Dear Angola,

For a generation your budget has been written in barrels. In 2021 oil rents equalled 28 percent of everything you produced. Yet the same year, 91 percent of the electricity you generated came from renewable sources, most of it from your rivers. You are a petrostate with a clean grid.

Oil paid for the state. It has not yet paid for the Living Line. Health service coverage stands at 44 on the World Health Organization index, the standard furthest below the Living Line. Just over half of you, 55.5 percent, have electricity, even though the power you make is clean. Seven in ten of you live in cities, and in 2022, 62.7 percent of city dwellers lived in slums. A third of you lived below the national poverty line in the last survey, taken in 2018.

“Oil paid for the state. The rivers and the railway can pay for the Living Line.”

A new asset is being built across your map. The Lobito Atlantic Railway runs about 1,300 kilometres from the port of Lobito to Luau on your eastern border, and in December 2024 the United States development finance agency announced a loan of up to $553 million to rebuild it. The World Bank is financing diversification along the same corridor, and lending $500 million in budget support for a green, resilient and diversified economy. A railway carries copper to the sea. It can also carry farm produce to market, power to towns and clinics to the places between them.

The question for Angola is not whether it can earn. It is whether what it earns can be aimed at the standards that hold its people back: care, shelter and power. Every barrel and every tonne of freight is a revenue stream that can be pledged to an outcome a citizen can feel. Oil paid for the state. The rivers and the railway can pay for the Living Line.