Jacinto Baltazar makes a living by pushing his wooden cart down a dirt road at a market on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola, the world’s most expensive city, asking women if he can carry their shopping home.
Baltazar, a tall, wiry 40-year-old father of eight, charges 300 kwanzas ($3) to carry groceries on the cart he built himself out of planks of wood and a Toyota Corolla tire. On a good day, he finds as many as 15 customers in the Viana municipality.
During the rainy season, he needs his black rubber boots when he has to ferry people across pools of stagnant water.
“I know I can’t make a lot of money as a wheelbarrow man, but it keeps me busy and I also feed my family,” he said. “My wheelbarrow is my life.” Baltazar is one of millions of Angolans who are being left behind by the 10-fold expansion of the economy since the end of a 27-year civil war in 2002, fueled by Africa’s second-biggest oil industry and billions of dollars in Chinese, U.S. and European investment.
While two-thirds of the Angolan capital’s six million residents live on $2 a day, an inrush of foreign workers for companies cashing in on the economic boom have pushed rents for one-bedroom apartments in the city center to as high as $10,000 a month.
Luanda was ranked the world’s most expensive city for expatriates in Mercer’s 2014 Cost of Living Index, a second straight year it’s beat cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Geneva. Wealthy Feast While the wealthy can feast on fresh seafood shipped in from the former colonial ruler Portugal at trendy restaurants along the Ilha, a sandy peninsula that juts out from Luanda harbor, most Angolans subsist on funje, a pasty dish made from corn or cassava, a tube root that costs a $1 a kilogram.
Bloomberg
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