Hummers.

People talk about political corruption being a major problem here, but it wasn`t till one night in Huambo that I saw exactly what that means. That night we went out to a pizza resturant for dinner that had a huge fucking Hummer parked outside. I joked with the waiter, asking if it was his. He said no, it was that guy´s at the next table. We looked over and a chubby guy in his 30´s wearing Lacost sports wear head to foot smiled and came over to chat with us.

"That your Hummer?" I asked
"Yeah, I got two." he replied. "Very expensive."
He was also wearing an ultra bling diamond studded watch. I asked what he did for a living.
"I get stuff for the government."
"What kind of stuff?" I asked.
"Whatever they need."

He asked if we had any plans for the evening and offered to take us to a new bar/club in town. So after our pizza we followed his monster Hummer in our shitty little hire Chevy accross town where he picked up a girl and then went on to this new club. As we entered he was treated like royalty. We sat down and he asked what we wanted to drink. We said beer. Wouldn´t we prefer he bought a bottle of whiskey for the table, he sugested? We politely declined. We got chatting and he told us this girl was one of 67 girlfriends he had. They all had boyfriends but liked him cos he bought them stuff.

Then we asked more about his work. It turns out his uncle had a high up government possition and offered this guys private company fat contracts to procure goods for them, presumably for a sizable kick-back to his uncle. I asked why a government office wasn´t responsible for that - he said "It was to stimulate the private sector in Angola." Yeah, right. After half an hour he tossed the keys to his Hummer to the girl who had sat there saying nothing and she left. Then he told us he was going off to fuck her, we could drink what we wanted but shouldn´t pay as he had a tab there.

So - the work this guy´s private company was doing could clearly be done for a tiny fraction of the cost by a government official on a normal salary, the rest of the money could then be spent on housing, education, health care, social welfare, feeding the starving and homeless kids in the streets - rather than on his two Hummers, diamond watches and €10,000 a week lifestyle.

Angola has unbelievable resourses. Dig a hole almost anywhere and you find oil, diamonds, copper or iron ore, the land is so fertile that if managed properly could feed not only Angola but the whole continent of Africa. But because of this type of corruption most of the population live in mud hut slums, with no running water, electricity, not enough schools for the kids and minimal health care, hungry deasesed children begging in the streets.

Now that´s some fucked up shit right there.