Context
Manuel Domingos Vicente served as Vice President of the Republic of Angola from 2012 to 2017, under President José Eduardo dos Santos. Before entering government, he spent more than a decade as chairman and chief executive of Sonangol, the state oil company and the institution that, in Angola, has historically functioned as something closer to a treasurer than a conventional national oil firm.
This context is important for understanding what he is describing in this interview. Sonangol did not simply produce and sell oil. It underwrote the sovereign borrowing that rebuilt the country after the civil war, providing the crude that served as collateral for Chinese credit lines. Manuel Vicente ran it during precisely the years when the arrangement now known internationally as “the Angola model” was constructed. He then moved into the vice presidency, where the same relationship was managed at the political level.
Few people alive have been closer to the mechanics of China-Africa financing. Fewer still have been on both sides of it, inside the industry that pledged the oil, and the government that spent the money.
War and the country’s emergence
Angola is still a young state with a long history of war behind it. Independence came from Portugal in 1975, after roughly five centuries of colonial rule. Almost immediately, the new nation fell into a civil war that would last, with interruptions, until February 2002 – a conflict rooted less in the fight against Portugal than in the rivalry between the liberation movements that had waged it.
The two principal antagonists had emerged during the anti-colonial struggle of the 1960s. The MPLA – the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) – took power at independence in 1975 and has governed the country ever since; it drew Soviet and Cuban backing during the Cold War. UNITA – the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) – became its main rival, supported at various points by the United States and apartheid South Africa. What began as a Cold War proxy conflict outlasted the Cold War itself, ending only with the death of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002. By then the country’s infrastructure, institutions, and public finances had largely collapsed.
The economy
In Angola, oil is the economy, and the economy is narrower than it looks.
Angola is Africa's second-largest crude oil producer, with oil accounting for roughly a fifth of its GDP and about half of its state revenue. But production has been falling for over a decade, nearly halving from a 2008–2010 peak of around 1.9 million barrels per day to roughly 1.03 million by 2025. In January 2024, Angola left OPEC after rejecting a quota it considered unrealistic and insulting, though as analysts noted, the decline owed more to mature fields and slowed investment than to the cartel. When Vicente says Angola is “producing less than we used to produce,” this is what he means, and it is the fiscal backdrop to everything else he says.
Then to the scale of Chinese lending, where over roughly two decades Chinese institutions committed more than USD 42 billion in loans to Angola – more than to any other African country. By late 2021, Angola owed USD 13.6 billion to the China Development Bank and USD 4 billion to China Exim Bank, together around 40 per cent of its external government debt. The mechanism was the “Angola model”: infrastructure financing secured against future oil deliveries, with crude cargoes pledged directly to debt servicing.
Yet this era has been ending. Angola stopped contracting resource-backed loans from China in 2017, and the stock has been drawn down since: oil-backed debt to China fell by almost a quarter in the past year, to USD 7.73 billion. When new Chinese financing was sought in early 2026 for a USD 4.8 billion facility for a refinery at Lobito, the terms did not use oil as collateral. The relationship has not ended, but its architecture has changed.
In February 2002, the Angolan civil war ended. Two weeks later, a government delegation boarded a plane to Washington. Vicente was on it. The purpose, as he describes it, was straightforward: after twenty-seven years of war, the country needed capital to rebuild, and it went first to the partners it knew.
“We could not convince the American government to give us this help,” he says. The delegation approached the Paris Club, the World Bank, and the IMF. In his account, none of them engaged seriously. “They didn't pay attention to us. That's why we moved to the East.”
The first Chinese facility was two billion dollars, collateralised against crude oil, directed at reconstruction. More followed. Over the following decade the arrangement became one of the most heavily analysed relationships in the China-Africa literature, and one of the most frequently invoked in debates about debt sustainability and resource-backed finance.
What is striking about Vicente’s account is not that it defends the relationship. It is that he declines to accept the terms in which outsiders usually argue about it. The standard story sees China arriving in Africa with capital and a strategy; the chronology runs the other way. Angola sought Western financing first, was refused, and turned East because it had run out of alternatives.
“The country was completely broken down. We had no resources, financial resources, and we need some help from abroad. We went to China, and China gave us some help. That's why this strong relation started.”
He is not sentimental about Chinese motives. Asked why Beijing was willing when Washington was not, he offers no ideological explanation: “In this world, each one has its own interests.” China, at that stage, had limited experience of international cooperation and was looking to build it - and it did not come for free. The result is a deflationary account with no Chinese benevolence and no Western conspiracy, only a state that needed money, a set of institutions that declined to provide it, and another that did, all for reasons of their own.
His characterisation of the Western reaction, once the arrangement began producing results, is blunter.
“The problem, in my opinion and from my experience, was jealousy. I think the West, they didn't believe that this cooperation would be succeeded. When they start watching the things, we're getting some results, they get jealous.”
Yet, through the conversation, the same caveat kept reappearing.
“There is room for everybody. There is room for the West, there is room for the East.”
“It was our mistake”
The most unexpected moment in the interview comes when he is asked whether China’s approach to Angola changed over time, whether Beijing extracted more when Angola was weaker, immediately after the war.
He rejects the premise, and then locates the failure at home.
“I think they didn’t change any engagement. Okay, I would say that there was mistakes. Yes, there was. But it was our mistake. It was not their mistakes. Because we didn’t defend our interests firmly. They play and they use the same way as usual. They try to get as much as they can. You have to define boundaries.”
