Amid the flurry of changes in African economies and markets over the last 10 years, one of the most enduring constants has been the six-monthly assurance from Angola’s secrecy-obsessed leaders that a stock market will open next year.  

The mantra received an alternative twist on Monday when oil minister Jose Botelho de Vasconcelos told an energy conference in New Delhi that Africa’s most tantalising bourse would now have to wait until inflation hit single digits.

The pronouncement caused more than the usual head-scratching among investors who have seen frustration turn to despair as what should be one of the continent’s most exciting propositions has failed repeatedly to get on to the grid, let alone over the starting line.

To be fair to the minister, he may simply be reproducing the stock ‘open next year’-phrase with a bit of macroeconomic jargon on top — Angola’s latest budget talked about annual inflation easing to 9 percent in 2011 from 13.99 percent in August.

But the remark does seem to make a causal link between inflation and stock market operations that has so far passed most economists by, and casts doubt on the thinking inside the policy cabal that sits around President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, now well into his fourth decade in office.

 ”How long is a piece of string?” said one economist who covers frontier African markets. “I can’t think of a single country in the world where single-digit inflation was one of the precursors to a viable stock exchange.”