Angola rule ‘too long’
After 38 years, outgoing President Dos Santos will be remembered for his fierce control.
When Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos steps down and his successor is chosen in today’s elections, it will bring to an end a 38-year reign dominated by his unrelenting authoritarian style.
Though seldom seen in public, he has been a looming presence in daily life for as long as most Angolans can remember, maintaining fierce control over the country throughout its devastating civil war and recent oil boom.
Now aged 74 and reportedly in poor health, Dos Santos became president in 1979, making him Africa’s second-longest-serving leader – one month shy of Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
Until the 27-year civil war ended in 2002, Dos Santos presided over a country torn apart by conflict as his People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government fought rebels led by the Unita group.
He has been credited for leading Angola out of the war, moving away from hardline Marxism and fostering a post-war oil boom and foreign investment surge that transformed central Luanda.
But his rule has also been criticised as secretive and corrupt, with Angola’s citizens suffering abject poverty as his family and the elite enriched themselves. He is “an accomplished and shrewd economic and political dealmaker with an instinct for political survival”, said Alex Vines of Chatham House, a British thinktank.
Married to the glamorous former air hostess Ana Paula, 18 years his junior, his children include Isabel, who is head of the state-owned Sonangol oil company and reputed to be Africa’s richest woman worth $3 billion (R39 billion).
From humble beginnings as the son of a bricklayer, Dos Santos joined the MPLA as a teenager and rose quickly through party ranks as a fighter during Angola’s struggle for independence from Portugal.
After stints in Kinshasa and Brazzaville, he went to Azerbaijan to study petroleum engineering, returning fluent in Russian and French, in addition to his mother-tongue, Portuguese.
In 1979, following the sudden death from cancer of Angola’s liberation president Agostinho Neto, Dos Santos – then the planning minister – was sworn in as president.
A presidential election in 1992 was aborted before a second-round vote when his battlefield rival Jonas Savimbi claimed the vote was rigged.
The civil war reignited until Savimbi was killed in 2002.
During the 2012 election campaign, Dos Santos made a series of unexpected appearances at public rallies, wearing colourful T-shirts and promising better universities and jobs for young people.
But his policies remained little changed after the vote. As head of the military, police and Cabinet, the president operates with few constraints.
He chooses senior judges and had MPLA allies in all public agencies, including the supposedly independent electoral commission.
The state also keeps a firm hand on the media.
Angola has become a major supplier of oil to China, and Dos Santos built close ties with the Asian powerhouse.
But while he sought to present himself as a rock of stability, rights activists and opposition members accuse him of systematic repression.
In a 2013-interview for Brazilian television, he said that his rule had been “too long, too long,” but added that decades of war “meant we couldn’t strengthen state institutions or even carry out the normal process of democratisation”.
Dos Santos has reportedly received cancer treatment in Barcelona over several years.
Always immaculately dressed, Dos Santos has split his time between his presidential palace in Luanda and a second residence south of the capital.
He rarely travelled abroad on official business, but is said to enjoy music and poetry, as well as cooking fish – and was once a keen footballer. – AFP
The likely next president of Angola, Joao Lourenco, pictured, is a party loyalist and former general.
Currently defence minister and deputy president of the MPLA, Lourenco is firmly “part of the inner circle of power”, according to Didier Peclard, an Angola specialist at the University of Geneva.
In February, Dos Santos named Lourenco the party’s presidential candidate for the general election to be held today.
Lourenco previously failed to hide his desire to succeed Dos Santos when the president hinted in the ’90s that he might step down. Dos Santos and his closest aides believed that the former general was being opportunistic and Lourenco was forced into several years of “political purgatory”, according to Peclard.
Lourenco fought against Portugal’s rule of Angola and in the civil war between the MPLA government and Unita rebels after independence in 1975.
Like Dos Santos, he was a student in the former Soviet Union, which trained a number of rising young African leaders during decolonisation.
In 1984, he was appointed governor of the eastern province of Moxico, Angola’s largest.
The ex-artillery general later became deputy speaker of the National Assembly.
His appointment as defence minister in 2014, secured his position as successor to Dos Santos.
Lourenco “has a reasonable reputation as a moderate, not an extreme character”, said Soren Kirk Jensen of the Chatham House research group in London.
Activist and journalist Rafael Marques, a leading regime critic, said Lourenco was at heart “a hardline MPLA general”.
Lourenco was born on March 5, 1954, in Lobito in west Angola, and is married to a former employee of the World Bank. – AFP
As head of the military, police and Cabinet, the president operates with few constraints.