Lisbon, Sept. 14, 2025 (Lusa) - Economist Carlos Lopes told Lusa on Sunday that Cape Verde was the country that had the "most consistent" post-independence growth trajectory, managing to be a reformist country and not a “rentier” one.

"The national liberation struggles achieved their greatest gain, which was independence, but after that you enter a different period, which is the period of building an economic reality that corresponds to the ambitions of an independent sovereign state, and there this growth was not always stable; in this respect the country that had the most consistent growth was Cape Verde, it was the country that went the furthest," said Carlos Lopes.

In an interview with Lusa on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the independence of the former Portuguese colonies, which is being marked this year, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) emphasised that "being the country with the least resources in raw materials, it should perhaps be the one that would have the most difficulties, so it's a paradox of development, which shows that the lack of ease sometimes creates ingenuity".

In his general analysis of the evolution of Lusophone African economies over the last five decades, Carlos Lopes separates the countries into reformists and “rentiers”, in other words, those that undertake reforms to modernise the economy and boost development, and those that live off the income guaranteed by the existence of a large quantity of raw materials.

"Angola is a rentier economy, it is not making major reforms to promote industrialisation, including the introduction of refineries; Angola's economic policies are not geared towards these reforms, when people talk about reform in the country, they usually refer to austerity, to making better gains in terms of government efficiency to reduce spending," said the professor of economics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, stressing that "this is not an industrial policy type of reform."

Angola, the largest Portuguese-speaking economy in Africa, "has failed to take advantage of the possibilities offered to it in terms of agriculture, it used to have the fifth largest GDP in Africa, and now it's falling further and further down the score, because it's experiencing the crisis of not having made the necessary reforms when they were easier and there was more elasticity" due to oil revenues.

The same can be said, he added, of Guinea-Bissau, which has an economy very much based on the export of cashew nuts and the receipt of development aid, which "allows the elite to reproduce without making reforms".

Mozambique, for its part, "is a little halfway there, it has rentier behaviours and sometimes has periods of reform, but it lacks consistency," said Carlos Lopes, referring to the exploitation of coal, aluminium and gas in recent years, which promises to change the country's economy.

"In the first fifteen years of independence, it had a good trajectory, but then it went into a kind of collapse because it didn't realise that it was becoming deindustrialised and this deindustrialisation ended up being the driving force for Mozambique to become very dependent on the logistics corridors that serve other countries and which, when there are difficulties with political stability or conflicts, have a direct impact on the country," said the economist.

Mozambique, he added, has a "huge potential for transforming raw materials", namely natural gas, which exists in abundant quantities in the north of the country, "and which could enable the energy transition that many countries are looking for".

However, he warns, "Mozambique has started to spend the gas money before extracting it", leaving the economy "dependent on a product that it has not yet extracted, which causes considerable damage not only to the economy, but also to its reputation".

Lastly, São Tomé and Príncipe doesn't have many options, "it's a country that lives aided by circumstances and doesn't have very easy choices of its own, just like Cape Verde, but the difference is that the latter has reformed and managed to [change], by sublimating the little potential it had, particularly in terms of services, and also greatly helped by an extraordinarily patriotic diaspora."

MBA/ADB // ADB.

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