TAHAL builds infrastructure for Angolan farming project

Quiminha project
Quiminha project

Israeli experts discuss the chances of success for the Quiminha Integrated Agricultural and Regional Development Project.

Somewhere around 2008, Yakov Orenstein found himself with a colleague on a boat, on a river, in Angola. The two were in the midst of a difficult period of gathering water and soil samples, mapping the area, and monitoring its rivers, until for a moment it was almost possible to forget that they were in the heart of a pristine area that looked like “a scene from a movie.” “Do you realize,” he said to his colleague when their glances suddenly met, both radiating joy, “they are actually paying us for this?”

Six years later, Orenstein, Tahal Group International BV Angola CEO, walks us over Ackerstein tiles to the rooms we will be staying in, on the hill which dominates the area. Behind us, on a Baobab tree dotted African plain, are rows and rows of red-roofed houses, in what appear at first glance to be a mirage - perhaps a misleading photo made by a graphic designer who pasted them there hastily.

Welcome to the Quiminha Integrated Agricultural and Regional Development Project: 50,000,000 square meters of agricultural settlement to be located in the heart of Angola, a few dozen kilometers south-east of the capital, Luanda. By the end of 2015, 310 Angolan families are meant to move here, each of which will receive a 30,000 square meter plot of land, and a three-room, 100 square meter house, built to Western standards. Until then, Orenstein and his team will work around the clock to complete the task they have undertaken, which includes: clearing the area of landmines and undetonated warheads, bringing water from the nearby lake, installing electrical infrastructures, sewage systems, and roads, and even building a school and other public buildings to serve the population that will live here.

“What was I thinking when I came to this project?,” he would later say, “I thought it was a crazy challenge, insane. Just like I’m telling you that the Angolan government has never had such a projects, and that TAHAL has never had such a project, also for a manager or an engineer, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

But still, an established man, in his fifties, with a family and kids in Israel, ups and goes to live for years in Angola?

“We had a family meeting. My daughter said, ‘Dad, Africa? Are you crazy? There’s Ebola there.’ And that was in 2008, not today. But my son, who was still in the middle of his mandatory IDF service in an infantry unit in Gaza, said, ‘You will be able to tell your grandchildren that you built this village in Africa.” And then we looked towards my wife. And he has always been very supportive with these things, and we decided, what the heck, we’re making this effort as a family.”

That was a few years ago, is your wife still supportive?

“Yes. Look, we just celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary, and 6 more of dating. I guess things are stable between us for some reason.”

26 years of war

Stability is precisely the thing that Angola, with its 19 million citizens, is longing for today. The former Portuguese colony’s bloody civil war, which spanned more than 26 years, since the country gained independence in 1975, only officially ended in 2002. According to estimates, more than half a million citizens were killed during those years, and another 4 million became displaced, or refugees.

“We lost a generation here,” says senior Angolan Agriculture Ministry officer Ernesto Chicucuma, who is the government official responsible for oversight of the project. “A great many professionals left during the civil war, and many more were killed. Currently, our main mission is to raise a new generation here.”

Indeed, the impression one gets is that in recent years, Angola - a huge country of 1.25 million kilometers, with abundant natural resources - is undergoing accelerated development. Driving on the main road out of the capital, which was only recently paved and made into a modern, multi-lane road, you can see along the sides of the road giant residential neighborhoods, built by Chinese companies, new sports arenas, and perhaps most important of all, gas stations. These were, until recently, extremely rare, and Orenstein tells of hours-long lines, and a booming gasoline black market for cars, in a country that produces more than a million and a half barrels of oil each day.

But Angola is still licking its wounds following the civil war, and one of the most painful wounds is agriculture. Until the civil war, the south-west African country was an agricultural superpower, which produced almost all of its own food, and even stood out as an exporter of agricultural produce such as corn, bananas, coffee, and tobacco. Today, despite the fact that the vast majority of the population works in agriculture, agricultural product makes up only 10% of the country’s GDP, and what’s worse is that the country needs to import most of its food.

The Angolan government is determined to change this. In 2006, when the President of Angola visited the Jordan Valley, he was impressed by the agricultural development he saw there, and so the first seed of the Quiminha project was planted. The next stage was when TAHAL made a reciprocal visit, headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who was then chairman of the TAHAL board, and submitted a detailed, formal plan for approval by the Angolan government in 2008 (similar projects already exist in Angola, but on smaller scales - for example, Israeli LR Group).

The work began only in early 2012, after the matter of financing the project, to the tune of $200 million, was closed. Today, TAHAL, which was founded by David Ben Gurion in 1952, and was responsible for planning the National Water Carrier in the 1950s and 1960s, before it was privatized in the 1990s, is responsible for the overall project planning. Other than managing the work on site, TAHAL is even responsible for putting together the financing package - not a trivial matter, when it comes to an African country (with TAHAL mediation, the local government received credit from the Dutch bank ING, and from Israeli banks Bank Hapoalim (TASE: POLI) and Bank Leumi (TASE: LUMI).

