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THE LOGIC OF AUTHORITARIAN
INDUSTRIAL POLICY: THE CASE OF
ANGOLA’S SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE
NICOLAS LIPPOLIS*
ABSTRACT
The commodity boom witnessed the emergence of ambitious develop-
mental projects in Africa. But in its focus on the distribution of power, the
extant literature struggles to explain the logic driving observed develop-
ment strategies. To fill this gap, this article provides the first comprehensive
study of the Zona Economica ́ Especial de Luanda-Bengo, Angola’s main
industrial project of the post-civil war era. Built at a cost of at least US$1
billion, sprawling over 1.5 million hectares, and comprising establish-
ments imported by the state across multiple sectors, the Zona Economica ́
Especial’s ill-conceived design doomed it to failure from the start. But this
did not hinder its use for elite rent-seeking, supported by the international
networks fed by Angola’s oil wealth. I argue that these outcomes reflect the
ruling MPLA’s typical ‘bifurcated policy style’, marked by a disjuncture
between discourse and policy practice and the competition for the spoils
of the state’s heavy expenditures. Its origins are to be found in the strate-
gies deployed by MPLA leaders to enforce organizational cohesion and to
pursue military and programmatic goals over the course of its long civil
war. I contend that similar analyses could help illuminate the drivers of
industrial policy in other party-based authoritarian regimes.
Introduction
IMPROVED ECONOMIC CONDITIONS SINCE THE EARLY 2000s
have prompted renewed industrialization efforts by African governments,
epitomized by the publication of ambitious, long-term development
*Nicolas Lippolis (nicolas.lippolis@politics.ox.ac.uk) is a doctoral candidate at the
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. The author would
like to thank Manuel Alves da Rocha and the Centre for Studies and Scientific Investigation
of the Catholic University of Angola, as well as the Oxford Martin Programme on African
Governance, for co-hosting a roundtable on Angola’s industrialization in February 2020 in
Luanda, where many of the ideas contained in this article were debated. Fernando Pacheco,
José Oliveira, Manuel Ennes Ferreira, and Miguel Gomes have also provided invaluable help
during fieldwork in Angola over the years. Last but not least, the author would like to thank
four anonymous reviewers and the editors of African Affairs, who were extremely generous in
providing comments that substantially improved this article.
595
596 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
visions1 and the appearance of a discourse centred on Africa’s ‘emer-

gence’.2 In the wake of this developmentalist revival, students of political
economy have sought to understand variations in African governments’
abilities to spur economic development. This literature comes in two main
varieties. One strand foregrounds the centralization of power and elites’

time horizons, which, by allowing elites to internalize the benefits of
economic growth, incentivize them to invest in long-term economic trans-
formation.3 A second strand, ‘political settlements analysis’, examines how
the distribution of political power, ruling elites’ material interests, bureau-
cratic capacity, and producer capabilities combine to yield industrial policy
outcomes, seen as key for fostering economic transformation.4
Uniting the separate strands of the recent political economy literature is
a conception of interests as materially determined and a rationalist ontol-
ogy whereby actors are assumed to consistently pursue the most efficient
means towards their goals. In conjunction, these features typify a distinc-
tively ‘structuralist’ approach to social explanation.5 Yet, such structuralist
explanations fail to acknowledge the basic constructivist point on the social
construction of interests.6 Moreover, by underemphasizing the distinction
between the drivers of policy adoption and those of successful implementa-
tion, they pre-emptively dismiss the possibility of sincere, but nonetheless
failed, developmental efforts.7 In fact, in a recent contribution, Mushtaq
Khan, the originator of political settlements theory, claims his framework to
be primarily focused on policy implementation, in contrast to policy design,
which is ostensibly influenced by ‘ideologies, or international pressures and
other contingent factors’.8
1. Pierre Jacquemot, ‘L’industrialisation en Afrique en question: Des désillusions à un

nouveau volontarisme’, Afrique contemporaine 266, 2 (2018), pp. 29–53.
2. Didier Péclard, Antoine Kernene and Guive Khan-Mohammad, ‘Etats ́ d’émergence. Le
gouvernement de la croissance et du développement en Afrique’, Critique Internationale 4, 89
(2020), pp. 9–27.
3. Tim Kelsall, Business, Politics and the state in Africa: Challenging the orthodoxies on growth
and transformation (Zed Books, London, 2013); David Booth and Frederick Golooba-Mutebi,
‘Developmental patrimonialism? The case of Rwanda’, African Affairs 111, 444 (2012),
pp. 379–403.
4. The seminal contribution to this literature is Lindsay Whitfield, Ole Therkildsen, Lars
Buur and Anne Mette Kjaer, The politics of African industrial policy: A comparative perspective
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015). For a review, see Pritish Behuria, Lars Buur
and Hazel Gray, ‘Studying political settlements in Africa’, African Affairs 116, 464 (2017),
pp. 508–525.
5. See Craig Parsons, How to map arguments in political science (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2007).
6. Mark Blyth, ‘Structures do not come with an instruction sheet: Interests, ideas, and
progress in political science’, Perspectives on Politics 1, 4 (2003), pp. 695–706.
7. Thandika Mkandawire, ‘Thinking about developmental states in Africa’, Cambridge
Journal of Economics 25, 3 (2001), p. 291.
8. Mushtaq H. Khan, ‘Political settlements and the analysis of institutions’, African Affairs
117, 469 (2018), p. 644.
THE LOGIC OF AUTHORITARIAN INDUSTRIAL POLICY 597
Khan’s claims notwithstanding, there is reason to believe that policy

design too can be the subject of systematic analysis. In fact, the impacts
of conflict on movement discourse and ideology, as well as on individuals’
personal ties and psychology, loom large in studies of African authoritar-
ian regimes ruled by former liberation movements.9 Among these post-

liberation regimes, a group of ‘illiberal state-builders’ stood out during
the commodity boom period for the ambition of their developmental
projects.10 By vanquishing alternative power centres through decisive vic-
tories in civil conflict, these regimes were left unencumbered—at least for
some time—by opposing social forces in their efforts to build authoritar-
ian dispensations. Illiberal state-builders’ relatively unconstrained scope for
action, together with their ‘articulate development discourse’,11 offers par-
ticularly fertile ground for developing a non-structuralist perspective on the
drivers of industrial policy. But while the excellent single-country studies
of their political economies stress the import of ruling movements’ histor-
ical trajectories for contemporary development strategies, they offer few
generalizable interpretations.12
The underexplored case of Angola can be useful for theory—building on
the links between authoritarian trajectories and the design of industrial pol-
icy. Since achieving power in 1975, the promotion of industrialization has
been a central part of the MPLA’s (People’s Movement for the Liberation
of Angola) legitimizing rhetoric.13 Yet, the oil-rich state has resoundingly
failed to deliver any tangible results in industrialization. One could read-
ily attribute this failure to the corruption that permeates state action. The
end of its 27-year civil war in 2002 and a pronounced increase in oil income
from 2004 enabled the Angolan government to undertake a massive project
of post-war reconstruction, including an ambitious agenda of import-
substituting industrialization. Observers have pointed to how the industrial
‘mega-projects’ of the commodity boom period often served as conduits
for elite rent-seeking. But while political settlements and associated the-
ories could account for the detrimental effect of rent-seeking interests on
Angola’s industrial performance, they would struggle to explain why rent-
seeking was accompanied by a committed developmentalist rhetoric, even
as the shortcomings of the government’s industrial policies were obvious to
most onlookers. Furthermore, theories of ‘developmental patrimonialism’
9. See, for example, Jonathan Fisher, East Africa after liberation: Conflict, security and the state
since the 1980s (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020).
10. Will Jones, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira and Harry Verhoeven, ‘Africa’s illiberal state-
builders’ (Working Paper Series No. 89, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, 2013).
11. Ibid., p. 5.
12. See, for example, Toni Weis, Vanguard capitalism: Party, state, and market in the EPRDF’s
Ethiopia (University of Oxford, unpublished DPhil dissertation, 2016).
13. Manuel Ennes Ferreira, A indústria em tempo de guerra (Angola, 1975–91) (Cosmos,
Lisbon, 1999).
598 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
are unable to explain why the MPLA, in spite of its uncontested control
over Angola’s political economy and the intent of consolidating its rule over
the long term, ultimately proved to be unable to foster economic transfor-
mation. This provides evidence of how, by treating success as their only
yardstick, existing frameworks lack the tools to analyse the political logics

