LUANDA

I have just read that Luanda, Angola's capital, will have a new iconic construction, a huge 325 meters high building with 70 floors. That's fully in accordance with the recent fact (2007) that Angola joined the OPEP, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Money becomes an easy matter when the pumps discharge so much amounts of dollars! Of course someone may challenge the way the barrels money is distributed and invested, but definitively this is not at all an ethic problem for most of the leaders of the continent, just a problem for those outsiders to the elites of rich developing countries.
Before Angola was an independent country I lived in Luanda and from 1967 to 1971 worked in the then tallest building in Angola, which was also Portugal's tallest one, as Angola was politicaly  portuguese. It has 23 floors and is 90 meters high. I have been Inspector and then Chief-Inspector of Banco Comercial de Angola, an affiliated bank of Banco Português do Atlântico and my office was on the 3rd floor, till I moved to Mozambique. After  indipendence the bank was taken over by the MPLA Government and changed its name twice; it is today the BPC, Banco de Poupança e Crédito. On top of the building there was a big electric panel with the letters BCA; now the letters are naturaly BPC. The upper floor has a fantastic view of downtown and the bay, best in the night, for my taste. Was the construction of the then imposing private-owned BCA building an ethic problem at the time? Well, not by Luanda's 2009 standards.