Angola
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
Political tensions continued to plague Angola long after the end of the civil war in 2002. Despite assertions of "free and fair" elections by both the African Union and the MPLA (the ruling government), more or less every result would be contested by the various opposition parties. UNITA, the primary opposition party, had failed to exceed its ~40% share of the vote in 1992, and reports of voter intimidation and arrests were rampant before every legislative election.
One might still regard this as exceeding expectations, given that the aforementioned 1992 election led to half a million deaths.
In any case, despite the “free and fair” elections, Angola continued to effectively be a one party state, with the MPLA dominating Parliament, and little hope for immediate change. José Eduardo dos Santos, the President of the country since 1979, continued in office through the 2010s. Indeed, the only barrier to him becoming a President for Life was the Angolan constitution, which limited him to a completely reasonable four terms, ending in 2022. Naturally, when this year began to creep up on him, the MPLA looked to amend the constitution to allow him to continue in power for even longer – they were only thwarted by his death in 2020 at the age of 77.
With dos Santos' death, the next in command was unclear – Fernando da Piedade Dias dos Santos, a close relative of the deceased President, had been President of the National Assembly for some time, but Manuel Vicente had been groomed as the successor to dos Santos as his Vice President. At the same time, the power struggle up top concealed a much more important one below.
Despite their strong geographic tendencies during the Civil War (UNITA being primarily relegated to the southeast, and the MPLA centered around Luanda), the politics of the two parties had long been personality-driven affairs. The new power vacuum left so much squabbling over who was in control of the MPLA that they lost sight of the 2020 Parliamentary elections, and forgot to rig them. In a spectacle that must have seemed nearly miraculous to outside observers, they were actually contested. A young, fresh politician out of the southeast, Fernandó Epalanga, managed to bring the presidential vote to a runoff election, only losing to the finally chosen Manuel Vicente there.
In any case, the parliament had to negotiate muddied waters for the first time, as the disparity between the ruling MPLA and its various opponents had been narrowed to a mere 40 seats – contrasting with the previous 130 seat gap. Forced to occasionally interact with their rivals, the various parties suddenly seemed to realize that almost literally everyone in the country was supposedly a social democrat, and that there really wasn't that much to argue about.
Except, of course, who had killed who in the last few decades.
Somehow, things managed to work themselves out. The presence of an actual opposition forced both parties to hold themselves and their members accountable – or at least, to a greater degree than anyone had been before. Corruption, though still rampant, went on the decline, and for once, some of the wealth that the country's vast oil and diamond reserves had been winning went to a larger segment of the population. The recipe for anti-corruption was not a new one, but it had proved hard to implement previously. Peace and the split government changed that.
By the late 2020s, this situation had been normalized enough – with UNITA winning substantial minorities in each election, that there were only a few cries of outrage when the no longer young Epalanga managed to win the first non-MPLA presidency in Angolan history, in 2032.
On the issue of Cabinda, little progress had been made after the attack on the Togolese football team in 2010. Distrust permeated discussions on both sides. Nevertheless, the growing competence and strength of the political opposition quieted many of the fears of Cabinda, especially once the wealth stopped being funneled exclusively to arms and the rest of Angola. By 2030, Cabinda had become an island of modernization, and with enough concessions granted by the government that separation looked unlikely in the far future.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Many had hoped that the peaceful transition of power in Angola would help stabilize the region as a whole, and while to some extent this proved true, it did not prevent the Democratic Republic of the Congo from slipping back into civil war. The renewed conflict, as usual, did not draw much attention from the rest of the world, with some aid being funneled by developed countries to the Congolese government against its eastern rebels. The Angolan government, still firmly in the hands of the MPLA at this point, backed the government forcefully, and contributed numerous forces to the AU military intervention in the region that would eventually quell the rebels in the late 2020s.
The impact of global climate change on the African continent would be much more harsh in the areas immediately adjacent to the Sahara. In southern Africa, by contrast, it would be limited to a fairly minor exacerbation of ongoing drought conditions in certain regions. Unfortunately, the droughts were already quite serious, and the droughts contributed to the destabilization of the DRC. Additionally severely impacted would be Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe's death would lead to the collapse of the regime in the late 2010s, sparking a serious of low-level riots and massacres that would smolder for nearly a decade before a new government would be installed.
Angola's increasing stabilization in the 2020s and early 2030s thrust it into a more prominent role among the African Union, contributing numerous soldiers to peacekeeping operations and interventions in the more unstable central regions of Africa, especially Sudan, whose out and out civil war in the late 2020s caught the attention of countries all over the world.
Comparatively enormous investment by the PRC into the African continent, including Angola, cemented ties between the two countries. Good relations continued with the Cuban government, even when that island nation began to moderate in the late 2020s, while close ties with the DRC and Namibia continue to the present day.
ECONOMY
Angola's economy in the 2010s and 2020s continued to grow at a breakneck pace (an almost insane 10% or higher annually, continuing previous trends), primarily on the back of the oil industry, with some help from diamond mining. The former, of course, was not sustainable, and started to go into serious decline in the latter half of the 2020s, especially as the developed world began to transition away from petroleum-based energy. The latter, based on the whims of an incredibly monopolized industry, fluctuated wildly enough that no one wanted to really use it as the basis for their entire economy. Copper, iron, and gold mining proved vital as well, though their earnings never quite reached the heights of the oil boom.
Luckily, the stability afforded by the relative climate of peace allowed Angola to redirect a lot of that wealth back into the economy. A flourishing producer of high-end agricultural goods before the war, the country rebuilt these industries, becoming a leading producer of coffee, bananas, and various other fruits. Chinese, and to a more limited extent, American investment, along with oil and diamond wealth proved a boon: especially as corruption declined in the 2020s, infrastructure spending more than quadrupled, rebuilding damaged roads and rail, and building a surprisingly modern highway system.
Naturally, the dreams of fusion power that more developed countries hoped for had little chance of making any headway in Africa. However, cheap solar technology began to propagate in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and with the development of numerous native African corporations, spread to towns and villages throughout the interior of Angola and its neighbors. Not only did they provide cheap, reliable power, they facilitated the continuing spread of cell phone and wireless technology, enabling widespread non-state-owned media broadcasts. This, along with the utter failure of censorship technology on the part of the MPLA government, has often been credited with the surprising political turn the country took in the early 2020s and beyond.
As has been previously mentioned, Cabinda became a beacon for the region, along with Luanda and other coastal cities. Numerous new accountability measures ensured that their wealth trickled down considerably faster than had been true before – median income of Angolans skyrocketed, soon resembling something more like South Africa than the DRC.