed a new state authority. However, the government was forced to apologize for unnecessarily crippling practices when thousands of people accused of illegal diamond mining were arrested and in many cases expelled.