Financial Times publishes op-ed by GPPi fellow on transparency reforms in Angola

In a July 18 commentary for the Financial Times, titled Transparency reforms yield little change, GPPi Fellow Ricardo Soares de Oliveira analyzes the link between transparency reforms in the Angolan public sector, especially the oil industry, and the effects on the country’s governance system.

Just a decade ago, he argues, both international technocrats and human rights activists were aligned in their criticism of the government’s transparency standards and behavior towards the population. The situation has changed since then. After first taking a very protective position towards international actors, Angola’s elite soon started to implement recommended transparency standards, such as the auditing of public accounts or carrying out oil bidding rounds following industry best practice. While the implementation of transparency measures was surely also motivated by the goal of getting better access to international financial markets, Soares de Oliveira identifies ​“the regime’s acknowledgment that many of the measures suggested were good in their own right” as the main reason for the regime’s changing attitude.

Those changes, however, remained on a very technical and superficial level. They helped to attract western businessmen and win plaudits from the International Monetary Fund, in cooperation with which important macroeconomic reforms were adopted. But, as the author argues, they left the area of public expenditure unreformed and just shifted much patronage to less superficial levels. In many cases, the situation of Angola’s elite in comparison to that of the country’s citizens even improved, so that actors from the humanitarian sector are far from being satisfied by the implemented changes.

It is this development which leads Soares de Oliveira to conclude that transparency remains the means to an end, and that ​“you can have an oil-rich state tick all the boxes and come out on the other side without this having any implications whatsoever for the nature of governance and broad-based development.”