The most important book for South Africans to have been published this year is not about South Africa - it's about Angola.

No other African country is closer in spirit, or in recent history, or throws such a sharp reflected light on South Africa. Look to Angola, and you see a different "Other" of yourself. That is why Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War, by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira - Portuguese-speaker, and associate professor of Comparative Government at Oxford University - published by C. Hurst & Co, London, is the best book up till now for insight into South Africa since the end of apartheid, under ANC government.

Read it, and you are forced to think about the present and the future not just of Angola, but of South Africa too. The reflected light provides a diagnosis one would rather not receive about oneself. That makes it indispensable.

Informed by first-rate knowledge about Angola in the Cold War period, its main focus is on the country now. Its subject is modern peace-time Angola ruled by the MPLA government since the death of its leading enemy, Dr Jonas Savimbi, the founder and head of UNITA, in 2002: the capitalist Angola, the Angola most like South Africa today.

Christopher Clapham, professor at the Centre for African Studies at Cambridge University, calls it a "stunning book, which takes the lid off Angola ... in a way I have never seen equalled for any African state."

There are exemplary differences between South Africa and Angola. Above all, there is no oil to fuel the South African economy,  and nothing comparable with Angola's oil boom until the recent fall in oil price. Also, however, despite the pain and horrors of the apartheid period, South Africa experienced nothing so horrific as the million Angolans killed in four decades of war before 2002 - five per cent of the current population of about 20 million, as de Oliveira indicates. Yet his book provides extraordinary comparisons, with chapter headings such as "The consolidation of the MPLA party-state" and "Oligarchic capitalism, Angola style". 

De Oliveira's deep familiarity with the rhetoric of the Left permits the reader an extraordinary insight into both reality and duplicity.

During the Cold War, the weirdness of Angola was that despite the MPLA being a Marxist-Leninist party - protected by Cuban soldiers with Soviet weapons - it was funded almost exclusively by US capitalism, through the expertise and global reach of Gulf Oil in the Cabinda enclave beyond the country's far north-west.

Following the end of the Cold War, when it swiftly dropped its "Marxist-Leninist" title, Soviet-era rhetoric nevertheless continues with the MPLA styling itself a "national bourgeois" party, and with extreme corruption and ruthless political control favouring a tiny elite of former Marxist-Leninist party leaders, generals and intelligence chiefs subordinate to dos Santos.

Not even in Russia has the Communist wolf transformed itself so utterly and so instantly into the capitalist hyena.

With his focus on Angola, de Oliveira nevertheless leads one to reflect on South Africa through telling phrases such as "the Eastern Bloc institutional legacy" (p.101) and "liberation movement mystique" (p.99), and with Angola's state administration described as "subordinate to the party; both ... subordinate to the president's diktat" (p.93). The genesis of the MPLA, when its intellectual founders were members of the illegal Portuguese Communist Party in the late 1940s, mirrors the role of the SACP in the ANC up to today.

De Oliveira even notes in a sideline that Jacob Zuma's accession as president of South Africa "led to great improvements [in mutual relations since 2009] and a flurry of business deals, including with Zuma's family." (p.183)

While he stresses the effective continuance of one-party, totalitarian rule through the MPLA - still really a "party-state" despite multi-party conditions since 2002, and Angola's most recent general election in 2012 - what is most striking is his exposition of a "parallel system" in which real power is held not even by the MPLA as a ruling political party but by one man, José Eduardo dos Santos: power-holder and president for 35 years, with his children, his cronies, his comrades.

All this is centred on a single determinant: oil. With unbroken, mainly US capitalist production of Angola's oil through 40 years of Cold War, civil war and peace-time, the centre of dos Santos's spider-like control over the country is the state oil company (really, his personal oil company), Sonangol. De Oliveira describes Sonangol as the "central political tool" of the president's "stranglehold over Angola." (p.36)

Through massive research (including citations from numerous anonymous interviewees, and 53 pages of notes and bibliography following 218 succinct pages of text), De Oliveira shows that the "Angolan political economy is best understood as a system of privileged access to spoils.... Conventionally defined competence to make money or create value is often irrelevant to the choices made at the top level." (p.143)

