From Bloomberg

Angola, Africa’s largest crude oil producer after Nigeria, plans to build hydroelectric plants to boost power generation fivefold in a bid to attract investment in other industries to the country.

The goal is to have an installed capacity of 9,000 megawatts of generation capacity by 2025 compared with about 1,800 megawatts now, Jose Salgueiro, director of studies, planning and statistics at the Ministry of Energy and Water, said in an Oct. 2 interview.

“Everything is planned to have the electricity there because it’s the main way to say Angola is open for business,” he said in Luanda, the capital. “The promise of more power will attract more investment.”

The southwest African country of 21 million people plans to build about 15 plants with the help of companies such as Brazil’s Odebrecht SA and Xinjiang TBEA Group Co. of China as it seeks to almost double non-oil foreign investment to $4 billion a year by 2017. Angola suffers daily power outages as it recovers from a 27-year civil war in which homes, dams, plants and power lines were destroyed and an estimated 800,000 people were killed, according to the University of Massachusetts’ Political Economy Research Institute.

The government wants to diversify its economy, which the International Monetary Fund expects to expand by 6.2 percent this year, away from the petroleum spending that accounts for 97 percent of exports and 75 percent of taxes. Angola pumped about 1.74 million barrels of oil a day in September, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The kwanza appreciated 0.3 percent to 97.47 per dollar by 2:22 p.m. in Luanda, paring the decline this year to 1.7 percent.

Read more at Bloomberg.