Angolan Interior Minister Roberto Leal Monteiro has said that the government is negotiating a political settlement with representatives of Cabinda province, the long restive oil-rich enclave, according to local media reports on Friday.

The visiting minister told journalists in Cabinda city on Thursday that "we are negotiating. The most important thing is that we're negotiating."

"This is a political problem", he said. "We must talk because it is through dialogue that men understand each other."

Leal Monteiro coordinates Luanda's working group on Cabinda, a province separated from the rest of Angola by a strip of land of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Cabinda produces more than half of the oil that has made Angola Africa's second largest producer after Nigeria, but it has faced a low-intensity separatist guerrilla for three decades.

In late March, Prime Minister Fernando Dias dos Santos told the parliament that the situation in Cabinda was evolving in "a frankly positive manner" and that Luanda could consider granting the province a "special status" of some kind.

Source: Xinhua