governing patently unsuccessful industrial policy.
By virtue of relatively unconstrained state action during the commod-
ity boom period and a yawning gap between discourse and outcomes,
Angola’s experience provides good visibility for the ‘recurring practices
and instituted belief systems’ shaping authoritarian decision-making.14 In
addition, and to a larger extent than kindred regimes in Ethiopia and
Rwanda, Angola’s traumatic history of settler colonialism, exile politics,
independence war, civil conflict, and Marxism-Leninism have exposed it
in accentuated form to many of the same formative influences received by
other African liberation movements. It thus qualifies as an ‘extreme case’
that can assist in formulating explanations able to travel to contexts where
the relevant mechanisms are less obvious.15
Why is the MPLA so keen on industrialization despite its history of
repeated failure? What logics drove industrial policy design during the
post-civil war period? How did the interaction between policy design and
rent-seeking interests shape implementation? This article seeks to answer
these questions through a case study of the Zona Economica ́ Especial de
Luanda-Bengo (ZEE), Angola’s main industrial project of the post-war
period. Built at a cost of at least US$1 billion and originally sprawling over
1.5 million hectares, the ZEE contains over 50 factories imported by the
state to promote import-substituting industrialization. Until 2020, most
factories were managed by the national oil company, Sonangol. The ZEE’s
size, cost, and ambition certainly place it among Africa’s most daring indus-
trialization efforts to date. Moreover, its import-substituting intent, the
pre-eminent role of the state, and the use of Sonangol to pursue regime
goals mirror longstanding MPLA practices. Nevertheless, the project is
widely recognized as a massive failure, again reflecting the outcomes of
Angola’s broader industrialization efforts.
Despite the ZEE’s centrality and representativeness for Angola’s indus-
trial policy, the project receives only three-page treatments in works
of Ricardo Soares de Oliveira and Jesse Salah Ovadia,16 while other
14. Ash Amin and Ronen Palan, ‘Towards a non-rationalist international political economy’,
Review of International Political Economy 8, 4 (2001), p. 564.
15. John Gerring, Case study research: Principles and practices (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2017), pp. 68–72.
16. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and beggar land: Angola since the civil war (Hurst,
London, 2015), pp. 63–65; Jesse Salah Ovadia, ‘State-led industrial development, struc-
tural transformation and elite-led plunder: Angola (2002–2013) as a developmental state’,
Development Policy Review 36, 5 (2018), pp. 599–601.
publications on Angolan industrialization do not mention it even in pass-

ing.17 As noted by Soares de Oliveira, more detailed research on the ZEE
was until recently hindered by highly restrictive security policies. The arrival
of a new ZEE administration in 2018, the onset of a World Bank–sponsored
privatization programme in 2019, and associated gains in transparency

offered a rare window of opportunity for research. Still, access to the fac-
tories remained tightly controlled and was only possible through informal
channels. By 2022, this window was closing, as almost all Sonangol-owned
factories had been privatized.
This article provides the first detailed study of the ZEE based on inter-
views with those directly involved in the project, including its current
CEO. The bulk of the data presented here comes from interviews with
ZEE firm managers carried out in firm premises in January 2020, con-
taining both structured and semi-structured questions, yielding data on 16
firms. I complement these with information obtained from an additional 66
semi-structured interviews with policymakers, journalists, academics, and
businesspeople, conducted between 2018 and 2022. Most interviews took
place under conditions of anonymity, as common in the Angolan context.
This article also utilizes other written sources, including official documen-
tation, journalistic coverage, and an unpublished study by the Centre for
Studies and Scientific Investigation of the Catholic University of Angola
(CEIC-UCAN). Where possible, I used these different sources to triangu-
late the information obtained through interviews. The interviews cited here
were all conducted in Portuguese, so the quotations provided below are my
direct translations. A similar rule applies to quotations of written material.
Capitalizing on rare levels of access, this article provides a wealth of new
empirical information on the MPLA’s hallmark industrial policies, includ-
ing previously uncovered documentation revealing the ultimate beneficia-
ries of publicly funded factories. I show that industrial policy in Angola
is the product of a ‘bifurcated’ policy style, whereby policies inspired by
outmoded statist ideas and financed by a changing portfolio of external
resources are treated by party elites as the spoils of a system of preben-
dal competition. By foregrounding movement ideology, the relationship
between political and technocratic elites, and the sources of organizational
cohesion, my theory of policy styles is of wider applicability to party-based
authoritarian regimes in Africa and further afield. I thus make novel con-
tributions to the study of authoritarianism and the political economy of
industrialization.
The rest of this article is structured as follows. The next section pro-
vides a theoretical exegesis of the concept of ‘policy style’. This is followed
17. See, for instance, Christina Wolf, ‘Industrialization in times of China: Domestic-market
formation in Angola’, African Affairs 116, 463 (2017), pp. 435–461.
600 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
by an overview of the evolution of economic policymaking and its atten-

dant policy style in post-independence Angola. The third section describes
the origins of the ZEE. The following section examines the ZEE’s design,
laying out the constituencies it serves. The fifth section explores the polit-
ical economy of implementation. In the concluding section, I outline

some implications of the analysis for thinking about industrial policy in
party-based authoritarian regimes.
Policy styles in authoritarian regimes

As flagged by revisionist critiques of the ‘developmental state’ literature,
understanding the historical origins of policymaking requires engaging with
how it is shaped by the ‘struggle involved in shaping institutions, ruling
coalitions, and policy choices’.18 In the case of authoritarian ruling par-
ties, formative experiences such as armed revolutions, wars of ‘national
liberation’, or counter-insurgency are likely to exert an outsized effect on
patterns of governance following the termination of conflict.19 However,
extant studies lack well-developed explanations for how parties’ political
trajectories shape the mechanics of economic policymaking. As will be
shown below, inspiration for filling this gap can be drawn from research
on insurgents and post-insurgent regimes, particularly Communist China.
In an influential study, Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry claim
that policymaking in contemporary China continues to bear the imprint
of a ‘guerrilla policy style’, developed over the course of armed struggle,
that encourages ‘decentralized initiative within the framework of central-
ized political authority’.20 Subsequent contributions explore the building
blocks of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policy style, including
the patterns of interaction between political and technocratic elites at the
centre of government;21 the process through which high-level directives
are translated into specific policies;22 and how the structure of the politi-
cal system shapes local-level implementation.23 Undergirding this complex
18. David C. Kang, ‘South Korean and Taiwanese development and the new institutional
economics’, International Organization 49, 3 (1995), p. 567.
19. Steven R. Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, ‘Beyond patronage: Violent struggle, ruling party
cohesion, and authoritarian durability’, Perspectives on Politics 10, 4 (2012), pp. 869–889.
20. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, ‘Embracing uncertainty: Guerrilla pol-
icy style and adaptive governance in China’, in Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry
(eds), Mao’s invisible hand: The political foundations of adaptive governance in China (Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2011), p. 7.
21. Sebastian Heilmann, ‘China’s core executive: Pursuing national agendas in a fragmented
polity’, in Vivienne Shue and Patricia Thornton (eds), To govern China: Evolving practices of
power (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017), pp. 57–81.
22. Sebastian Heilmann, Red swan: How unorthodox policy making facilitated China’s rise
(Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 2018).
23. Anna L. Ahlers and Gunter Schubert, ‘Effective policy implementation in China’s local
state’, Modern China 41, 4 (2015), pp. 372–405.
policy process is a ‘shared understanding about political agency’ that draws

on the CCP’s early intellectual influences and ‘conceives of policy-making
as a process of ceaseless change’, helping explain the party’s remarkable
adaptive capacity over the course of its history.24
Despite the major differences between the Chinese political system and

most African ones, by highlighting the institutional logics of policymaking,
the studies discussed above point to the variables relevant for explaining
patterns of continuity and change in authoritarian policymaking. Accord-
ingly, in what follows, I outline how to adapt Heilmann and Perry’s
‘retrospective governance’ approach to the African context by discussing
three relevant organizational characteristics: the ideas held by ruling elites;
the process through which policy goals are set, including the nature of the
actors involved; and how a party’s organizational machinery converts these
goals into concrete actions and policies. These steps broadly correspond to
the stages of the policy process as conceived by the public policy studies
inspiring Heilmann and Perry’s work.25
Like the CCP, the early leaders of Africa’s ‘anti-colonial’, ‘majority
rule’, and ‘reform’ rebels were mostly issued from countries’ educational
elites and were often bred in highly politicized, leftist university milieux.26
Once in power, the regimes built by former rebels were profoundly influ-
enced by the worldviews moulded in these debates.27 But few studies have
paid sustained attention to the mechanisms linking ideas to policymaking
outcomes, particularly with regard to the role of technocracy. As shown
by the CCP’s trajectory, the political role of technocrats often has roots in
institutional choices made at critical junctures.28 If we are to understand
how policy is set, we must identify the relevant (elite) actors, the capacities
in which they are involved, and what beliefs and agendas they bring to the
fray.29 While such close observation will often pose difficulties in author-
itarian countries, previous studies of decision-making in different policy
areas can offer insights into the processes likely to be operative, even in
the absence of direct evidence ascertaining the individuals involved in a
particular decision.30
In theorizing about policy implementation, I build on Frank Dobbin’s
account of the parallels between the institutions organizing economic life
24. Heilmann and Perry, ‘Embracing uncertainty’.

