In just three months, the central bank has already loaned the equivalent of half the total amount it provided in financing to the government for the entire year of 2025. International reserves fell by $480 million in the first quarter.
The National Bank of Angola (BNA) has already lent 758.8 billion Kz to the government since the beginning of the year, an amount that corresponds to about half of the nearly 1.5 trillion it lent to the government in all of 2025, according to calculations by Expansão based on the central bank’s monetary and financial statistics for the first quarter. This is equivalent to 830 million USD.
The central bank law permits loans to the State, although it also prohibits them. In Article 34 (Credit to the State), paragraph 1 states: “The National Bank of Angola is prohibited from granting, directly or indirectly, credit to the State and its dependent services or agencies, as well as to other legal entities governed by public law and to public enterprises or any entities in which the State or local authorities hold any stake or may exercise, directly or indirectly, any influence, except as provided for in Articles 35 and 36.”
Article 35, however, effectively nullifies the previous provision and states that “without prejudice to the provisions of the preceding article, the National Bank of Angola may grant the State, on an annual basis, credit in the form of a checking account up to a limit equivalent to 10% of the ordinary revenues of the General State Budget collected in the previous year.” The following paragraph states that the principal and interest must be settled “by December 31
of the relevant year.” And paragraph 3 indicates that “loans granted under this article are made at market interest rates and must be settled solely in cash.”
However, in December, the government settled the debt using 5-year government bonds with interest rates ranging from 5% to 6%, which violates the BNA law, which stipulates that such payments must be made in cash.
According to Expansão’s findings, only about 192 billion Kz was paid in cash, as required by law. This method of payment at the end of last year more than doubled the central government’s debt securities in the BNA’s asset portfolio, which rose from 1.2 trillion Kz in November to nearly 2.6 trillion Kz in December.
“Burned” by the difficulties it faced in late 2024 in meeting its obligations (which forced it to resort to one-year loans with exorbitant interest rates nearing 10.0%), the government circumvented the BNA law and included in the 2025 General State Budget a provision stating that the loan guaranteed last year by the BNA could be repaid in debt securities, which, according to experts, undermines the central bank’s law and also undermines the institution’s independence, enshrined in the Constitution. For this year, and despite the “kilapi” (deficit) facing the BNA, the government has once again turned to the central bank’s “vault” to finance the General State Budget.
And since the law allows it to obtain financing from the central bank up to a limit of 10% of its ordinary revenues—which do not include loans—this means that, according to Expansão’s calculations, this year it could borrow approximately 1.9 trillion Kz from the BNA.
This is because, according to preliminary data published on the Ministry of Finance’s website, last year the state collected 19.2 trillion Kz in ordinary revenue: 8.7 trillion Kz in taxes and 10.4 trillion in “other revenue,” which consists mainly of sales of “oil shipments” and property rents.
Source: Expansão