“We are a company that has been present in African countries since the 1960s, and ironically, many of our projects that are underway today are based on a master plan that TAHAL put together in the 1960s and 1970s,” explains TAHAL CEO (since 2011) Saar Bracha, who joined us for our visit at the site. “This project is the president’s national project that is meant to convey a message,” he says, pointing to the importance of agriculture in rebuilding the country. “We will employ thousands of locals here, and we will train an entire generation of farmers who will operate the site.” All the work, Bracha points out, is carried out by contractors, and they are all locals. “Angola is building this place. We are the planning and management company.”

Will improve quality of life

“Quiminha is a very important project for the Angolan Ministry of Agriculture. This is the biggest project in the Ministry’s portfolio,” Angola Ministry of Agriculture director Joaquim Duarte told “Globes - G Magazine,” in Portuguese, in an interview in which Orenstein acted as interpreter. “Since 2002, great efforts have been made, not only by the government, but also by the citizens, to rebuild the country, and the moment the project ends, the produce will reach the capital, and it will improve the quality of life for the city’s residents, as well as those of the families who live on the project’s site.”

How will you determine which families will live there? And what about families that live on the land today and will soon be displaced?

“In the first stage, the residents who now live on the site will be the first to be included in the 300 families that receive farms. We are conducting a public relations campaign locally about the advantages of this project for people who are currently in the area, and it will really have a positive effect not only on them, but on the entire region. Generally speaking, because more than 1,000 families have already been relocated from the site, I can say that we have had a positive experience with the compensation process for those who have been relocated, which is working well. Of course, there are always those here and there who will think they receive too little compensation, or opportunists who try to take advantage of the situation.”

Landmines on the side of the road

On a trip through the countryside, you can still see some of the residents who have not been evacuated living in tin or mud homes, and the contrast between them and the permanent houses being built on the site is, of course, quite obvious to the naked eye. Orenstein ferries us between the structures and the various centers that are being built around the site, and it seems that just from the excitement with which he tells us about what we are seeing - in many cases, these are future infrastructures or engineering projects in various stages of development - enough energy could be generated to feed all the hungry people of Africa (or at least to light up Ramat Gan).

On some of the roads we drive on, the area defined as safe for travel are 30 meters wide. Anything beyond that has not yet been cleared of landmines. This is no small matter: in post-civil war Angola, this is a real problem, which continues to cost many lives. According to the agreement between TAHAL and the Angolan government, the company was to receive land that had been cleared, however, they quickly understood that, with all due respect to the National Demining Institute (INAD), they would be well advised to include Israeli professionals in their efforts as well.

Yuval Waks, 42, is a lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reserves, former deputy battalion commander in the Engineering Corps., and a top contender for the project’s “most enthusiastic employee” award. “A year and a half ago, I retired from the army, and the last thing I thought I would do is deal with mines and explosives - my dream was to cook,” he says. “Technically, my job here is oversight, but because of the gaps - professional gaps that are not their fault - we also check on them, and mentor them, and the ties that are formed between extend far beyond the professional - when I come back from Israel, I bring gifts for these people.”

How would you compare what you do here to what you did in the army?

“Here it’s less dangerous, but the sense of fulfillment I get from sharing knowledge with the people here is greater than anything else. Today, for example, I was approached and told that a few women who live in the shacks asked that I come to see what they found next to their house. You enter the courtyard, and there are cluster bombs there, inside the house. Now, they have no idea - they really don’t know what it is. So it is simply humanitarian work of the highest order. Forget the agriculture, and Quiminha, and TAHAL for a minute - this is saving human lives.”

A taste of home

Waks demonstrates his culinary abilities over a dinner that includes a variety of barbequed meats. The senior managers who live on-site, 14 people, 10 of them Israeli, gather around the table. Most have families back home, and spend a month and half on-site, go home to Israel for 10 days of R&R, and then back again.

You are a company that works in developing countries. You don’t have a problem doing business with undemocratic regimes, particularly when, in many cases these are deals that affect the country’s resources?

Bracha: “We are not a defense company, and I don’t give any sort of defense advice anywhere. As far as I’m concerned, I am creating life. As a company, we make sure that we work with the formal authorities, as is evidenced by the fact that all the international organizations are here. You want me to tell you if I can rate the democracy here? I don’t know. We don’t get involved in the local politics, and things can change. So maybe you don’t yet have the civilian society that creates a democracy, but it’s coming.”

Then Orenstein explains what really bothers him: “You know, we build here for 36 months, and then we provide training for 24 months, and then we have to go, and what happens then? Do we leave a white elephant here? It breaks the heart. We are troubled by it, the government here is troubled by it, the Minister of Agriculture is super-troubled.”

And how do you resolve this?

“I have been carrying this question with me for a very long time, but I think that the penny dropped for me when I went back and looked at the model of the Israeli moshav (agricultural settlement). I look at the children who continue the work of the moshavim in Emek Izrael, or in Emek Hefer, and there they fight over who will continue the work.”

The author was a guest of TAHAL in Angola

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on October 27, 2014

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2014

Quiminha project
Quiminha project
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