A Pencil Against a Billion Dollars
Days ago, in the village of Miumba, in the historic municipality of Cahama (Cunene Province), I witnessed the raw portrait of education in Angola. A class of children sat under a tree for their Mathematics lesson on geometry. The teacher drew houses on a board and asked the children to color them. But there were no colored pencils. Many didn’t even have a regular pencil. The few that existed were nothing but worn stubs, so short that scratching a line on paper seemed like wasting gold.
Three classes meet this way; each gathered beneath the largest trees in the community. Circles of stones mark where the children must sit. These children, the sons and daughters of pastoralist families, live in an Angola that has yet to arrive for them.
Every stroke of the pencil was an act of resistance, every mark on a notebook a silent cry against abandonment. To share a stub with a classmate who had none was a true gesture of solidarity. Miumba is a place where, even without pencils, the will to write a different tomorrow is born. It shows us a country where children are ready to learn, but their government abandons them.
These children embody the nation itself: intelligence and willpower suffocated by neglect. If Angola cannot guarantee a pencil, what sense is there in boasting of modernity, digitalization, and the future?
This is the grim reality of primary education in Angola: a system incapable of securing the most basic tool of learning—a pencil. And no nation that cannot provide a pencil to its children has the right to speak of the future.
And yet Angola is rich—oil, diamonds, natural resources in abundance. What it lacks are priorities and good governance. Billions are wasted on vanity projects and endless presidential tourism.
Beneath the tree in Miumba lies Angola’s cruelest contradiction: misery is not born of scarcity, but of misrule. Angola is not poor; Angolans are impoverished by a government that abandons them.
There too lies the naked truth of the nation: a lack of justice, a governance that is reckless and inhuman.
Consider the cost of João Lourenço’s travels, exposed by the Angola Open Policy Initiative and reported by O Novo Jornal. In just eight years, he is estimated to have toured some 50 countries at a cost nearing one billion dollars—journeys that look more like tourist pilgrimages than statecraft, financed by the suffering of the people.
If the president abandoned merely two of his extravagant parades abroad, trimmed the bloated entourages, and redirected the funds, it would suffice to put a pencil and a notebook in the hands of every child in Angola’s forgotten communities.
The contrast is brutal. On one side, children learning to draw without color, practicing the geometry of survival, staring into a future that offers none. On the other, the opulence of a wandering Presidency, unmoored from the nation it claims to lead.
Education in Angola cannot remain a desert. The right to learn is not a favor to be begged for— it is a demand that must be made, a justice that must no longer be denied.