Business Succes, Angola-style: Postcolonial Politics and the Rise and Rise of Sonangol.

This paper investigates a paradoxical case of business cuccess in one of the world's worst-governed states, Angola. Founded in 1976 as the essential tool of the Angolan end of the oil business, Sonangol, the national oil company, was from the very start protected from the dominant (both predatory and centrally planned) logic of Angola's political economy. Throughout its first years, the pragmatic senior management of Sonangol accumulated technical and managerial experience, often in partnership with Western oil and consulting firms. By the time the ruling party dropped Marxism in the early 1990s, Sonangol was the key domestic actor in the economy, an island of competence thriving in tendem with the implosion of most other Angolan state institutions. However, the growning sophistication of Sonangol (now employing thousands of people, active in four continents, and controlling a vast parallel budget of offshore accounts and myriad assets) has not led rto the benign development outcomes one ould expect from the successful 'capacity building' of the last thirty years. Instead, Sonangol has primarly been at the service of the presidency and its rentier ambitions. Alongst other themes, the paper seeks to highlight the extent to which a nominal 'failed state' can be successful amidst widesprread human destitution provided that basic tools for elite empowerment (in this case, Sonangol and the means of coercicion) exist to ensure the viability of incumbents.