The 30-second briefing
THE ECONOMY: Moody’s has changed Angola’s sovereign outlook from stable to positive, while keeping its B3 rating. But €745 million of a €1 billion German-backed credit line remains unused — a striking illustration of the gap between improving macroeconomic indicators and conditions facing businesses.
CARRINHO: One of Angola’s fastest-growing business groups has agreed to buy BPI’s 33.35% stake in BFA for €388.5 million, subject to regulatory approvals. Its rapid expansion during João Lourenço’s presidency, major dealings with the state and access to state-backed finance have fuelled persistent suspicions of political favour — allegations Carrinho rejects and Lourenço has denied. Its growing presence in banking now raises another question: who controls access to capital?
PRIVATISATION: Angola has sold scores of state assets and now has an operating stock market. But selling assets is not the same thing as spreading ownership — particularly when the state retains control of strategically important companies.
PUBLIC SECTOR: Teachers are back at work, but their dispute with the government has exposed continuing questions about the state’s ability to implement agreements as well as pay for them.
THE BIG QUESTION: Is Angola creating a broader capitalist class — or rearranging economic power among a relatively small number of groups?
Angola received some welcome economic news last week, as Moody’s changed the outlook on the country’s sovereign rating from stable to positive, while reaffirming the rating itself at B3.
For Marisa Lourenço, political and economic risk analyst and strategic adviser specialising in Southern Africa, the distinction matters.
The improved outlook says something about the government’s ability to meet its obligations. It says much less about how easy it is to run a business in Angola.
A €1 billion credit facility backed by Deutsche Bank provides a rather good illustration. Years after it was announced, €745 million remains unused.
There is money available. The problem is getting it into the economy.
Lourenço pointed to bureaucracy, weak financial markets, difficulties smaller companies face obtaining bank finance and continuing problems accessing foreign currency.
That distinction — between what looks better from above and what works on the ground — ran through this week’s Angola Briefing.
And eventually it led to a much bigger question.
Who actually owns Angola’s economy?
The extraordinary rise of Carrinho
Few companies make that question more interesting than Grupo Carrinho.
The Benguela-based group has expanded dramatically across the Angolan economy and is now becoming an increasingly important player in finance.
Earlier this month, its financial arm agreed to acquire BPI’s 33.35% holding in Banco de Fomento Angola for €388.5 million, excluding an additional variable component. The deal still requires regulatory approval.
That extraordinary expansion has also attracted political scrutiny.
Carrinho has become one of a small number of business groups repeatedly associated with major dealings with the Angolan state during João Lourenço’s presidency. Its growth has included state contracts, the acquisition of the formerly state-owned BCI and access to financing backed by sovereign guarantees.
Critics and commentators have consequently questioned whether Carrinho’s rise reflects unusually close political connections. The company has strongly rejected suggestions that its success derives from improper favour from the presidency, while Lourenço has previously denied that his government favours Carrinho and several other large business groups.
For Florindo Chivucute, founder and executive director of Friends of Angola, Carrinho’s trajectory deserves much more scrutiny.
Chivucute was careful about one point: he said he could not prove a direct connection between President João Lourenço and Carrinho’s owner.
His question was instead how a relatively small company had expanded so rapidly and become such an important recipient of business involving the state.
Lourenço approached the issue from another direction: credit.
Angolan companies already operate in an economy in which access to finance is difficult and uneven. A large conglomerate expanding into banking therefore acquires influence not only through the businesses it owns, but potentially through its position within the system that determines where credit goes.
As Lourenço put it during the discussion:
“Where are the lines of credit going?”
That is a much bigger question than Carrinho.
It goes to the heart of what Angola’s economic reforms were supposed to accomplish.
Carrinho — from Benguela to BFA
Grupo Carrinho’s transformation is one of the most striking stories in Angola’s recent political economy.
Its expansion has taken it from its base in Benguela into an increasingly wide range of sectors. In finance, it acquired the state-owned BCI in 2021 and has also been pursuing an interest in Banco Keve.
That Keve transaction is itself an illustration of the complexity surrounding the group’s expansion. The Banco Nacional de Angola has acknowledged an effective participation by Carrinho while the formal approval process remains unresolved.
Now comes BFA.
BPI has agreed to sell its 33.35% holding to Carrinho’s financial arm. The fixed portion of the transaction is worth €388.5 million, with an additional variable component linked to BFA’s 2026 dividend.
The acquisition remains subject to approvals in Angola and Portugal.
Carrinho’s relationship with the state has been the subject of public scrutiny for years. Expansão has grouped it with a small number of companies that became increasingly prominent in state business during the Lourenço presidency, while other observers have questioned whether political connections helped explain its rapid ascent.
Carrinho disputes that interpretation. Its representatives have argued that the group’s expansion reflects its own commercial performance and ability to meet the requirements of international lenders. President Lourenço has likewise rejected allegations that his government favours Carrinho.
The significance of its banking expansion is therefore not simply that Carrinho is buying another asset. It is that one of Angola’s fastest-growing — and most politically scrutinised — industrial groups is establishing an increasingly consequential position inside the country’s financial system.
Privatisation — but to whom?
Angola’s PROPRIV programme was intended to reduce the enormous role of the state in the economy, attract investment and encourage a stronger private sector.
