Angola’s poor people hit hard by #urbanisation crackdown in Luanda | Lilly Peel | Global development | guardian.co.uk
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/may/10/angola-urbanisation-crackdown-luanda
#Angola has experienced fast economic growth, due to a booming oil and diamond trade. But the war left a ravaged infrastructure and weakened political and social institutions. Luanda is now one of the world’s most expensive cities, yet an estimated two-thirds of the people living there exist on less than $2 a day. Since 2002, forced evictions and the demolition of poor areas to make way for shopping centres and gated condominiums for Angola’s elite have been recurrent themes. Postwar infrastructure and development are undoubtedly necessary in this chaotic and crowded place, but at what cost?
Sitting outside her tin shack in what is left of Cambamba II neighbourhood, where she has lived for 47 years, a Luandan grandmother says she and the other inhabitants had cultivated land over the years to grow their own food, but police and government bulldozers have destroyed her home five times, together with all her possessions. “We lost the bed, the pans, our stove – the people who pushed down the houses took them. They came with dogs and guns and they flattened everything.”