by RAFAEL MARQUES DE MORAIS
Since last July, thousands of Angolan citizens living in Luanda have been making desperate efforts to acquire state-funded public housing apartments in the Kilamba development. The private real estate company hired to sell the apartments and funded by the state, Delta Imobiliária, charges prices ranging from US$125,000 to US$200,000 per apartment. These unaffordable prices, and the disclosure of the names of Delta Imobiliaria’s shareholders, reveal yet another corruption scandal.
Contrary to the government’s established ceiling prices for state-funded social housing, Delta is overpricing the units by two to three times. On 5 August 2010, the President of the Republic, José Eduardo dos Santos, announced that struggling Angolan families would be able to buy state funded social housing for a maximum price of US$60,000 per unit. He made the announcement during his speech at the meeting of the National Program for Social Housing, held at the presidential palace.[1]
In the run up to the 2008 legislative elections, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos made an electoral promise to build one million houses over four years. Such a promise was seen as crucial to the ruling party’s election triumph. Although limits in building capacity caused it to be scaled down to just a few thousand houses, the Kilamba social housing project became a symbol of what had been promised to the people.
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