NEW HOPE IN ANGOLA
Angolan president João Lourenço has surprised friend and foe by starting to dismantle the Dos Santos family’s hold over the oil, diamond and media sectors, while also removing his predecessor’s hand-picked intelligence and police chiefs.
Lourenço, who visited SA last week, has also signalled that he intends abolishing visa requirements for South Africans, a move that could be seen as a first real step towards implementing the 2005 SADC protocol on trade to establish a regional, free-trade zone.
The speed with which the former defence minister has moved against what he called “obstacles to reform” is indicative of the extent to which his ailing predecessor’s 38year-long grip had slipped. Former president José Eduardo dos Santos’s family empire is now under siege.
Lourenço, in short order, has fired Dos Santos’s daughter Isabel as Sonangol CEO, replaced national diamond mining company Sodiam’s CEO and sacked the governor of the national bank, Banco Nacional de Angola.
Expectations are that Lourenço will soon remove Dos Santos’s son José Filomeno as chairman of Angola’s Us$5bn sovereign wealth fund, especially after reports of it being looted by Filomeno’s close associates.
Isabel and her husband Sindika Dokolo’s sole buying rights for all Sodiam’s output, a monopoly worth an estimated $1bn/year, is also widely expected to be cancelled.
Other state-imposed monopolies such as Isabel’s sole right to produce and import cement and her extensive shareholding in banking, the largest cellphone network and a national supermarket chain (which have all helped to make her Africa’s wealthiest woman) can also no longer expect to receive presidential protection.
The former president’s younger daughter Welwitschia did not escape the axe: among the changes at key state media positions, her $30m/year contract to produce a weekly magazine programme also got the chop.
But the most telling has been the dismissal in the past week of Dos Santos’s chiefs of national intelligence and national police, in defiance of a decree by Dos
Santos that their appointments be fixed for five years.
Gen José António Maria’s sacking as chief of intelligence services and Ambrósio de Lemos’s as chief of national police may signal the end of the mechanism which kept political dissent in check. Arbitrary detentions and even extrajudicial killings have taken place on their watch.
Lourenço, a former army general and rapidly rising political star in the late 1990s when he was elected MPLA secretary-general, was sidelined from politics in 2001 for privately expressing interest in his boss’s job.
His rapid rise to power since he was reappointed to cabinet in 2015, and his ruthless dismantling of the Dos Santos power structure since becoming president, signals the ascendancy of the “Casa Militár” (military President Lourenço speaks of financial reforms and discussions with the IMF as he begins to dismantle the Dos Santos family’s enormously lucrative grip on the country’s finances house), much as is the case in Zimbabwe.
As in Zimbabwe, the damage done by his predecessor to business confidence in Angola is enormous. A forex shortage, triggered by a collapse in oil income (followed by a refusal by international banks to do business with Angolan banks for failing to honour repayments) has caused the economy to shrink by 2%/year since 2014.
Angola’s booming construction industry has crashed and hundreds of thousands of foreign workers have been sent home, most of them unpaid. Angola, in spite of some expansion of the food-manufacturing sector, still remains dependent on food imports to feed its rapidly growing cities.
Last month, the Angolan government announced it had resumed consultations with the IMF to address “structural inefficiencies” in the economy — a term used euphemistically to refer to the management of Sonangol’s oil revenues.
More painful measures can be expected to follow, including a devaluation of the novo kwanza, which trades at 2.5 times the official rate on the black market.
Lourenço’s primary objective is to tackle institutionalised corruption, says Angolan lawyer Eduardo Paiva Jésus, an MPLA sympathiser. “He represents a line of power in the MPLA that will not see the same old interests return in another guise.”
Not everyone agrees, but most Angolans are unified in who they blame for their economic woes — and by breaking the Dos Santos stranglehold on the country’s finances, Lourenço is at least providing hope for reform.
What it means: The sacking of the intelligence and police chiefs indicates a real changing of the guard