Luanda – Angola, the second largest crude producer in sub-Saharan Africa, on Thursday said oil exports rose 3% during the last three months of 2021 as energy prices soared.
The country raked in US$7.8 billion from crude oil exports between October and December, when prices averaged US$79 a barrel, the secretary of state for oil and gas, Jose Alexandre Barroso, said.
The export volume “represented an increase of three percent over the previous quarter”, he told a news conference in the capital Luanda.
Angola exported a total of 394 million barrels of crude oil last year, he added.
In December the International Monetary Fund projected that Angola’s economy will grow by about four percent in the medium term, “bolstered by the implementation of planned growth-enhancing structural reforms”.
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“Continued fiscal restraint should deliver a substantial overall surplus in 2021, while higher oil prices are supporting a high current account surplus,” the IMF said in a statement.
In a report last month, the global lender lauded Angola’s governance scores, which “have improved since the launch of reforms under President Joao Lourenco’s administration”.
It cited reforms in state-owned companies and his administration’s anti-corruption drive, among others.
After taking office in 2017, Lourenco launched an anti-graft push to recoup assets he suspected were embezzled under his predecessor, Jose Eduardo dos Santos who had ruled the country for 38 years.
Justice Minister Francisco Queiroz last week said Angola has recovered assets worth more than $11 billion that had been looted from state coffers and stashed in countries around the world.
Angola is sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil exporter after Nigeria, but many of its nearly 33 million people live in poverty.
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Source: AFP
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