Bottom Of The Heap.(Brief Article)

It's not just the poverty that's so appalling in Luanda. Africans have a saying: when a politician takes power, he and his cronies get "to eat"--to enjoy the spoils of office through corruption, perks or patronage. And in a world of haves and have-nots, there may be no greater contrast between misery and excess than in the Angolan capital- -a more damning indictment of a nation's leadership than any measure of annual per capita income.

Luanda is a boomtown. Oil brings in more than $3 billion a year, and the major companies plan to spend tens of billions more in the southwest African nation over the next five years. Huge new deep-water finds could make Angola the continent's leading oil producer in a decade. It already supplies 8 percent of the United States' oil, more than Kuwait. Not even the brutal civil war waged by rebel leader Jonas Savimbi for the last quarter century can explain why nothing seems to trickle down.

But the consequences are pain-fully obvious. Down the block from the glitzy local headquarters of the French oil giant TotalFinaElf, street children make their homes in four abandoned cars. They've removed the seats and covered the vehicles with pieces of plastic, cardboard and sheet ...