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war has made state and nation building almost
impossible. Post-independent Angola continues to
experience the absence of robust democratic means
of venting disenchantment with government policies
and measures. In such a situation of political failure,
the MPLA state depends on power, war and resource
capture to secure its undemocratic grip over society ±
all variables incorporated into the triangular model. As
mentioned before, the state did not hesitate to recruit
aid in the form of private mercenary armies to marginalize
the opposition. The problem is that military
solutions are generally short-term, invariably abusive
of human rights and inevitably fail to heal the underlying
causes of state failure (Messiant 1998:151±153;
New African Yearbook 1999:26; Global Witness 1998;
Mail and Guardian 12 May 1999:1).
It suffices to say that the sustained ability of FARC,
ELN and UNITA to act as `de facto' rival government
in sizeable areas under their control also contributes to
the state's security failure. In the case of Colombia,
FARC and the ELN control and administer nearly half
of the territory; organize their own local elections;
patrol roads and waterways; collect taxes, and hold
trials of suspected criminals. Their counterpart, UNI-
TA, cannot boast of the same magnitude of power and
control (Sweeney 1999:3).
Socio-economic failure
Angola and Colombia's socio-economic failure experiences
have different origins. In Angola, the MPLA
government initially favoured the classical Soviet
model of development, imposing radical collectivization
and state-controlled industrialization with little
room for gradualism. About 65 per cent of GDP were
controlled by the state between 1976 and 1985. In the
country, Angolans were cut off arbitrarily from their
traditional tribal structures and beliefs. Instead of
uniting all segments of socio-economic society, the
state alienated large sub-ethnic tribes and the farming
community through its centralized development policy.
The latter began to adjudge the MPLA in the same
light as their Portuguese predecessors, while many
considered UNITA as the new `liberator'. The prolonged
civil war that followed made socio-economic
failure and collapse inevitable, disrupting state structures
responsible for food and other aid disbursement,
and forcing thousands of people from their agricultural
land. Production suffered in every sector, with
agriculture, the livelihood of most Angolans, the
hardest hit. Agricultural sector collapse did also have
dire consequences for the nutrition and health status
of the population, worsened by severe rural income
decline. Instead of producing food surpluses, people
have been forced into subsistence farming with little
or no export capacity. Central government could no
longer adequately facilitate and secure the availability
of consumer goods. A dynamic private sector was
almost non-existent.
With increased poverty and infrastructural destruction,
the state was no longer able to secure domestic
taxation income, thus creating greater dependency on
the Soviet bloc for its economic survival. The `minivortex'
created by state failure during the Cold War era
developed into a full blown war, due to increased
Soviet and Cuban political, economic and military
influence in Angola. Fear of communism in the US and
South Africa was followed by increasingly destructive
overt and covert military support and backing of
UNITA. However, superpower withdrawal following
the end of the Cold War, did not bring an end to the
long-term degenerating process of socio-economic
failure in Angola. Instead, the protracted civil war and
its socio-economic destruction continuing, new `nonideological'
state (and nonstate actor) survival strategies
merely saw an increased shift towards resource
capture, control and exploitation, allowing them to
`hang on'. For most Angolans, the weak MPLA state
and government has been no better at generating
resources and stabilizing allocation for sustained
socio-economic development than was its predecessor
± so it relies even more on control and coercion. In
the absence of strong and dynamic government
institutions and the physical infrastructure in a state
of disarray, recent trade liberalization policies have
been unable to generate socio-economic reconstruction
beyond the oil production sector. Furthermore,
foreign revenues from this sector have been selectively
mis-allocated to exclusively benefit e lite groups.
Socio-economic failure has also given rise to a
situation where the informal economy tends to take
over, overshadowing the formal economy in its
transactions and escaping the control of the state
(Messiant 1998:151; Zartman 1995:8±9; Fituni 1995).
Angola, and to a lesser extent Colombia's economic
failure can be attributed to their inability to benefit
from enhanced market opportunities created by global
trade liberalization, stimulating a demand for exports.
On the one hand, as primary commodity exporters
both countries have experienced mixed fortunes.
While the recovery of crude oil prices resulted in a
large surge in the value of exports (crude oil and
petroleum products are among Angola and Colombia's
main export commodities), the same could not
be said of the agricultural commodity sector (e.g.
cassava, bananas, coffee, cotton, sugarcane). Colombia,
for example, is the world's second-largest coffee
producer, after Brazil. Growth in world market
demand for agricultural commodities has lagged
behind that of value-added industrial goods, while
industrialized countries have continuously boosted
their own supply capacity through the application of
new technology. To protect their domestic markets,
industrialized countries have also resorted to restrictive
trade measures such as quotas and tariffs. The
result: downward pressure on, for example, coffee and
cotton prices, as well as limited market accessibility.
ISSN 0256±6060±Unisa Lat. Am. Rep. 16(2) 2000 21