Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg visited Angola,where she met the country’s president, João Lourenço. “We are in a positive process” said Solberg.
The country is Norway’s most important economic partner on the African continent.Solberg told NTB news that she and the Angolan president had a broad discussion about cooperation between the countries.
“We talked about everything from oil and gas work to marine and fisheries issues,and what we should cooperate more on in the future.And of course we also talked about corruption and the poor management of resources in this country”said the prime minister.
Positive process
Angola is one of the world’s most oil rich countries, and is Africa’s second largest oil producer.However,the country is completely down in 167th place on the Transparency corruption index, and is among the 47 of the UN’s list of least developed countries.
João Lourenço was elected as Angola’s president in 2017, and the former defence minister was just fighting corruption as one of his main constituencies in the election campaign.
Solberg believes the country has taken steps in the right direction.
“Perhaps the most important thing from the meeting was that we recognised that Angola is in a positive process of openness and anti-corruption. So we hope that this process continues so that the President’s agenda for more investments can actually be implemented”said Solberg.
Large oil resources
Later on Monday,Solberg participated in a business seminar with representatives from civil society and Norwegian business.There,the Prime Minister met Torgrim Reitan, who
earlier this year became Executive Vice President for Development and Production International of Equinor.
Most of the Norwegian business engagement in Angola is related to oil.Equinor entered the market in 1991, and today extracts around 200,000 barrels of oil equivalents per day from its fields in Angola.
During the speech at the seminar,Solberg said that she hopes that the cooperation between Norway and Angola can develop to deal with more than oil and gas.
“Petroleum is a key sector for both Norway and Angola,and will continue to be for a while.But I hope we can expand our business cooperation to other sectors over time’’ said the prime minister,and drew on clean energy and fishing as potential areas where the two countries share common interests.
© NTB scanpix / #Norway Today
