"Our misfortune is intrinsically linked to oil as the only resource, but oil is not the only resource", said the head of AmCham-Angola in an interview with Lusa, urging the executive to "stop and see what Angola can offer beyond oil".
In his opinion, a sector that would bring Angola out of the crisis "in the very short term" would be tourism.
Praising the fight against corruption waged by the President, João Lourenço, Pedro Godinho Domingos said, however, that the performance of the economy "is not happening at the desired speed" and considered that "we are not looking at resources that Angola has at hand and that could minimize the impact of the crisis", such as tourism.
"The ideal would be for the President of the Republic to create a crisis cabinet, because tourism is a cross-cutting sector, which does not depend solely on one portfolio and involves several departments of the executive" and several ministries, he proposed.
For the development of the sector, roads, water, energy or the Internet will be needed, so it will have to be the holder of the executive power "to agglutinate all the wills" to create the necessary conditions, he argued.
Pedro Domingos considered it necessary to identify the weak and strong points for tourism in Angola and invite "the best tourism companies in the world to make an assessment" of the sector.
He pointed that, according to the World Tourism Organization, each visitor leaves an average of 1040 dollars in the country he visits (2500 dollars in Angola), he also recalled that "when tourists arrive they do not bring kwanzas, they will bring convertible currency", which would also be favourable to the country's foreign exchange problem.
The president of AmCham also pointed out that the tourism sector is the third largest employer in the world, after retail and agriculture.
Asked if this would be an attractive sector for American companies, he admits that it is no longer a priority.
The greatest appetite of American investors lies in the area of energy (oil, gas and electricity), transport, particularly in aviation, and the railway sector, as well as some "still tenuous" interest in agribusiness.
The US is one of the largest foreign investors in Angola with companies such as Chevron, Exxon, Coca-Cola and General Electric (GE).
AmCham is, along with the embassy, one of the main access doors to the Angolan market, with more than 100 similar organizations around the world.
Angola is considered by the US administration to be a country with great potential for lasting economic partnership.
