The delegation of business leaders accompanying French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on his visit to Angola on Thursday, October 31, is impressive.

Among them are top representatives from Air France, Airbus, BNP Paribas, and Total, all hoping to get a piece of the economic boom the southern African country has been enjoying over the last several years.

The stakes of this diplomatic visit are even articulated on the website of France's finance ministry, where the Angola page reads: "Few countries in the world have as great a potential as Angola, where, despite the competition, there are several possibilities for French companies."

On paper, Angola's "economic miracle" is obvious. Since the end of the bloody civil war that ravaged the country from 1975 to 2002, the former Portuguese colony has registered rates of growth comparable to China's. Despite a slowdown during the first years of the financial crisis, Angola saw its annual growth rise above 7 percent as of 2012.

Analysts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) has predicted that the country -- Africa's third strongest economically, after South Africa and Nigeria – will maintain this growth rate for years to come.

Moreover, China has lobbied to become Angola's principal business partner, investing more than 15 billion dollars in 17 different economic agreements with the country. "Officially, there are 276,000 Chinese citizens residing in Angola," read a memo from the Switzerland Global Enterprise, an institution with the mission of boosting Swiss commerce, in December 2012.

Portugal has also manifested its interest in Angola's robust economic health – but in a different way. Struck low by the crisis at home, more than 150,000 Portuguese citizens have obtained visas to work in Angola, a migratory phenomenon that the site Slate Afrique qualifies as "never before seen in contemporary history".

Angola largely owes its economic success to "black gold" or oil. The country is the second biggest oil producer on the African continent, and the fourth biggest in the world. Angola is planning on increasing its production from the current rate of 1.8 million barrels per day to 2 million in 2015.

France has also been staking out its spot in the race for Angola's oil money, with Total investing 9.1 billion euros in the country (out of a total of 10 billion euros invested by France in Angola in 2012).

Some analysts have gone as far as predicting that Angola could become the African Qatar. The country could indeed transform itself into a gas jackpot like that Gulf state, as it has the second biggest reserve of natural gas in Africa, which it has only recently begun to exploit. Following the Qatari model, Angola set up a 5-billion-dollar sovereign wealth fund in 2012, which it plans to use to diversify its economy.