There has unquestionably been movement.
State assets have been sold. BODIVA has developed from an institution largely associated with debt instruments into an actual equities market. Major Angolan companies have begun listing shares.
That would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.
But there is another question hidden inside the headline numbers:
Who bought the assets?
And then an even harder one:
Who ultimately owns the companies that bought them?
Chivucute’s concern is that counting the companies buying state assets does not necessarily tell us how widely ownership has spread.
A privatisation programme could produce dozens of nominally different buyers while economic control remains concentrated among a much smaller group of ultimate beneficiaries.
Chivucute argued that greater transparency over beneficial ownership is therefore essential before judging how far PROPRIV has genuinely broadened participation in Angola’s economy.
Some of his conclusions are considerably more critical than the government’s presentation of the programme. During the discussion he compared the direction of Angolan privatisation with the concentration of wealth associated with Russia’s post-Soviet privatisations.
That is Chivucute’s assessment, rather than an established description of the programme. But it raises a legitimate question for PROPRIV:
Should success be measured by the number of assets privatised — or by what the programme does to the distribution of economic power?
What exactly is PROPRIV?
PROPRIV is Angola’s privatisation programme, launched as part of the economic reforms pursued under President João Lourenço.
At its most basic, its purpose is to reduce direct state participation in the economy by selling state-owned assets and stakes in companies to private investors.
But not every privatisation is economically equivalent.
Selling a small non-strategic company outright is very different from selling a minority stake in a major bank, telecoms operator or energy company while the state retains effective control.
That distinction became one of the central themes of the Angola Briefing discussion.
The headline number of transactions can therefore tell only part of the story. Other useful measures include how much capital was raised, who acquired the assets, whether ownership subsequently became more dispersed, and how much control the state actually relinquished.
A stock exchange changes the equation
There is an important counterargument.
Lourenço cautioned against looking at the shortcomings of PROPRIV and concluding that nothing meaningful has changed.
Angola now has something it did not previously have: an increasingly functional public equities market. Companies including banks, insurer ENSA, BODIVA itself and telecoms operator Unitel have come to market.
Publicly traded companies create prices that can be observed. They require greater disclosure. And, at least in principle, they allow a much wider group of investors to own pieces of important Angolan businesses.
The market is still extremely young, and recent price movements have provided an early lesson that buying shares also means accepting losses as well as gains.
But its existence is itself part of the reform story. And Unitel may be the most interesting example of all.
Lourenço said she had once doubted that she would see Unitel reach the stock market. It did; but the structure of the transaction also demonstrates the limits of Angola’s privatisation model.
The state was able to bring private investors into Unitel and raise capital without giving up control of the company.
For Lourenço, that is PROPRIV in miniature.
Why Unitel matters
Telecommunications is a strategically important sector, and the company itself is one of Angola’s most important businesses.
A public listing therefore goes considerably further than selling a collection of small state assets.
It exposes a major company to public-market investors and contributes to the development of BODIVA.
But a minority listing does not necessarily transfer control.
That makes Unitel a useful example of the compromise running through Angola’s privatisation programme: bring private capital into major assets, develop a functioning capital market and demonstrate economic reform — while stopping short of relinquishing state control over strategically important businesses.
Money for projects, but not for people?
The ownership question also connects to a seemingly separate story: the latest confrontation between the government and Angola’s teachers.
Teachers have returned to classrooms following the latest industrial action, but implementation of the agreement remains important.
The government says career updates are planned for 53,755 education workers admitted between 2017 and 2020, with 27,334 cases already validated for payment from October. The remaining files are expected to be dealt with in the first half of 2027.
Chivucute questioned whether teachers would trust those commitments after previous disputes.
Lourenço identified two overlapping problems.
One is money. Debt servicing and competing demands on the budget limit how much room the government has to increase public-sector spending.
But the other is state capacity. Even where an agreement has been reached and money is theoretically available, administrative systems can struggle to implement changes.
That makes the contrast with large infrastructure projects politically significant. Angola can mobilise enormous sums for visible capital projects while apparently struggling with comparatively mundane administrative processes affecting salaries and careers.
The reform paradox
There is a temptation to tell Angola’s economic story in one of two ways.
The first is the official reform story: privatisation, macroeconomic stabilisation, new investment and a growing capital market.
The second is the sceptical version: old networks of economic power have simply been replaced by new ones.
The discussion on this week’s Angola Briefing suggested something more complicated.
Real reforms have happened. Macroeconomic management has changed. Angola has reduced some of the extraordinary institutional conflicts that characterised the old system. BODIVA exists and is developing. Major companies are coming to market.
But economic liberalisation is taking place inside a political system in which control over major economic assets remains important.
That creates a tension. The government wants private capital, functioning markets, and for international investors to see evidence of reform. But surrendering control of the biggest assets is something else entirely.
Which brings us back to the original question. After years of PROPRIV, it is no longer enough to ask how much has Angola privatised, but rather:
Who bought it? Who ultimately owns the buyers? Who controls the finance? And how much control has the state really surrendered?
Watch the discussion
Claudio Silva is joined by Marisa Lourenço, political and economic risk analyst and strategic adviser specialising in Southern Africa, and Florindo Chivucute, founder and executive director of Friends of Angola.
Watch the full Angola Briefing →