25. Michael Howlett, M. Ramesh and Anthony Perl, Studying public policy: Principles and
processes (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020).
26. William Reno, Warfare in independent Africa (Cambridge University Press, New York,
2011).
27. Fisher, East Africa after liberation.
28. Heilmann, ‘China’s core executive’.
29. John L. Campbell, ‘Ideas, politics, and public policy’, Annual Review of Sociology 28
(2002), pp. 21–38.
30. Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos and Jody LaPorte, ‘Process tracing and the problem of
missing data’, Sociological Methods & Research 50, 3 (2021), pp. 1407–1435.
602 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
and those used to sustain political order.31 I contend that patterns of pol-
icy implementation will closely match the means used by party leaders to
enforce organizational cohesion and effectiveness. For instance, in China,
the CCP’s territorial segmentation called for the conferral of autonomy to
local units in order to further military and socio-economic goals during the

civil war.32 More generally, research on armed insurgencies suggests that
pre-existing networks of collective action facilitate the creation of cohe-
sive organizations.33 This resonates with research on African insurgencies,
which sees pre-existing cultural attitudes towards authority and leader-
ship and the existence of social spaces amenable to strengthening group
bonds as important determinants of insurgent cohesion.34 These accounts
also point to the formative role of external actors. Cohesive groups will
see their effectiveness further reinforced by an influx of resources, while
fragmented organizations will fall prey to an accentuation of infighting
and factional struggle.35 Diplomatic efforts to get hold of these resources
will in themselves also shape the nature of the insurgency by determining
the ideological compromises it might have to make, the accountability of
the leadership to its members and to the population, and the institutional
structures erected to administer sources of external support.36
The approaches to studying policy generation and implementation
sketched out above can be combined in a theory of policy styles that
explains institutional development in terms of the ‘relational substrata of
people’s actual lives’.37 During periods of institutional flux, political leaders
armed with particular worldviews will deploy existing sources of authority
to maintain organizational cohesion and pursue political, military, and pro-
grammatic goals. To understand the mechanics of a policy style, we must
identify the process through which strategic decisions are made and the
means—material, institutional, and ideational—used to enforce organiza-
tional cohesion. The same mechanisms are likely to persist over time due
to ‘locked-in’ patterns of collective action,38 thereby continuing to shape
policy design and patterns of implementation. For the rest of this article, I
31. Frank Dobbin, Forging industrial policy:The United States, Britain, and France in the railway
age (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994).
32. Heilmann, Red swan, pp. 52–53.
33. Paul Staniland, ‘Organizing insurgency: Networks, resources, and rebellion in South
Asia’, International Security 37, 1 (2012), pp. 142–177.
34. Christopher Clapham, ‘Introduction: Analysing African insurgencies’, in Christopher
Clapham (ed.), African guerrillas (James Currey, Oxford, 1998), pp. 1–18; Reno, Warfare in
independent Africa.
35. Staniland, ‘Organizing insurgency’.
36. Christopher Clapham, Africa and the international system: The politics of state survival
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996), pp. 208–243.
37. John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, ‘Robust action and the rise of the Medici,
1400–1434’, American Journal of Sociology 98, 6 (1993), pp. 1259–1319.
38. Ibid.
illustrate the analytical utility of this framework by first describing the ori-
gins of the MPLA’s bifurcated policy style, before showing how it can help
us understand the ZEE’s trajectory.

Economic policymaking in independent Angola
The roots of economic policymaking in the MPLA’s Angola can be traced
to how the movement’s sociological origins crystallized into relatively sta-
ble, although feebly institutionalized, patterns of decision-making over the
course of its pre- and post-independence history. I argue that the MPLA
evolved over time towards a policy style marked by a disjuncture between
its nationalist and statist official discourse and the realities of pervasive
rent-seeking.
The ‘disarticulated’ and highly unequal nature of late colonial Angolan
society hindered the formation of a unified nationalist organization.39 In
the case of the MPLA, this also created tension within the movement itself.
Founded in 1960 by mostly mestiço (mixed-race) intellectuals exiled in
Europe and led from 1962 by the black doctor and poet Agostinho Neto,
the MPLA struggled from the start to reconcile the alliance between ‘cre-
oles’ and ‘new assimilados’ that formed its sociological backbone.40 Party
cohesion had reached a nadir by 1974, but the MPLA was saved from
dismemberment by the irruption of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution on
25 April 1974. Subsequent diplomatic efforts sought to keep the party
together to participate in the transitional government and jostle with rival
movements for control of the independent state. But upon its arrival in
Luanda, the MPLA leadership struggled to incorporate within its party
structures the plethora of left-leaning political groups that had sprouted
within late colonial society. This political quandary tragically unravelled in
the wake of the aborted Nito Alves coup on 27 May 1977, when large-
scale internal repression consolidated the MPLA’s adhesion to a highly
autocratic brand of Marxism-Leninism.41
Thereafter, intra-party governance increasingly came to rely on
Agostinho Neto’s arbitration between the ‘left’ factions of the party, com-
posed mainly of more educated and ideologically aware mestiço and creole
cadres, and the ‘right’ wing of mostly new assimilado black Africans.
39. Franz Wilhelm Heimer, The decolonization conflict in Angola 1974–76: An essay in political
́
sociology (Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, Geneva, 1979).
40. Christine Messiant, ‘Luanda, 1945-1961: colonisés, société coloniale et engagement
nationaliste’, in Michel Cahen (ed.), « Vilas » et « cidades »: Bourgs et villes en Afrique Lusophone
(L’Harmattan, Paris, 1989), pp. 125–199. The seminal treatment of the MPLA’s early history
is Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali, Guerrilhas e lutas sociais: O MPLA perante si proprio, ́ 1960–1977
(Mercado de Letras Editores, Lisbon, 2018).
41. Mabeko-Tali, Guerrilhas e lutas sociais, pp. 533–635.
604 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
While the former were given control over the party’s discourse, the lat-
ter held greater sway over the praxis of government, advocating for a more
‘pragmatic’ approach that was not completely hostile to private sector activ-
ities.42 Meanwhile, the middle and lower tiers of the party-state saw the
clientelistic incorporation of new individuals, many of them being former

dissidents. To cement his power within this disparate organization, Neto
came to rely on the rotation of cadres across different positions within
the party-state—including attendant pecuniary advantages—according to
identitarian and factional logics, resulting in a ‘patrimonial carrousel’ of
constant personnel changes.43 A corollary of the use of posts to satisfy
political requirements was the diminished role of merit in bureaucratic
appointments,44 leading to the reliance on the ‘increasing and expensive
employment of foreign technicians and skilled cadres’.45
This system was further developed under the leadership of José Eduardo
dos Santos, who acceded to power in 1979 following Neto’s death. Faced
with a series of internal crises, and under the guise of emergency measures
to deal with the aggravating civil war, Dos Santos tightened his stranglehold
over the country’s oil resources, forging a ‘parallel system’ of governance
backed by ‘global networks of support and patronage’ and centred on
Sonangol.46 By 1985, the ‘left’ faction of the MPLA had been definitively
vanquished, while rent-seeking took on ever more unbridled forms in a con-
text of severe economic crisis.47 But in spite of the fading political relevance
of these factional conflicts and of the distinction between their associated
constituencies, their legacies would prove more durable for the party’s
style of policymaking. The striking dissociation of policy formulation from
implementation is already evident in MPLA policy documents from 1980,
which denounce the dismal execution of policy plans owing to indiscipline
and poor management.48 Produced by technical staff of largely creole ori-
gin with a background in the colonial civil service,49 similar diagnoses of the
economic problems afflicting Angola would be repeatedly enunciated over
the following years, but had no impact over industrial planners’ continued
enthusiasm for long and detailed Soviet-style plans.50 The stage was thus
42. Messiant, ‘Luanda’, p. 186; Nuno Vidal, ‘A génese da economia do petroleo ́ e dos
“esquemas” impeditivos do desenvolvimento’, in Nuno Vidal and Justino Pinto de Andrade
(eds), Economia política e desenvolvimento em Angola (Chá de Caxinde, Luanda and Lisbon,
2011), pp. 11–66.
́
43. Vidal, ‘A génese da economia do petroleo’.
44. Mabeko-Tali, Guerrilhas e lutas sociais, p. 526.
45. M.R. Bhagavan, ‘Angola’s political economy 1975–85’ (Research report no. 75, Scan-
dinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1986), p. 42.
46. Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and beggar land, p. 25.
47. Vidal, ‘A génese da economia do petroleo’, ́ p. 57.
48. Mário Nelson C. Maximino, ‘O SEF 30 anos depois’, Novo Jornal, 21 April 2017.
49. Mabeko-Tali, Guerrilhas e lutas sociais, p. 526; Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and beggar
land, fn. 10, p. 96.
50. Ennes Ferreira, A indústria em tempo de guerra, p. 357.
set for the lack of realism that would continue to plague Angolan industrial
policy.
Technical advice finally appeared to gain greater relevance from 1985
onwards, as deteriorating economic conditions pushed policymakers to
explore reforms, culminating in the drafting of a fully fledged economic

