Gusher to a Few, Trickle to the Rest

Evaristo Jose, a spokesman at the Angolan Embassy in Washington, said his country was making reforms to improve its accounting of oil revenue. He said allegations of official corruption were untrue. A senior Bush administration official said Angolan authorities had "acknowledged that corruption is a problem and they are addressing it." He said the administration was not going easy on Angola's record on human rights and corruption because of its status as a major energy exporter.

Angola and other sub-Saharan African countries provided the United States with 15% of its oil imports last year, and that figure is expected to grow to 25% over the next decade.

Yet the lives of many people along Africa's Atlantic coast have only worsened: Jobs have not materialized, basic rights have eroded and corruption has spread.

"Global oil is a mixed picture, predominantly negative, and African oil is the most negative of all the stories," David Gordon, head of the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues, said at an energy conference last year in Washington.

A copy of a confidential report, written by an industry consultant in 2001 for Royal Dutch/Shell Group and obtained by The Times, provided an unusually frank assessment of oil's role in Angola:

A charitable foundation set up in the president's name uses the money it solicits from foreign businesses to "bolster the personality cult of President Dos Santos and to attempt to convince his compatriots that he cares about them."

"Angola's petroleum revenues, as they are currently used, are widely viewed as a curse," the report said. "Those ordinary Angolans who are aware of Angola's oil riches have grown to realize in recent years that this resource is managed for the immense profit of a very few, and the increasing misery of the many."

Poverty Despite the Oil

The story is much the same elsewhere in the region.

Nigeria has exported more than $200 billion worth of oil during the last 15 years, but 70% of its 130 million people live on less than $1 a day. Former Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., who helped oversee U.S. military operations in most of Africa until 2003, said in April that widespread poverty had left the country "ripe for turmoil."

Political instability there "could cause major disruption of the world's production of crude oil," he said at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. "If Nigeria explodes, we will feel it."