A network of activists from eastern Angola has said the region continues to be treated as a “reservoir” of natural resources and electoral votes, lamenting the “absolute misery and deliberate discrimination of its people.”
According to the activists, eastern Angola — encompassing the provinces of Moxico, Lunda Norte, Lunda Sul and Moxico Leste, described as “the cradle of the great pre-colonial Lunda-Chokwe kingdoms and guardian of Angola’s largest diamond, forest, water and agricultural reserves” — “continues to be systematically treated as an exploited backyard.”
The Bloc of Eastern Resistance and the Civic Movement to Combat Regional Asymmetries in the East, in a document sent to Lusa from Luena in Moxico province addressed to opposition parties as a “strategic, binding and historic proposal for the redemption of eastern Angola,” argue the region lives under “deliberate discrimination” and has been turned into a “reservoir of natural resources and electoral votes, but never as a worthy partner in the national project of building a just, united and prosperous Angola.”
The activists call for “urgent, public, comprehensive and binding” clarification on the “broad salvation front of Angola” — a platform of parties and civil society members coordinated by UNITA (the largest opposition party) — and propose “loyal, active collaboration conditional on the full assumption of a concrete, historic and transformative patriotic agenda” for the “marginalised east.”
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The proposal “is not a request for charity. It is an offer of a serious, loyal and strategic partnership, but conditional on concrete, public, binding and measurable commitments,” the document states, noting the east “has already paid too dearly for its blind loyalty to the national project.”
The activists describe eastern Angola’s reality as “painful and unacceptable.” Despite “colossal wealth,” the population lives in “absolute misery and deliberate structural discrimination” — a situation they attribute not to geography or climate but to “historical, systematic, deliberate and ongoing regional discrimination that began in the colonial era.” They note that eastern resources finance the national budget while the region “receives crumbs.”
Specific grievances include scarcity of drinking water, lack of roads connecting municipalities and provinces, absence of electricity, “catastrophic” healthcare, large numbers of children without schools, and the marginalisation of Chokwe culture.
Their “patriotic agenda for the east” demands permanent independent oversight of public works, an urgent national land registry, integrated development programmes, health infrastructure, the immediate institutionalisation of a regional development levy on diamonds and timber with at least 40% of revenues going directly to producing provinces, effective local government and the construction of a regional sports complex.