reform programme in the ‘saneamento economico ́ e financeiro’ (SEF) in
1987.51 Yet the enactment of these reforms showed all the typical symp-
toms of ‘partial reform syndrome’,52 as the government sought to signal
reformist intentions to an external audience, while attempting to preserve
its domestic patronage system.53 The hesitations, volte-faces, and con-
tradictions marking the reform period finally came to an end in 1991,
with the abandonment of the MPLA’s Marxist-Leninist ideology, the
promulgation of a new constitution proclaiming a market economy and
multiparty democracy, and the signing of (ultimately untenable) peace
accords between the MPLA and UNITA. Momentous as they were, these
formal changes belied the continued economic dominance of individuals
with ties to the party-state and the further strengthening of presidential
power over the ensuing decade.54
By the 1990s, the power-sharing practices of the ‘patrimonial carrousel’
and the bifurcated mechanisms of economic policymaking had crystallized
into a recognizable policy style. As first observed during the SEF period,
the promulgation of economic plans tended to be reactive and took place
during recurring crisis situations. Responsibility for the formulation of pol-
icy blueprints often fell onto expensive foreign consultants, a consequence
of both the government’s extremely low capacity and the rent-seeking
opportunities associated with overseas payments. The decision-making
process was further marred by the shifting and unclear division of power
between economic agencies, their lack of horizontal ties, frequent changes
in personnel, and the overriding of decisions by presidential advisors.55
The realm of policy implementation was also marked by inconsistency
due to the marginalization of technical knowledge, constant policy shifts,
and the inability to follow through with strategic priorities, which would
be hastily abandoned for no clear reason.56 These inconsistencies, together
51. On the history of the SEF, see the series of articles by Mário Nelson C. Maximino in
Novo Jornal, 21 April-23 June 2017.
52. Nicolas Van de Walle, African economies and the politics of permanent crisis, 1979–1999
(Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001).
53. Ennes Ferreira, A indústria em tempo de guerra, pp. 125–130.
54. Manuel Ennes Ferreira, ‘La reconversion économique de la nomenklatura pétrolière’,
Politique Africaine, 57 (1995), pp. 177–196.
55. Nicholas Shaxson, João Neves and Fernando Pacheco, ‘Drivers of change, Angola:
Summary of findings’ (DFID, London, 2008), pp. 3–5.
56. Tony Hodges, Angola: Anatomy of an oil state (James Currey, Oxford, 2004), pp. 122–126
606 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
with the spread of rapacious practices in the 1990s’ war economy, incen-
tivized individual cadres to maximize the benefits derived from their posi-
tions whenever they happened to be favoured. The outcome can best be
described as a form of ‘prebendal competition’, as individual ministries
would present poorly conceived projects for funding at the Ministry of

Planning, in the hope that the bestowment of political influence and the
availability of international credit lines would lead to their acceptance.57
Thus, by the end of the war in 2002, economic policy had largely become a
competition for the spoils generated by the parallel system controlled by the
president, under the veneer of a modernist, statist, and developmentalist
ideology.58
Origins of the ZEE

The main sources of inspiration for the ZEE are of socialist and—
especially—late colonial vintage.59 Its earliest antecedents are to be found
in the fourth development plan (1974–79), crafted in the twilight of
Portuguese colonialism but never implemented.60 The plan foresaw the
construction of an industrial park in Huambo and an industrial zone in
Luanda. Both were to be managed by a newly created ‘industrial develop-
ment institute’ tasked with administering the state’s stakes in private and
state-owned companies, including responsibilities related to the incubation
of enterprises, technological development, and commercialization, jointly
financed by the state and private banks.
The next mention of zone-type policies came in a 1986 Ministry of
Industry White Paper, which proposed to decentralize industrial produc-
tion by creating regional ‘industrial development poles’ as a means of
reinforcing the links between agriculture, natural resources, and manu-
facturing.61 The rationale for these poles allegedly was to move industrial
production closer to consumption in order to circumvent the transport
restrictions imposed by the war.62 The plan never came to fruition,
although it appears to have exerted an influence over later efforts to build
industrial development poles across the country.
57. Renato Aguilar, ‘Angola’s private sector: Rents distribution and oligarchy’, paper pre-
sented at the Lusophone Africa conference: Intersections between the social sciences, Cornell
University, Ithaca, 2–3 May 2003, p. 11.
58. Shaxson et al., ‘Drivers of change’.
59. On the ‘strangely influential afterlife’ of late colonialism in contemporary Angolan
imaginaries, see Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and beggar land, p. 84.
60. Presidência do Conselho, ‘IV Plano de fomento/1974-1979, Angola’ (Imprensa
Nacional, Lisbon, 1973), pp. 439–441.
61. Ministério da Indústria, ‘Direcções principais da industrialização contínua e do desen-
volvimento de uma indústria de grande capacidade recorrendo a todos os recursos naturais’
(Luanda, 1986), cited in Ennes Ferreira, A indústria em tempo de guerra, p. 415.
62. Interview, former IDIA official, Luanda, 31 January 2020.
These ideas resurfaced in near-definitive form in the 1994 ‘master plan

for the reindustrialization of Angola’.63 The document revived the institu-
tional architecture laid out in the fourth development plan almost exactly,
recreating the Industrial Development Institute of Angola (IDIA) as an
agency under the Ministry of Industry tasked with managing industrial

development poles (PDIs) and a series of Industrial Development Cor-
porations (SODIs).’64 The first PDIs were formally created in 1998 in
Viana, Luanda province, and in Catumbela, Benguela province.65 The
PDIs were to consist of parcelled, serviced land offered to private sector
investors together with fiscal incentives. Meanwhile, the SODIs were tasked
with supporting industrial development through financial intermediation,
managerial support, equity finance, and service provision, effectively repro-
ducing the role originally planned for IDIA in the fourth development
plan. However, unlike its counterpart in Viana, the Catumbela PDI did
not include its own SODI, allegedly due to the high costs involved,66 in
what would become the norm in future PDIs. IDIA’s original plan bud-
geted US$1.4 billion for the construction of the PDIs, 60 percent of which
was to be financed through international credit lines.67 For this purpose,
preliminary discussions were held with businesspeople in France, Portugal,
and Spain and a memorandum of understanding was signed with Equa-
tor Bank,68 later known as ‘HSBC Equator Bank’ and implicated in the
infamous ‘Angolagate’ scandal.69 In spite of the programme’s ambition,
construction work on the PDIs languished until 2013,70 and to this day,
none of the planned PDIs can be considered complete.71
The contrast between the speed with which the PDIs and the ZEE got
off the ground is revealing of how prebendal competition within the MPLA
interacts with the changing availability of external resources to drive pat-
terns of policy implementation, with the president as the ultimate arbiter.
In 2004, the Chinese and Angolan governments signed a landmark deal for
63. IDIA, ‘Investir na indústria…uma porta aberta para o futuro!’, (Instituto de Desenvolvi-
mento Industrial de Angola, Luanda, 1999), pp. 14–18.
64. Ibid., p. 17.
65. Comissão Permanente do Conselho de Ministros, ‘Resolução no. 1/98’, 10 March 1998;
‘Resolução no. 3/98’, 11 March 1998; ‘Resolução no. 4/98, 27 March 1998; Ministérios das
Finanças e da Indústria, ‘Decreto executivo conjunto no. 49/98’, 4 September 1998.
66. Ministério da Indústria e Comércio, ‘Plano de desenvolvimento industrial Angola 2025’
(Luanda, 2021), pp. 22–23.
67. IDIA, ‘Investir na indústria’, p. 16.
68. Ibid., p. 18.
69. United States Senate, ‘Keeping foreign corruption out of the United States: Four case
histories’ (United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Washington,
DC, 2010).
́ Industrial de Viana é viabilizado’, 3 June 2014. This information
70. Jornal de Angola, ‘Polo
is confirmed by a foreign investor who moved to the Viana PDI in 2013: interview, Viana, 24
January 2020.
71. Interview, Kiala Ngone Gabriel, former director of IDIA (1995–2008), Luanda, 29
January 2020.
608 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
a $2 billion Export-Import Bank of China credit line earmarked for infras-

tructure projects.72 In parallel, this new China connection also comprised
opaque deals between members of the Angolan government and elusive
Chinese counterparts with ties to the Chinese state, who controlled their
interests through the ‘Queensway Group’ of companies.73 Through these

