The Kilamba project became the show-piece of Angola’s Housing and Urban Development Program announced by the President in 2008. With US$ 3.5 billion financing from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, purportedly backed by oil-revenues, the project was built in a record 18 months by CITIC a major Chinese consortium and completed in 2012. The Kilamba City project, includes 750 apartment buildings, schools, and more than 100 retail units. The new city was built to accommodate 160,000 people in 20,000 flats, each with a floor area of between 110 and 150 m2 and costing from US$120,000 to US$200,000. SONIP Housing had been created in 2013 as a real-estate arm of the Angolan state petroleum company SONANGOL. It was given the mandate to commercialize, manage and distribute 33,255 housing units of which 20,000 of them were in the recently completed Kilamba City. Kilamba has gained fame as being the largest Chinese built housing complex in Africa and the show-case of Angola’s post-war National Urban Housing Program. During the first year of SONIP’s management of Kilamba, it only distributed 12,425 units and acquired a substantial waiting list of impatient aspirant clients. Smaller, most affordable, three bedroom T3 units were in great demand but the larger expensive five-bedroom
units remained empty. By September 2013 the three and four bedroom units were exhausted2, and clients reluctantly accepted the larger units, but often expressed concerns about their capacity to make the payments of US$ 12,000 per year.