Abstract

OVADIA, Jesse Salah. The Reinvention of Elite Accumulation in the Angolan Oil Sector: Emergent capitalism in a rentier economy. Cadernos de Estudos Africanos [online]. 2013, n.25, pp.33-63. ISSN 1645-3794.

The post-war transition in Angola has involved small shifts in strategies of elite accumulation to maintain the status quo and deepen the internal concentration of power and wealth. This paper hypothesizes that Angola is at the beginning of a fundamental political-economic shift - away from the peripheral rentier economy and towards an indigenous system of capitalist accumulation. Recent developments in the oil and oil services sectors such as the push for increased local content, or “Angolanisation”, show that the elite is engaged in a process of reinventing itself. Unfortunately, the tendency of the transition is towards the further entrenchment of the power of the Angolan elite and increasingly unequal distribution of wealth under the emerging social relations of production and accumulation.

Keywords : petroleum; development; capitalist accumulation; local content; Sonangol; Angola.

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