deals, undisclosed amounts were lent to the mysterious, military-headed
‘Office for National Reconstruction’ (GRN), which in turn contracted the
China International Fund (CIF), one of the companies in the Queensway
Group, to undertake large-scale infrastructure projects.74 Its portfolio
included what was to eventually become the ZEE.
Interviewees unanimously agree that the ZEE was the pet project of Gen-
eral Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Jr. (‘Kopelipa’), a member of the powerful
‘triumvirate’ surrounding President Dos Santos.75 As such, it lacked any
technocratic oversight over its design. Unlike the PDIs, the ZEE was to
have direct state involvement in production. The first phase of the project,
carried out between 2005 and 2007, consisted of importing machinery for
55 factories, spanning as many activities in the manufacturing sector, in
addition to a logistics centre and a poultry farm.76 Of these, only 26 were
ever made operational77 and seven are still in their containers,78 while the
rest are unaccounted for. An additional 16 factories were ‘negotiated by the
state for the ZEE’, while 26 establishments were allegedly brought in by pri-
vate investors,79 although insiders claim that even these were paid for by the
state.80 Among the 27 state-owned factories originally set to be privatized in
72. Lucy Corkin, Uncovering African agency: Angola’s management of China’s credit lines
(Routledge, London, 2013), pp. 78–79.
73. On the Queensway Group, see Lee Levkowitz, Marta McLellan Ross and J.R. Warner,
‘The 88 Queensway group: A case study in Chinese investors’ operations in Angola and
beyond’ (U.S. China Economic & Security Review Commission, 2009); Tom Burgis, The loot-
ing machine:Warlords, oligarchs, corporations, smugglers, and the theft of Africa’s wealth (William
Collins, London, 2015).
74. J. R. Mailey, ‘The anatomy of the resource curse: Predatory investments in Africa’s
extractive industries’, (Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, Washington, DC, 2015), p. 37.
Recent corruption investigations have revealed that the CIF actually belonged to generals
Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento (‘Dino’) and Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Jr. (Kopelipa),
rather than to the mysterious Sam Pa, as previously thought. See Novo Jornal, ‘Caso CIF:
Generais “Dino” e “Kopelipa” constituídos arguidos’, 2 October 2020.
75. On Angola’s ‘triumvirate’, which includes Dino, Kopelipa, and former Sonangol CEO
Manuel Vicente, see Rafael Marques de Morais, ‘The Angolan presidency: The epicentre of
corruption’, Pambazuka News 493, (5 August 2010).
76. The list of imported factories is available in a report by the consultancy CESO Por-
tugal, ‘Estudo de mercado sobre a província de Luanda’ (CESO Portugal, 2010), pp.
34–38, <https://www.ceso.pt/pdfs/ProvinciaLuanda.pdf> (25 January 2021).
77. Ministério da Economia e Planeamento, ‘Empossado conselho de administração da
́
Zona Economica Especial Luanda-Bengo’, 12 September 2018, <https://mep.gov.ao/ao/?id=
36103> (12 May 2020).
78. Agência Lusa, ‘Privatização de segunda fase de unidades industriais em Luanda adiada
para 27 de maio’, 22 May 2020.
79. CESO Portugal, ‘Estudo de mercado’.
80. Interview, former official at the Ministry of the Economy, Luanda, 27 January 2020.
2020 (including seven that never became operational), eight had originally
been supplied by the Brazilian firm Asperbras.81 A further nine factories
were supplied by various Delaware-based corporations established shortly
before the import operations.82 Many of the firms that never became oper-
ational, mostly due to the age or poor quality of the machinery, were

originally supplied by Asperbras or one of these anonymous, Delaware-
based companies. The remaining factories were supplied by the Chinese
firm Dong Feng, various European firms, or belonged to foreign investors
with contacts within the GRN.83 While official data on these factories’ costs
are not available, interviewees point to figures of around $600 million.
In parallel to the importation of machinery, a special commission tasked
with developing the zone was created,84 and US$1.8 billion’s worth of
contracts for the construction of the ZEE were signed with the Brazilian
firm Odebrecht, the Chinese Guangxi Hydroelectric Construction Bureau
(GHCB), and the Portuguese Mota-Engil.85 However, no concrete action
followed, and the machinery remained inside the containers until at least
2010. Nevertheless, the period saw some high-profile controversies over
the GRN’s appropriation of agricultural land in the town of Icolo and
Bengo86 and the seizure of land belonging to Viana PDI,87 involving even
the confiscation of construction materials stationed there by investors.88
A comparison between the PDIs and the ZEE shows that in both
cases, elites drew inspiration from ideas harking back to the late colo-
nial and socialist periods, although emptied of much of their economic
rationales, resulting in policies of remarkably low sophistication. Policy
goals were in both instances premised on the straddling of the domestic
and international economies for economic accumulation, thus manifesting
characteristic extraverted dynamics.89 However, the extraverted strategy
first attempted by IDIA officials could only materialize once greater oil
81. IGAPE, ‘Empresas em processo de privatização’, <https://igape.minfin.gov.ao/

PortalIGAPE/#!/privatizacoes/empresas-em-processos-de-privatizacao> (25 January 2021).
82. Data on Belle Overseas International, MD Medical Device Tecnologias, International
Business Matters, and First State Suppliers obtained from opencorporates, <https://opencor-
porates.com/> (26 January 2021).
83. Interview, firm manager, ZEE, 16 January 2020.
84. Presidência da República, ‘Despacho no. 2/07’, 21 February 2007.
85. Conselho de Ministros, ‘Resolução no. 49-A’, 25 June 2007.
86. Semanário Angolense, ‘Novas revelações no desaguisado com o general Kopelipa: Mendes
de Carvalho queixou-se directamente ao Presidente’, 26 August 2006.
87. Semanário Angolense, ‘Quase barrado quando pretendia visitar o Centro Industrial de
Viana: Joaquim David perdeu terreno para Kopelipa’, 30 July 2006.
́ Industrial de Viana: Investidores dizem-se perseguidos pelo
88. Semanário Angolense, ‘Polo
GRN’, 12 May 2007.
89. Jean-François Bayart, ‘Africa in the world: A history of extraversion’, African Affairs 99,
395 (2000), pp. 217–267.
610 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
income and the prospects of post-war reconstruction allowed for an expan-

sion in the regime’s ‘extraversion portfolio’.90 The new partnership with
China was particularly important, but the government was also able to
deepen pre-existing ties with Portuguese and Brazilian actors, as well as
draw on the opportunities provided by the offshore world.91 In turn, the

project’s unfolding bore the imprints of the MPLA’s typical pattern of
prebendal competition, as IDIA officials were stripped of this part of the
industrialization agenda, whose stewardship was assigned to Kopelipa and
the GRN. The policy style was also manifested in the stop-and-start nature
of the project, which, as shown below, was only put back on track through
recourse to Sonangol.
Setting up the zone

Different explanations have been put forward for why the CIF and the
GRN failed to complete the ZEE and other infrastructure projects.92 Irre-
spective of the true reason for the interruption, most informants agree
that the ZEE was belatedly set up primarily to be presented as one of the
government’s accomplishments prior to the 2012 elections. Accordingly,
the zone’s design shows unmistakeable traces of its electoral objectives,
couched in the usual statist and nationalist discourse, without precluding
the service of other regime interests.
In characteristic fashion, the government’s response to the failures of one
of its ‘ad hoc commissions’ was to transfer responsibility for the project to
other state agencies, at the president’s behest.93 In 2009, the ZEE was
formally created as an entity under the tutelage of the Ministry of the
Economy,94 and the ZEE Luanda-Bengo Development Corporation was
given responsibility for managing it.95 The assignment of the zone to the
Ministry of the Economy appears to have generated resentment among
IDIA staff, who had originally claimed much of the ZEE’s land for Viana
PDI. But despite indications that the ZEE would be reassigned to the
Ministry of Industry in 2015,96 it has formally remained under the Min-
istry of the Economy. Meanwhile, following the dissolution of the GRN in
2010, the imported factories came under the control of Sonangol Industrial
90. Caryn Peiffer and Pierre Englebert, ‘Extraversion, vulnerability to donors, and political
liberalization in Africa’, African Affairs 111, 444 (2012), pp. 355–378.
91. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, ‘Researching Africa and the offshore world’, Journal of
Modern African Studies 60, 3 (2022), 1–31.
92. See, for example, Burgis, Looting machine, pp. 99–100.
93. Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and beggar land, pp. 44–45.
94. Conselho de Ministros, ‘Decreto no. 50/09’, 11 September 2009.
95. Conselho de Ministros, ‘Decreto no. 57/09’, 13 October 2009.
96. ‘Government approves integration of ZEE Luanda-Bengo to Viana IDZ’, Polo ́ de Desen-
volvimento Industrial/Industrial Development Zone, (2nd ed., Luanda: Ministério da Indústria,
July-September 2015).
Investments (SIIND), a subsidiary of the parastatal specifically created for

managing the ZEE factories, mirroring actions taken with respect to other
CIF/GRN projects.
The increased financial rationality brought by the transfer of the project
is evident in the large reduction in the budget for building the zone’s infras-

tructure, from $1.8 billion to $65 million,97 even as the final cost might
have come closer to $500 million.98 Nevertheless, the original set of con-
tractors was maintained. There are indications that Odebrecht and GHCB
were already at work in 2008,99 while Mota-Engil allegedly took over work
left unfinished by Odebrecht. In addition, zone construction entailed set-
ting up the factories themselves, amounting to a cost of $128 million for
the first 14 factories.100 This part of the project was executed by many of
the same promoters who had sold the machinery in the first place, includ-
ing Asperbras and Medical Device Tecnologias (referred to by interviewees
as a ‘Portuguese firm’ despite being incorporated in Delaware), which in
turn subcontracted other firms based in their home countries. By 2013, all
SIIND firms ever to become operational had been inaugurated.101
Despite the heavy involvement of foreigners in the project’s design and
execution,102 and claims to inspiration from China, Brazil, and Dubai,103
the ZEE displays much of the gigantism and propagandist flavour that
characterizes other MPLA signature projects. The zone is laid out in three
concentric circular roads cut by four transversal streets, dividing it into
four quadrants. In the absence of infrastructure in the third and fourth
quadrants, the effect is to create a characteristic half-moon shape. Accord-
ing to observers, this layout was intentionally chosen so that when seen
from above, the ZEE would resemble the half gear wheel that adorns the
Angolan flag. This fits well with the predominance of aerial images of the
ZEE in the government’s propaganda prior to the 2012 elections. How-
ever, the unusual, rounded layout has reportedly resulted in a sub-optimal
allocation of space, and the excessively large block sizes stand in the way
of adapting spaces to factories’ needs.104 Moreover, it is widely acknowl-
edged that the location of the ZEE is logistically disadvantageous, since the
97. Conselho de Ministros, ‘Resolução no. 21/09’, 13 March 2009.

