LITMIR.BIZ

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and Angolan flags fluttered above Kilamba’s entrance. This was a flagship project for China’s undertaking in Africa: Xi Jinping toured the site while it was under construction in 2010, three years before he ascended from the Chinese vice presidency to the presidency. A vast billboard proclaimed that Citic, the Chinese state-owned conglomerate whose operations span banking, resources and construction, had built the new town. Oversight of the construction had been assigned to Sonangol, which subcontracted the management of the sales of apartments to a company called Delta Imobiliária. Delta was said to belong to the private business empire of Manuel Vicente and General Kopelipa. Both men were perfectly placed to use the power of the public office to dispense personal gain for themselves, just as they had been assigned concealed stakes in Cobalt’s oil venture. Kilamba was, in the words of the Angolan campaigner Rafael Marques de Morais, ‘a veritable model for African corruption’.²⁸

      Hexplosivo Mental raps with intensity – brow furrowed, left hand gripping the microphone, right hand chopping through the air. Like Public Enemy and other exponents of protest rap before him, he makes it his business to attack the abuses of the mighty. A rangy figure in a hoodie, he gives loud and lyrical voice to dissent in Angola that had long been mostly whispered, exhorting a counterpunch against the ruling class’s monopoly on wealth and power with tracks like ‘How It Feels to Be Poor’, ‘Reaction of the Masses’, and ‘Be Free’.

      One Tuesday in May 2012 a group of ten young Angolans gathered at the Luanda home of one of a new generation of politically conscious rappers. Hexplosivo Mental was among them. They had been involved in organizing the small but concerted demonstrations that had rattled the regime. In the vanguard of protest against the Futungo’s power, the group had had brushes with the authorities before, notably when the police dispersed their demos.

      This was not the first time the house had been raided. But the band of fifteen men who turned up at just after ten that night wanted to teach the dissidents a more serious lesson.²⁹ Elections at which dos Santos planned to ensure a thumping victory were three months away, and the deployment of oil money alone would not be enough to neutralize public displays of opposition to his rule. Bursting through the door, the men bore down upon their victims with iron bars and machetes, breaking arms, fracturing skulls and spilling blood. Their work done, they zoomed away in Land Cruisers. One account of the attack alleged that the vehicles belonged to the police – evidence that the assailants were part of one of the pro-regime militias whose task was to instil fear ahead of the polls.

      No one died that night, but when I spoke to Hexplosivo Mental weeks later, his badly injured arm was still being treated. We arranged to meet discreetly at a busy roundabout in Luanda. I waited thirty minutes or so before he called to say he had had to go back to the hospital. When he spoke later by phone the young rapper put it simply: ‘Before, we did not know how to protest. Now we are growing.’

      There were some serious anti-government demonstrations in the run-up to the elections, but if Hexplosivo Mental and his comrades hoped to mount a challenge to an entrenched regime on the scale of the Arab Spring revolutions that had erupted far to the north, they did so in vain. The amount of official funding available to political parties was slashed from $1.2 million in the legislative elections of 2008 to $97,000. Meanwhile, the MPLA was said to have spent $75 million on its campaign.³⁰

      The MPLA has genuine support, especially in the coastal cities that were its bastion during the war and among those Angolans so traumatized by the conflict that they see a vote for any incumbent, no matter how venal, as the option that carries the smallest risk of a return to hostilities. The regime leaves little to chance, dominating the media, appointing its stooges to run the institutions that conduct elections, co-opting opposition politicians, and intimidating opponents. Kopelipa presided over an electoral apparatus that left 3.6 million people unable to cast their ballots – almost as many votes as the MPLA received.³¹ The MPLA’s share of the vote fell nine points compared with the 2008 election, but it still recorded a landslide victory, with 72 per cent. Under a new system the first name on the winning party’s list would become president. More than three decades after he took power, dos Santos could claim he had a mandate to rule, despite the findings of a reputable opinion poll that showed he enjoyed the approval of just 16 per cent of Angolans.³²

      In August 2014, three years after the US authorities had begun their corruption investigation into its Angolan deal, Cobalt issued a statement revealing that the Securities and Exchange Commission had given notice that it might launch a civil case against the company.³³ ‘The company has fully co-operated with the SEC in this matter and intends to continue to do so,’ Cobalt announced. Joe Bryant called the SEC’s decision ‘erroneous’ and said Cobalt would continue to develop its Angolan prospects. At the time of writing no proceedings have been brought, and Cobalt continues to deny wrongdoing, as it has throughout. Cobalt’s share price, which took a billion-dollar hit after news of its secret Angolan partners emerged and declined even further after some mediocre drilling results, fell another 10 per cent when the SEC’s warning emerged.

      Cobalt’s founders have already turned a tidy profit. Between February 2012, when Cobalt revealed that it was under formal investigation, and that April, when Kopelipa and Vicente confirmed to me that they and Dino held stakes in Nazaki, Joe Bryant sold 860,000 of his shares in the company for $24 million. Between the start of the corruption investigation and the end of 2013 – during which period Cobalt also struck oil in the Gulf of Mexico – Goldman Sachs, a joint Riverstone-Carlyle fund, and First Reserve, another big American private equity firm, each made sales of Cobalt stock worth a net $1 billion.³⁴

      I tried to find out who had taken over the stake in Nazaki that, according to Vicente, he, Kopelipa, and Dino had ‘liquidated’ as well as whether their business associates were still shareholders, but neither the trio nor the company itself would tell me. In February 2013 Nazaki transferred half its interest to Sonangol, the state oil company. The official journal did not disclose the size of any fee that Sonangol paid for the stake, but bankers’ valuations indicated it was worth about $1.3 billion, at least fourteen times the amount Nazaki would have been expected to pay in development costs up to that point.³⁵ If any fee was paid, it represented a transfer of funds from the coffers of a state where the vast majority live in penury to a private company linked to the Futungo. Then, in 2014, three weeks after Cobalt disclosed that it was facing possible proceedings by the SEC, the company announced it had severed ties with Nazaki and with Alper, whose ownership remains undisclosed. Both companies transferred their stakes in Cobalt’s venture to Sonangol. Again, none of the parties involved revealed what, if any, fees were paid.³⁶

      Cobalt is just one among dozens of companies vying for Angolan crude, and Nazaki was but a single cog in the Futungo’s machine for turning its control over the state into private gain.

      Just before Christmas 2011, as Manuel Vicente was preparing to hand over the reins of Sonangol to his successor and with the expenses of the following year’s election looming, seven international oil companies snapped up operating rights to eleven new blocks in the Atlantic. The acreage was in the ‘presalt’ zone, where Cobalt was already exploring. As in previous bidding rounds in Angola and elsewhere, the companies agreed to pay signature bonuses. These are upfront payments that oil companies make to governments when they win rights to explore a block, often through auctions. The payments are perfectly legal, though frequently the amounts paid are not disclosed. If they were delivered on the sly to officials, such payments would be called bribes; instead, they are deposited in the leaky treasuries of oil states.

      Any Angolans curious to know how much their government had brought in from the auction would be disappointed. Mindful that in 2001 BP had been threatened with ejection after it announced plans to publish some details of its Angolan contracts, the oil companies kept the terms of the bonuses safely shrouded. Norway’s Statoil made something resembling a disclosure. It said its total ‘financial commitment’ for two oil blocks, where it would be the operator of the project, and working interests in three other blocks came to $1.4 billion, ‘including signature bonuses and a minimum work commitment’. The regime’s overall take from the whole bidding round would have been a multiple of that figure.

      Both the Futungo’s business ventures and the state institutions’

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