Oil production is collapsing in Angola, Africa’s second-largest oil producer, as investment dry up and wells get depleted.
Production has fallen from a peak of 1.9m barrels per day in 2010 to just above 1.4m b/d.
Like Nigeria, Angola has a big problem.
Angola is one the continent’s most oil-dependent nations. It gets some 95 per cent of its export revenues from oil and 70 per cent of tax revenues come from petroleum.
Angola is running out of oil to sell because its oil blocks are being quickly depleted as new investment has all but dried up.
That has had a devastating impact on an economy that was, until a 2014 fall in oil prices compounded the problem of dwindling reserves, among the fastest growing in Africa.
After years of double-digit growth, the third-largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa has failed to grow for four years.
This year it is likely to manage less than 0.5 per cent, below the rate of population growth.
“The goose that lays the golden egg is in trouble,” said Alex Vines, an Angola expert and head of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, a British think-tank.
That prolonged recession has concentrated minds. But it now be too late.
President João Lourenço, who took over as president in 2017 from a predecessor who had eked out 38 years in power, has made it his mission to revive the sector, in a country that had earned a reputation as one of the most corrupt in the world.