98. Jornal de Angola, ‘Executivo prevê dinamizar a Zona Economica ́ Especial’, 16 August
2018.
99. As revealed by internal Odebrecht emails: Operação Lava Jato 14, ‘Relatorio ́ de análise
de polícia judiciária no. 510’, (Polícia Federal, Curitiba, 2015), p. 51, <http://d1ao0r2iuz522v.
cloudfront.net/5f835cbae331e499e4f59c5fcd952958.pdf> (27 January 2021); and confirmed
by an interview, firm manager, ZEE, 29 January 2020.
100. Ovadia, ‘State-led industrial development’, p. 599.
101. IGAPE, ‘Empresas em processo de privatização’.
102. The Spanish firm PROMACO appears to have been involved in the ZEE’s design,
as attested by a series of projects displayed on their website: PROMACO, ‘Proyectos’,
<http://promaco.es/proyectos/> (1 April 2021).
103. See, e.g. Jornal de Angola, ‘Industrialização arranca em força’, 28 May 2011.
104. Interview, former official at the Ministry of the Economy, Luanda, 27 January 2020.
612 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Table 1 Ownership profile of ZEE firms.

State-owned 23 (62%)
Privately owned 14 (38%)
Of which with foreign ownership 5 (14%)
Total 37

Source: Author’s elaboration, based on self-administered survey and CEIC-UCAN, ‘Poten-
ciação da ZEELB’.
Luanda Railway line is on the opposite side of the Luanda-Catete Road.

This all suggests that symbolic or vanity considerations might have had
greater weight than economic benefits on design decisions, in line with the
MPLA’s bifurcated policy style.
Despite its centrality to the ZEE, the semi-circular industrial reserve until
recently constituted only a small part of the overall zone. The ZEE was in
fact created as a composite of several industrial, agricultural, and mining
reserves, totalling 1,556,409 ha, spread across parts of Luanda and Bengo
provinces, and including entire towns. Until the divestment of all reserves
but Viana and Uala in April 2021,105 their land was formally under the
private domain of the ZEE Development Corporation, with an estimated
value of $10.5 billion.106 The bulk of this land was never put to produc-
tive use. Instead, it has mostly fuelled conflict around ‘the illegal sale and
occupation of land belonging to the ZEE reserve’; ‘land conflict opposing
[the ZEE Development Corporation] to municipal administrations, peas-
ant communities, and villagers’; and ‘the emission of overlapping land titles
by municipal and provincial governments.’107 While efforts to appropri-
ate land without productive intent may appear puzzling, the experience
of the PDIs and of other episodes of land grabbing in Angola hint at the
speculative logic likely to be guiding such actions.108
The ownership of ZEE factories offers further clues on the regime inter-
ests the zone serves. Table 1 shows data on firm ownership obtained by
combining information on the 16 firms interviewed by me with the 35
firms (including several overlaps) interviewed in a previous CEIC-UCAN
survey.109 Some private firms are not captured in the surveys, but they still
paint a fairly comprehensive picture of ownership in the ZEE. State-owned
105. Presidente da República, ‘Decreto presidencial no. 81/21’, 8 April 2021.

106. World Bank, ‘Financial performance, corporate governance and reform of state-owned
enterprises in Angola’ (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019), pp. 27–29.
107. Ministério da Economia e Planeamento, ‘Empossado conselho de administração’.
108. On the PDIs, see DW Angola, ‘Pela primeira vez foi reconhecido o direito à terra aos
desalojados de Benguela’, 24 September 2013; as well as a series of reports published on
the news website Novafrica, starting with: ‘Máfia no Polo ́ Industrial de Viana: Empresários
nacionais estão a ser expulsos e terrenos cedidos a estrangeiros’, 6 August 2019.
109. CEIC-UCAN, ‘Estudo para potenciação da ZEELB’ (Luanda, 2019).

Figure 1 SIIND factories’ ownership structure.
Source: Own elaboration, based on Diário da República entries.
(i.e. SIIND-owned) firms predominate, although there is a significant con-

tingent of private firms, many of which have foreign ownership, including
from Portugal, India, and China.
Figure 1, based on documents from Angola’s firm registry, shows the
SIIND factories’ ownership structure prior to privatization.110 We can see
that every factory was actually a joint venture between the SIIND and
Sonangol Holdings, a subsidiary specifically set-up to control the oil com-
pany’s non-oil investments. Sonangol Holdings was known as ‘Sonangol
GSPS’ until 2007, when a reshuffle of its ownership led then-Vice Presi-
dent (and former Sonangol CEO) Manuel Vicente to acquire a 1 percent
ownership stake in it,111 which he kept until 2013.112 This implies that at
the time of setting up the SIIND’s factories, Vicente effectively owned a
personal stake in them, although the reasons for the successive ownership
reshuffles are unclear.
Available documentation suggests that other members of the triumvi-
rate also have interests in the ZEE. The dairy products company Priority
belongs to General Dino’s Marshall Islands-domiciled,113 US-sanctioned
110. Note that five of the factories inaugurated in 2011 were initially 30 percent owned by
the SIIND and 70 percent by Sonangol Holdings, but all ownership stakes were subsequently
set the opposite way round.
111. ‘Sonangol Holdings, Limitada’, Diário da República IIIa série, no. 123, 12 October
2007.
112. ‘Sonangol Holdings, Limitada’, Diário da República IIIa série, no. 185, 26 September
2013.
113. ‘Cochan Angola Holdings, LLC’, ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database, <https://offshore-
leaks.icij.org/nodes/80050952> (7 June 2022).
614 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Cochan business group.114 The firm uses the Cuban brand name ‘Cop-
pelia’ for ice cream production and is under the direct management of
Cuban state employees.115 Cochan-controlled Zahara Group also held a
logistics centre in the ZEE under the previous ZEE administration, which
it allegedly rented at ‘symbolic prices’ and then sublet to third parties.116

Other companies are linked to regime insiders in different ways. The elec-
tronics firm Inovia is owned by Domingos Manuel Inglês, an associate of
Kopelipa known for serving as frontman for the general’s interests.117 The
thermoplastics firm Angoplaste is majority owned by the former president’s
son José Avelino Gourgel dos Santos and has been linked to a dubious loan
awarded by the development bank BDA, in partnership with the Taizhou-
based Hong Kong New Mails Mining & Energy Co.118 Several associates
of another of Dos Santos’ children, José Filomeno ‘Zenu’ dos Santos, share
ownership of the medical dressing and gauze factory Medvida, a joint ven-
ture with the Portuguese construction group Telhabel.119 The ownership
of the glass manufacturer Embalvidro is structured in a more sophisticated
way, as it has been owned by a shifting set of Angolan public limited com-
panies and offshore companies domiciled in Malta, Mauritius, and Dubai,
but which can all be traced back to Isabel dos Santos and her late husband
Sindika Dokolo.120 The ubiquity of foreign partnerships in the ownership
and operations of firms tied to powerful Angolan interests once more attests
to the centrality of diversified foreign ties to the regime’s political economy.
In principle, the ZEE is open to any firm that fulfils basic pre-requisites.
In practice, however, all firms granted access to the zone have connections
to powerful players in Angolan politics. For instance, one of the foreign
firms I spoke to has longstanding ties to the Casa Militar, formerly headed
by Kopelipa and responsible for the initiation of the ZEE project.121 In
114. ‘Agro-Industrial’, Cochan, <https://www.cochan.com/en/business-areas/agro-

industrial> (15 April 2021).
116. Interview, ZEE official, Luanda, 28 February 2022.
117. Marques de Morais, ‘The Angolan Presidency’. For documentation on Inovia’s own-
́
ership, see entries for ‘INOVIA – Electronica de Angola, Limitada’; ‘Academia Inovia,
Limitada’; and ‘Inovia Distribuição, Limitada’ in Diário da República III Série.
118. ‘Angoplaste, Limitada’, Diário da República IIIa Série, no. 137, 18 July 2014. On the
BDA loan, see Moiani Matondo, ‘Os filhos de JES e a sua teia de poder: O esquema de Joess’,
Maka Angola, 13 January 2017.
119. Entries for ‘Medvida, Limitada”; ‘INVEPAR – Participações e Investimentos, Lim-
itada’; and ‘G3F – Investments, Limitada’ in Diário da República IIIa Série. On Zenu’s
associates, see ‘O destino de “Zenu”’, Expresso, 17 July 2016; and ‘Gestão do INEA já
provocou duas prisões preventivas’, O País, 2 February 2019.
120. Entries for ‘Sodiba Participações, S.A’; ‘SODIBA – Sociedade de Distribuição e
Bebidas de Angola, Limitada’; ‘Sonavid (SU), Limitada’; and ‘EMBALVIDRO – Indús-
tria (SU), Limitada’ in Diário da República IIIa Série. Information on the companies owned
by Isabel dos Santos and Sindika Dokolo is from International Consortium of Investiga-
tive Journalists, ‘Explore: How to build a business empire’, <https://www.icij.org/investiga-
tions/luanda-leaks/explore-how-to-build-a-business-empire/> (18 May 2020).
Table 2 Electricity.
Minimum Average Maximum N
Average no. of power outages per 0 2.5 6 14

month

Average length of outages 1 hour 17 hours 48 hours 12
Percentage of electricity coming 1% 25% 100% 11
from generators
Increased Decreased No change N
How has the frequency of power 2 12 1 15
outages changed over the past
2 years?
Source: Self-administered survey.
another case, a family relationship with a highly placed employee in one

of the large construction firms active in Angola did the trick.122 Several
of the private firms in the zone are financed by the government’s flag-
ship credit programme for the productive sector, formerly called Programa
Angola Investe and recently renamed Projecto de Apoio ao Crédito (Credit
Support Programme, or ‘PAC’),123 widely reputed to have served as a
tool for government patronage.124 Thus, the ZEE in practice relies on the
same oligarchic networks that have perpetuated the extreme concentra-
tion of power and wealth in Angola,125 evidencing the hybrid strategies
combining state, party, and elite ownership that characterize its political
economy.126
The ZEE in practice