The result of this "state-led capitalism" (or "state capitalism") is an "elite takeover of the national economy" with the "top hundred-odd political and military figures" functioning as "partners" in an "exclusive club." (p.142) De Oliveira quotes a senior Central Bank figure who states that "about 85 per cent of Angolan credit goes to two hundred or so clients." This means, comments de Oliveira, that the bank shareholders are essentially "lending money to themselves." (p.138)

He quotes an extraordinarily frank Angolan economist who states that "if ever someone is denounced and brought to trial for being unable to justify how he acquired his wealth, that individual, if he wants to talk, will take everyone [else] to court and to prison.... Because if one of them talks, they are all gone." (p.153)

Given the "rentier roots of Angolan business" - based not in production but in a kind of rental income from oil as a natural resource - and the fact that "all business is directly or indirectly with the state", the result is a harshly divided and unbalanced society. Describing the economy's "absolute dependence on foreign partnerships", De Oliveira shows that outside the oil industry Angolan businesses remain "incompetent and inefficient." Angolans "rarely if ever play an active role in the management of joint ventures with foreign partners" and "prefer to conduct themselves as owners rather than managers." 

The "constant resort to expatriates" to handle administrative and technical functions - especially Brazilians, Portuguese and Chinese - reflects a culture in which Angolan businesses generally "have no bookkeeping, are not audited, and have no board of directors." With an acute philosophy of "short-termism", owners use their companies as a "personal piggy bank", in an economy "almost defined by its reluctance to engage in productive enterprise.... Industry and agriculture remain sideshows to the main business of appropriating the oil rent."  (pp.144-47)

Under these conditions, with many of the elite consumed by "flash and relentless spending" (p.149), Angolans are realising that "petro-prosperity is only for the few." (p.161)

While the International Monetary Fund reported in 2011 that a quarter of GDP could not be accounted for, and while investments by the elite outside the country - especially in Portugal, the former colonial power - suggest to de Oliveira an alleged form of "money-laundering", (p.196) he notes that at the heart of Angolan public life there is a brute fact: "most people in power are perceived as thieves, in the literal sense of the word, having appropriated their fortunes from the siphoning off of oil monies or the use of public office for private gain." (p.154)

Along with "lack of service delivery to the poor" (p.157), he finds the MPLA characterised by a "rhetoric of universal inclusion contradicted by a practice of mass exclusion." (p.206) The "national cake was not being shared. ... Despite a GDP per capita of US$5,700 in 2012, most Angolans are very poor, suffer and die of preventable diseases, and have a life expectancy that barely reaches 50 years; access to potable water, sanitation and electricity remains scarce. People are not finding their way into jobs in the modern economy, but rather scraping by in the big cities, seething at the prosperity that excludes them." (pp.211-12)

This was written before the recent sharp fall in world oil prices, by about 60 per cent since June last year.

Agence France Presse reported on 19 March that the parliament cut the budget by a quarter last month, with public investment cut by 45 per cent. It noted that "about 54 percent of Angolans live on less than two dollars a day, according to official statistics released in October."

In a country in which - as de Oliveira shows - "the defence, security and public order budget is three times larger than the education budget and four times larger than the health budget" (p.214) - the destructive results of Angola's selfish, upside-down political culture may well become expressed in popular protests and regime repression.

In this toxic political economy, a brave and renowned Angolan journalist, Rafael Marques de Morais, was put on trial last month on charges of defaming leading military generals after he accused them of having links with Angola's trade in "blood diamonds". Only a week previously he had received a Freedom of Expression award in London from the campaigning group, Index on Censorship. He was arrested following publication of his book, Blood Diamonds: Torture and Corruption in Angola.

Under the title Diamantes de Sangue: Tortura e Corrupção em Angola, it was published in Portugal in 2011, following research revealing a systemic pattern of abuses involving hundreds of cases of murder, torture and other violations of human rights.

De Morais will return to court on 23 April, to face a fresh total of 24 charges, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This is the Angola examined with a surgeon's knife by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira in Magnificent and Beggar Land. Noting the "lawless behaviour of security companies in diamond-rich areas", de Oliveira has reported that many of these diamond fields are "owned by FAA generals" (serving in Angola's army, FAA), and that "these firms exercise power of life or death" over the rural population in the country's north-east. (pp.123-24)

South Africans should read and discuss this book, and consider how best to learn its lessons.

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