controversy corner

well at least there is some half sensible commentarty starting to appear instead of the initial moral indignation.. so i will give you some further material for debate..

Angola gained independence in 1975, following 500 years of Portuguese subjugation and 14 years of armed struggle between the Portuguese colonizers and a splintered Angolan nationalist movement. Upon independence, the nationalist groups - unable to reconcile their respective aspirations for national power but able to draw first on the largesse of respective Cold War sponsors and later on Angola's abundant mineral wealth - plunged into a brutal, 27-year civil war. The two largest groups to emerge during the long period of struggle were the Movimento Popular de Liberta??o de Angola (MPLA) and the Uni?o Nacional para a Independ?ncia Total de Angola (UNITA). The battle between the MPLA and UNITA, interrupted by only a few short periods of peace or "quasi-peace," lasted until the death of UNITA's leader, Jonas Savimbi, in 2002. All told, as many as 1 million Angolans were killed, 4.5 million became internally displaced, and another 450,000 fled the country as refugees.

The prolonged war left the country's infrastructure in ruins, its interior areas heavily mined, and much of its social fabric in tatters. Political and economic institutions, which during colonial times were centralized and geared to serve the interests of a select elite, were also impaired, as the war (and the Marxist-Leninist philosophy the Government adopted during the war) further entrenched the practice of centralized planning and left in its wake large disparities of income and a new elite. The combined effect of the legacies of colonialism and civil war is that Angola compares quite poorly with other countries on measures of good governance. In 2004, Angola scored below the 25th percentile on the six elements of governance measured in the World Bank's "Governance Matters" data sets; and, scored below the 10th percentile on the measures of regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. On Transparency International's "Corruption Perceptions Index," Angola ranks 133 out of 145 countries.

Not surprisingly, Angola also falls near the bottom on most global measures of socio-economic development. The UNDP's most recent Human Development Index places it 166 out of 177 countries. While the World Bank estimates average per capita income at $740, relatively high for sub-Saharan Africa, Angola's poverty reduction strategy (Estrat?gia de Combate ? Pobreza [ECP] in Portuguese), notes that 68 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of $1.70 per day, with 28 percent living in extreme poverty on less than $0.70 per day. Angola's health indicators are some of the worst in sub-Saharan Africa: the total fertility rate is estimated to be 7.2 births per woman, average life expectancy is only 40 years, the infant mortality rate is 154 per 1,000 live births, and the under-5 mortality rate is a staggering 260 per 1,000 live births.