To gauge the ZEE’s success in attaining its stated goal of promoting
import-substituting industrialization by offering firms a better business
environment, Table 2 presents my survey results on electricity provision.
Together with customs facilitation, electricity is considered one of the main
constraints on private sector development in Angola.127 All ZEE firms
experienced power outages in 2019. In the CEIC survey, 28 out of 35
(80 percent) firms answered that they had used a generator in 2018, while

123. Eg. Agência Angola Press, ‘Empresa investe USD 4 milhões em enchidos’, 27 February
2019.
124. Interview, economic journalist, Luanda, 20 December 2019; See also Portal de Angola,
‘Suspeita de cabritismo no Angola Investe’, 9 August 2015.
125. Aguilar, ‘Angola’s private sector’.
126. Manuel Ennes Ferreira and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, ‘The political economy of
banking in Angola’, African Affairs 118, 470 (2019), p. 57.
127. World Bank, ‘Angola country economic memorandum: Towards economic diversifica-
tion’ (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018).
616 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
34 out of 35 answered that the lack of energy is a constraint on their

activities.128 In my survey, not only the frequency of power outages varies
significantly between firms, but also for a given firm over time - some man-
agers mentioned that several months without a single power outage may
alternate with periods of more frequent interruptions. Although not all

respondents were able to answer this question, firms on average reported
obtaining approximately 25 percent of their electricity from generators,
only slightly below the figure of 29 percent found in the World Bank’s Enter-
prise Survey, last conducted in Angola in 2010. Despite the zone’s inability
to cope with firms’ electricity needs, most respondents reported improve-
ments in the power supply over the previous 2 years (i.e. between 2017 and
2019), although this is more likely attributable to developments outside the
zone.129 The ZEE thus appears to offer no substantial advantage in terms
of electricity provision.
A similarly discouraging picture emerges when looking at soft infrastruc-
ture. The ZEE’s original legal framework had a marked nationalist flavour,
as ZEE firms were to receive priority in government procurement, and
there were to be preferences for the admission of Angolan over foreign
firms, domestic over foreign inputs, and nationals over foreign workers
and even an outlandish—given the utter lack of competitiveness—ban on
exports.130 In addition, the regulatory benefits of locating within the zone
were to be negotiated with the management company on an ad hoc basis,
a measure at odds with the promotion of a more predictable business envi-
ronment. These provisions all reflect the obsession with import substitution
and the disjuncture between government measures and economic realities
that have long characterized Angolan industrial policy, which cannot be
ascribed merely to the rent-seeking intent.
The less realistic measures were repealed in the 2015 revision of the
ZEE’s legal framework, which also introduced new incentives such as
import and export tariff exemptions, as well as a system of prior cus-
toms clearance (desalfandegamento prévio) to streamline the importation
process.131 In practice, none of these advantages register with firm man-
agers in the zone, who invariably remark on the absence of benefits to
locating there. Table 3 displays data on customs clearance, which is pre-
sumably the only ‘soft’ advantage conferred by the zone. As was the case
for electricity, the questions on the days needed to clear customs and those
128. CEIC-UCAN, ‘Potenciação da ZEELB’, p. 12.

129. Interviews, Angoplaste manager, ZEE, 16 January 2020; and former IDIA official,
Luanda, 31 January 2020. On recent progress in Angola’s electricity sector, see World Bank,
‘Selected policy notes for incoming administration of Angola’ (World Bank, Washington, DC,
2018), pp. 78–79.
130. Presidente da República, ‘Decreto legislativo presidencial no. 49/11’, 9 March 2011.
131. Presidente da República, ‘Decreto legislativo presidencial no. 6/15’, 27 October 2015.
Table 3 Customs.
Average number of days for clearing 2.5 days 9.1 days 30 days 14
customs

Increased Decreased No change N
How has the speed of customs clear- 7 1 5 13
ance of imports changed over the last
2 years?
Yes No Doesn’t know N
Has the establishment submitted 13 3 0 16
an application to obtain an import
license?
How many days did it take to obtain Less than 1 day 21.4 days 60 days 12
this import license?
Source: Self-administered survey.
needed to obtain an import license stand out for the high variance between
answers, although the highest values come mostly from the highly bureau-
cratic and centralized SIIND firms, where managers have little involvement
in the importation process. The data point to mild improvements in the
business environment, but which again appear to be unrelated to the ZEE
itself, given the major differences in firms’ experiences.
ZEE firms often complain about the inefficiency of the management
company. As affirmed by one dispirited manager: ‘if my factory had wheels,
I would move it out of the ZEE’.132 The ZEE website claims to offer a vari-
ety of infrastructure services to prospective investors, including basics such
as power, water, a treatment plant for wastewater, and security, as well as
extra services such as collective transport, equipment maintenance, and
catering.133 However, the only service that does not receive complaints is
the drainage system. The management company’s inability to deliver ade-
quate conditions appears to be related to its low fiscal capacity. On the
revenue side, regulations on expropriating plots left vacant for more than
6 months have mostly not been enforced, and payments of the monthly
administration fee, estimated at around $500, also seem to be largely
flouted. Despite officials’ assurances about the greater uniformization of
contracts since 2018,134 lease payments for land continue to be negotiated
on a case-by-case basis, and the investors I spoke to reported very different
132. Interview, Angoplaste manager, ZEE, 16 January 2020.

133. ‘Our services’, ZEE, <https://zee.co.ao/en/our-services/> (4 April 2021).
134. Interview, ZEE official, Luanda, 28 February 2022.
618 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

Figure 2 ZEE Development Corporation finances.
Source: Author, based on World Bank, ‘Financial performance, corporate
governance and reform of state-owned enterprises in Angola’.
payment modalities. On the expenditure side, meanwhile, most of the avail-

able funds have been used to feed the company’s administrative machine,
sparing few resources to invest in improving the zone’s infrastructure.135
The result has been net losses totalling $6.5 million in 2015 and 2016, far
outweighing previous years’ surpluses.
As shown in Figure 2, financial performance began improving in 2017.
Revenues reportedly quadrupled between 2017 and 2018,136 leading to
the first ever payment of dividends by the ZEE to the state in 2019.137
This coincided with João Lourenço’s appointment in 2018 of a new man-
agement team tasked with tackling inefficiencies in the ZEE.138 The new
CEO, who is directly accountable to the president, claims that his team
introduced some ‘belt-tightening’ measures, since ‘there was an excessive
amount of employees in the zone, relative to its business volumes’ and
an ‘unclear relationship between the state and private sector activities’.139
However, interviews suggest that the fiscal improvement is at least in part
attributable to an increase in the number of investors in sectors such as

136. Jornal de Angola, ‘ZEE arrecada dois mil milhões de kwanzas’, 5 March 2019.
137. Jornal de Angola, ‘ZEE gera lucros e paga dividendos ao Estado’, 10 June 2020.
139. ́
Interview, Antonio Henriques da Silva, CEO of the ZEE, Luanda, 2 March 2022.
storage, sales, or services, mainly due to the zone’s convenient location on

the outskirts of Luanda. Many of these investors have been offered front-
loaded lease payment schedules, even if at a substantial discount, casting
doubt on the solidity of the zone’s much-touted financial turnaround.
In the absence of tangible benefits to locating within the ZEE, manufac-

turing firms reproduce many of the business strategies typically followed in
the Angolan economy. Most ZEE establishments produce only final goods
through either assembly or processing, and over 80 percent of inputs are
imported.140 Against this common backdrop, we can differentiate between
two main firm strategies, each with different implications for the ability to
adapt to the economic downturn created by the post-2014 fall in oil prices.
First, there are the formerly SIIND-owned firms and other firms belonging
to major regime figures, which are mostly active in capital-intensive sectors
such as metallic towers, irrigation pivots, electrical materials, and, perhaps
most surprisingly, fibre optic cables. These activities appear to have profited
to some extent from government contracts and the arbitrage opportuni-
ties open to importers during the boom years. But they have also suffered
from competition with lower-cost Chinese producers and from the small
size of the Angolan market, particularly after the conclusion of the more
infrastructure-intensive phase of reconstruction. Most of these firms have
lost the means to import inputs following the downturn, and at the time of
my visit in January 2020, the vast majority were either inactive or operating
far below capacity. Adjustment to new conditions was not helped by low
levels of managerial autonomy within the SIIND and the unwillingness of
the parent company to engage in any form of restructuring.141
A second category consists of private firms active in light manufacturing
sectors. These also profited from arbitrage and government contracts in the
boom years, but have had a somewhat easier time adapting to the down-
turn, although here too there are cases of total paralysis. One illustrative
example is a paint factory that, having relied exclusively on sales to the state
up to 2018, thenceforward began selling to the public.142 The manager of
a food processing factory claims that since the downturn, they have begun
to reach out to small wholesale suppliers, restaurants, and hotels, in con-
trast to the more passive marketing strategy that had prevailed until then.
They have also started sourcing more inputs locally; nonetheless, domes-
tic inputs still constitute only 10 percent of the total.143 These anecdotal
examples suggest that in industries with lower technological sophistication
140. CEIC-UCAN, ‘Potenciação da ZEELB’, p. 13.

