

The BBC's Louise Redvers reports on the ghost town of Kilamba, Angola, a horrendously expensive high-rise enclave built by Chinese companies on a line of credit secured with Angolan oil, which has only seen 220 apartments out of 2800 sold. Kilamba is the most ambitious of several new towns being built outside of existing Angoloan cities by Chinese firms.

It's like a bizarro-world version of the Keynsian idea of getting the economy going by paying one group of laborers to dig holes and another to fill them in. But in this case, one group of workers are paid to pump oil, which is offshored to China. In exchange, a group of Chinese workers is paid to build a gate-guarded enclave for a non-existent pool of mega-rich locals that no one can afford to live in, and which gradually turns into a massive liability. Profit!

The place is eerily quiet, voices bouncing off all the fresh concrete and wide-open tarred roads. There are hardly any cars and even fewer people, just dozens of repetitive rows of multi-coloured apartment buildings, their shutters sealed and their balconies empty. Only a handful of the commercial units are occupied, mostly by utility companies, but there are no actual shops on site, and so – with the exception of a new hypermarket located at one entrance – there is nowhere to buy food. After driving around for nearly 15 minutes and seeing no-one apart from Chinese labourers, many of whom appear to live in containers next to the site, I came across a tiny pocket of life at a school. It opened six months ago, bussing in its pupils in from outlying areas because there are no children living on site to attend.

Angola's Chinese-built ghost town

(via Super Punch)