Land of the state, home of the poor

from the Globe and Mail

by STEPHANIE NOLEN

LUANDA — For sale in a mediocre neighbourhood of Luanda: pokey two-bedroom apartment in a Soviet-style 1960s apartment block. Fourteenth floor, elevator last operated in 1990. Erratic plumbing, no maintenance in the past 22 years. Asking $300,000 (U.S.) And that's about all you're going to get in Luanda for $300,000: Any new one-bedroom apartment in this city starts at $1-million.

Luanda recently snatched the title of "most expensive" away from better-known capitals such as London, Oslo and Tokyo, according to a number of international surveys. The tide of petrodollars surging into the once sleepy port has created a property boom like no other.

Office space in the centre of the congested city sells for about $8,000 a square metre. A well-renovated, two-bedroom apartment downtown rents for $15,000 a month. Luanda is squeezed into a little patch of seafront land, and developers have their eyes on every bit of it that is not presently clad in scaffolding.

But they have a problem: Much of the prime land in the city is covered by musseques, informal settlements that grew up when millions of Angolans poured into Luanda seeking safety during the country's three-decade civil war. Today, the land they occupy is worth billions of dollars as the country's economy grows by more than 20 per cent a year on the strength of vast oil reserves and virgin diamond mines.

More than three-quarters of Luanda's residents, nearly four million people, live in the informal settlements, and these are grim. Most have no sanitation services; people must buy water from tanker trucks for nearly $1 a bucket. Infant and maternal mortality rates are some of the worst in the world. Many of the slums have no schools; when they do, they lack teachers, desks and books.

The government has an initiative under way to move people from the worst settlements and into new houses, but these are built in planned communities 30 kilometres or more outside the city (where affordable land is available). The slum dwellers complain that, out there, they are deprived of all opportunity to do the informal trading through which most earn a living in the city.

"If they take me to a faraway place, how am I going to survive? I might have a better house, but can I eat the walls?" asked Miquel Domingos Vunge, 34, a security guard who must also work selling used shoes and as a porter in the market in order to feed his two daughters.

They live in a two-metre by two-metre shack, built of sheet metal and nails held in place with beer bottle caps, in Boa Vista. The slum is built on a heap of garbage next to some of the city's most upscale residences, and abuts the Luanda port, which is being dramatically expanded to service the snarl of oil tankers in the harbour.

The government, possibly concerned about Mr. Vunge's precarious home but certainly pushed by developers (who are often partners with senior officials), is keen to move the likes of him and his neighbours: Human Rights Watch documented 18 mass evictions, which displaced an estimated 20,000 people and destroyed 3,000 houses, between 2002 and 2006. The evictions then slowed as the government geared up for a historic election held on the weekend, but forced removals are widely expected to resume now that the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been returned to office in a landslide.

Yet some people here say there is a solution that would work for everybody: Give slum dwellers such as Mr. Vunge title to their land. Then the next resort developer or condominium project that comes through will have to buy it, putting money into the pockets of the evicted squatters instead of driving them penniless off the only real asset they have.

"Of course change is going to come to the city, everyone knows this and accepts this," said Willy Piassa, who manages an urban-poverty program for Development Workshop, Angola's oldest aid organization. "But what we're trying to get people talking about is how this change should happen. We are talking about land title, not just expropriating. It means paying fair compensation."

This question of giving the poor title to squatted land has come up in other parts of the developing world, and has been tried with varying success. Mr. Piassa and his colleagues argue that Luanda is a good environment for it, because there are large amounts of money available, both public and private, and many skilled entrepreneurs in the informal sector who could do a great deal with a small cash infusion.

His organization is working with government to draft new land-title legislation, and he said the idea has been well received by some senior government figures. None were available to speak about the issue, a sensitive one in the days around the election.

Activists such as Mr. Piassa say giving people new houses and title to the land on which they are built is one important step, but also unfair, given that multimillion-dollar condominiums and hotels will go on the land where slums are demolished, and developers will profit hugely.

"The question is, can you do this in way which benefits not just a small group of people, but a lot of people? I think so." What's more, he said, the government has an opportunity to help people out of poverty by making sure the property rights of slum dwellers are recognized; the state could effect a wealth transfer that would allow people to better educate their children, or to invest capital in a small business.

"If they gave me some money, as well as a house, then I could earn a living," said Mr. Vunge, who thinks he could expand his shoe business into a second-hand clothing shop.

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