141. CEIC-UCAN, ‘Potenciação da ZEELB’, p. 19. In a 2018 interview, a trade union
leader claims that ‘the manager has to ask for authorization even to buy a nail.’ See Valor
́
Economico, ‘Privatização da ZEE causa preocupações’, 27 August 2018.
620 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
and better suited to the Angolan market, there has been some room for
innovation and adaptation to changing conditions, although the changes
are far from being transformative.
In spite of the presence of substantial elite interests in the zone, a plan-
ning horizon unencumbered by credible political challengers, and a pocket

of (relative) bureaucratic efficiency in Sonangol, the ZEE’s results have
fallen far short of expectations. These shortcomings are instead consis-
tent with the logic of the MPLA’s policy style, in which feeble ideational
capacity and the dictates of prebendal competition stand in the way of pol-
icy learning. Many of the project’s flaws owe to problems in its design,
starting with a choice of sectors incompatible with the size of domestic
markets or the availability of local inputs. Neither do the soft infrastructure
advantages promised by the zone—albeit hardly implemented—appear to
be the product of much thought. Implementation failure is in turn largely
attributable to the mismanagement of the ZEE Development Corpora-
tion, which, typically for the Angolan state, has been more interested in
handing out sinecures than in devising a suitable financial model. But
despite the ZEE’s evident failings, the government continues to bet on SEZ
development as the cornerstone of its industrialization plans.144 Unabated
gigantism is expressed in the desire to massively increase the scale of the
ZEE by ‘not attracting 10 new projects, but 1,000 new projects’, mak-
ing it an alternative urban growth pole for Luanda and bringing in major
international brands to set up regional hubs in Angola—‘just like Dubai’.145
Conclusion
An overview of the ZEE, Angola’s main industrial project of the post-civil
war era, reveals that its roots are to be found in late colonial plans. The
project’s design blends statist visions with vanity considerations, illustrating
the limited role played by technical knowledge in Angolan policymaking.
Instead, the ZEE has responded to party elites’ modernist designs and their
competition for the sponsorship of projects. In this case, the main beneficia-
ries were José Eduardo dos Santos’ family members and the ‘triumvirate’ of
his close collaborators, who were able to capitalize on the available external
partnerships. In turn, project implementation, through both SIIND and
the ZEE management company, was not focused on delivering improve-
ments in the business environment, but in assuring the distribution of
resources to relevant constituencies, reflecting the usual means of enforcing
cohesion in the MPLA party-state.
144. Ministério da Indústria e Comércio, ‘Plano de desenvolvimento industrial Angola

2025′ .
́
145. Interview, Antonio Henriques da Silva, CEO of the ZEE, Luanda, 2 March 2022.
Although rent-seeking is certainly an important motivation, the design

of industrial policy, variations in implementation over time and across pol-
icy areas, and the ways in which policies feed into rent-seeking interests
cannot be explained unless we account for the broader logic of which they
partake. The concept of ‘policy style’ articulated here can help make sense

of how party leaders responding to the demands of armed struggle, politi-
cal control, and organizational cohesion create patterns of collective action
that continue to condition policymaking once the political context stabi-
lizes. In the case of the MPLA, individual actors in government have little
choice but to adapt to the dictates of the system, lest they lose access to a
potentially lucrative opportunity.
This article’s attention to the organizational bases of policymaking offers
a novel contribution to the literature on authoritarianism and illiberal and
post-liberation regimes. In efforts to highlight the commonalities linking
regimes issued from armed struggle, the extant literature has so far made
limited inroads in exploring how their ideas and organizational norms
shape differences in post-conflict governance. By emphasizing conflict’s
fortifying effects on regime resilience, these studies also ignore how locked-
in patterns of policymaking may weaken regimes if preventing them from
changing course in economic management, as appears to be the case in
Angola.146
Elaborating on an approach first developed in Chinese policy studies, I
illustrate how ideas, organizational norms, and interests come together in
specific causal configurations to shape policy actions. My analysis shows
that industrial policy is not mechanically derived from the distribution of
power or other variables emphasized in structuralist accounts, but must
first be refracted through the lens of ruling elites’ ideas and the prac-
tices they use to shore up their rule. In Angola, ideational influences
from the late colonial period continue to be felt long since the achieve-
ment of independence. But the MPLA’s policy style is also a function of
its history as an internally fractured movement that rapidly transitioned
to leading a Marxist-Leninist petrostate fighting a civil war with Soviet
and Cuban support. The Angolan case thus invites further comparative
study of how the ‘origins, timing, and sequencing’ of historical and contex-
tual factors—sociological origins, organizational cohesion, resource bases,
armed struggle, sources of external support—jointly shape authoritarian
ruling parties’ policy styles.147
146. On the obstacles to learning in African policymaking, see Van de Walle, African
economies, pp. 171–172.
147. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, ‘Not just what, but when (and how): Comparative-
historical approaches to authoritarian durability’, in James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
(eds), Advances in comparative-historical analysis (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2015), pp. 97–120.
622 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Finally, I stress how a changing ‘extraversion portfolio’ determines the

feasibility and attractiveness of policy choices. Despite being decades in
the making, the bulk of Angola’s industrial policy was only implemented
during the boom period between 2004 and 2015, when it took advan-
tage of the resources and networks made available by the strengthened

relationship with China, as well as those of traditional partners. It also
enthusiastically embraced the mechanisms of the globalized offshore econ-
omy. Although Angola’s industrial policy offers a particularly egregious case
of rent-seeking, attention to organizational and ideational legacies, and
how these interact with states’ insertion in the global political economy
to shape policy, can offer useful insights into the drivers of the industrial-
ization strategies of more developmentally inclined states. It can also help
place studies of their trajectories in closer conversation with those of other
illiberal and post-liberation regimes in Eastern and Southern Africa.

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African Affairs, 121/485, 595–622 doi: https://doi.org/10.

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visions1 and the appearance of a discourse centred on Africa’s ‘emer-

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1. Pierre Jacquemot, ‘L’industrialisation en Afrique en question: Des désillusions à un

Khan’s claims notwithstanding, there is reason to believe that policy

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publications on Angolan industrialization do not mention it even in pass-

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by an overview of the evolution of economic policymaking and its atten-

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Policy styles in authoritarian regimes

policy process is a ‘shared understanding about political agency’ that draws

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24. Heilmann and Perry, ‘Embracing uncertainty’.

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Origins of the ZEE

These ideas resurfaced in near-definitive form in the 1994 ‘master plan

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a $2 billion Export-Import Bank of China credit line earmarked for infras-

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81. IGAPE, ‘Empresas em processo de privatização’, <https://igape.minfin.gov.ao/

income and the prospects of post-war reconstruction allowed for an expan-

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Setting up the zone

Investments (SIIND), a subsidiary of the parastatal specifically created for

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97. Conselho de Ministros, ‘Resolução no. 21/09’, 13 March 2009.

Table 1 Ownership profile of ZEE firms.

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Luanda Railway line is on the opposite side of the Luanda-Catete Road.

105. Presidente da República, ‘Decreto presidencial no. 81/21’, 8 April 2021.

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(i.e. SIIND-owned) firms predominate, although there is a significant con-

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114. ‘Agro-Industrial’, Cochan, <https://www.cochan.com/en/business-areas/agro-

Average no. of power outages per 0 2.5 6 14

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Source: Self-administered survey.

another case, a family relationship with a highly placed employee in one

The ZEE in practice

122. Interview, firm manager, ZEE, 24 January 2020.

34 out of 35 answered that the lack of energy is a constraint on their

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128. CEIC-UCAN, ‘Potenciação da ZEELB’, p. 12.

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Source: Self-administered survey.

132. Interview, Angoplaste manager, ZEE, 16 January 2020.

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payment modalities. On the expenditure side, meanwhile, most of the avail-

135. Ministério da Economia e Planeamento, ‘Empossado conselho de administração’.

storage, sales, or services, mainly due to the zone’s convenient location on

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140. CEIC-UCAN, ‘Potenciação da ZEELB’, p. 13.

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144. Ministério da Indústria e Comércio, ‘Plano de desenvolvimento industrial Angola