This is not the answer either prevailing script expects. The debt-trap framing casts African states as victims of a deliberate strategy; the counter-framing casts Western criticism as hypocritical noise around a fundamentally sound partnership. Vicente takes a third position, a home position: the asymmetry was real, the Chinese negotiators behaved exactly as negotiators behave, and the responsibility for whatever Angola failed to secure rests with the Angolans who were at the table.
Coming from someone who was at that table, it is a significant thing to say.
“In this world, the rules are the same for everybody. You have to fight for your own interests and the other side will fight for their own interests. The idea is to find a common ground, a common point where there is a win-win situation. If you don’t take care and you don’t defend your interests, they’ll get all the most.”
Upon extension into general principle, it is worth noting what this framework does and does not concede. It grants that the terms may have been unfavourable. It denies that unfavourable terms were evidence of predation. It relocates the entire question from the ethics of Chinese lending to the competence of African negotiation – a shift with real implications for how the literature on resource-backed finance is framed.
On the structure of the loans themselves, he is specific: Angola retained the right to select projects, Chinese companies executed them, and between and per cent of budgets were reserved for local content, in materials or labour. Whether that provision was met in practice is a question the interview does not settle, and one worth pursuing.
The Africa-first argument
Asked about Angola’s position in the contest between the United States, China, and Russia, Vicente’s answer is unsentimental to the point of bluntness.
“It’s good when big giants, they are fighting. While they are distracted, if we can get something, it would be good for us.”
He describes an ideal of a peaceful world in which states compete on capability, and then sets it aside as unrealistic. What remains is a smaller calculation: Angola has resources the giants need, and should use that position to build internal capacity.
“U.S. wants to be the leader, China wants to be the leader, the Russians, they want to be the leader, and they’ll keep fighting forever about it. You, as a small or medium country, you have best to see what are my main interests.”
But the more substantial argument, and the one that occupies most of the conversation’s second half, is that this external positioning is secondary. The priority is internal and continental.
Three themes recur:
1. Stop exporting raw materials.
“We should stop being an exporter of, I would say, raw materials. We should increase the cooperation with all the countries, with all the companies worldwide, but we should transform these materials in house. Keeping as it is, exporting diamonds, exporting oil, exporting iron ore and everything, we won’t get that.”
His forecast for African-Asian relations over the next fifty years is built on this: Asian firms building infrastructure in Africa and processing raw materials on the continent, rather than shipping them out unprocessed.
Context: Angola exports crude and imports refined fuel. The Lobito refinery now under construction is intended to change that; Angola hopes to become a regional refining hub supplying the DRC, Zambia, and South Africa. It is also the project for which Sonangol sought the 2026 Chinese loan – meaning the move away from raw-material export is itself being financed, once again, from Beijing.
2. Build intra-African trade before courting external partners.
“Before we get in touch and we think to increase the cooperation with the West and all these big giants, we should increase our internal trade in Africa.”
He names the barriers between Angola and Namibia, Angola and the DRC, and argues for thinking commercially as a continent. On whether a trans-African transport network is realistic, his answer is infrastructural determinism of a fairly pure kind:
“If you set up the railways, if you set up the roads, and you secure and guarantee the circulation of the people, all the rest is done.”
He draws the parallel to European integration directly – a century ago, he notes, it would have seemed equally implausible.
3. Know your own population.
This is the least expected of his priorities and, in some ways, the most concrete. He returns repeatedly to the absence of reliable demographic data.
“We say Nigeria today has 250 million people. Are all them registered? It’s a question.”
Before any of the rest is possible, he argues, African states need to know how many people they have, where they are, and what they do.
“If you don’t know deeply about yourself, it’s difficult to move forward.”
Underneath all three sits a single insistence, repeated in several forms: “No one will do this for you. You have to do it yourself.”
On being written about
Asked what scholars of African-Asian relations are missing, Vicente offers a direct answer: they have not lived it.
“With all the respect, I think most of the people that write all these articles, they’ve never been there. They don’t know the reality.”
He argues that sustained presence would change most analysts’ conclusions, and adds a qualification: “Okay, we have problems in Africa. Yes, we have leadership corruption. It’s a reality, but it’s not so big as they describe.”
He then distinguishes analysts he respects – those who go, observe, and report what they find – and those he says are “working for someone else,” where “the opinion that comes to us, it’s not the real opinion. It’s the opinion of the owner of the network.”
The point is worth taking seriously on its own terms: distance can produce confident conclusions about places the analyst has not seen, and firsthand observation is a reasonable corrective. It is also worth noting, in the same even spirit, that Vicente’s own public record has been the subject of exactly the kind of external scrutiny he is describing – a context readers can weigh for themselves. Neither observation cancels the other; both belong in view.
His final answer, when asked what he wishes were better understood, turns the point inward. “When people talk about Angola, they think they are talking about oil. But we don’t have only oil. We have a lot of things.” And then: “I would say that it’s not their fault. It’s our fault. We should be the one to promote our own capabilities, our own reality.”
Why this conversation matters
Vicente’s account is a participant’s account and carries the interpretive weight that implies he is describing decisions he helped make, and the framing is not neutral. But three things in it are worth carrying into the research literature.
The first is chronological. If Angola’s turn to China in 2002 followed a refused approach to Washington and the Bretton Woods institutions, then the question of why African states borrowed from China is partly a question about what the alternatives declined to offer. That reframing is available in the archival record, but it is rarely foregrounded.
The second is his relocation of agency. “It was our mistake” is an unusual thing for a former Vice President to say, and it points research toward a question the debt-trap literature tends to skip: what negotiating capacity did African states actually have, who was in the room, and what would have had to be different for the terms to have been better?
The third is his ordering of priorities. The external relationship, on his account, is downstream of internal capacity – and the questions worth asking about Angola and China may be, in the end, questions about Angola.