José Eduardo dos Santos, former president of Angola, has passed away. Under his watch, Angola became sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer – but the wealth never reached the people.
Themba Hadebe / AP
hide captions
switch captions
Themba Hadebe / AP
José Eduardo dos Santos, former president of Angola, has passed away. Under his watch, Angola became sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer – but the wealth never reached the people.
Themba Hadebe / AP
LISBON, Portugal – José Eduardo dos Santos, once one of Africa’s longest-serving rulers, who for nearly four decades as president of Angola fought the continent’s longest civil war and turned the country itself into a major oil producer as well as one of the poorest and most corrupt of all, died on Friday. He was 79 years old.
Dos Santos died at a clinic in Barcelona, Spain after a long illness, the Angolan government said in an announcement on its Facebook page.
The statement said dos Santos was “a statesman of historic stature who ran … the country of Angola during very difficult times.”
Dos Santos has mainly lived in Barcelona since resigning in 2017 and has been receiving treatment there for health problems.
Angola’s incumbent head of state, João Lourenço, announced five days of national mourning starting Saturday, when the country’s flag will be flown at a height of half a foot and public events cancelled.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated dos Santos’ involvement in the struggle that led to Angola’s independence and his leadership “through the signing of a peace treaty ending the civil war in 2002”. his spokesman said. “During his tenure, Angola has become an important international and regional partner and advocate of multilateralism.”
The UN Security Council quietly paid tribute to Mr dos Santos at the start of its meeting on Friday after its current president, Brazil’s UN Ambassador Ronaldo Costa Filho expressed “disappointment” sad” at his death.
His public personality doesn’t match his behind-the-scenes plot
Dos Santos came to power four years after Angola gained independence from Portugal and became a proxy battleground during the Cold War.
His political journey spanned one-party Marxist rule in the postcolonial years and the democratic system of government was adopted in 2008. He voluntarily resigned when his health began weaken.
In public, dos Santos is modest and even shy at times. But he is a shrewd operator behind the scenes.
He secured the 17th-century presidential palace in Luanda, the Atlantic capital of South Africa, by dividing Angola’s fortunes between his military generals and political opponents to secure their loyalty. He demoted anyone he deemed to have attained a level of popularity that could threaten his command.
Dos Santos’ biggest enemy for more than two decades was Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the UNITA insurgency whose post-independence guerrilla insurgency fought in the bush to overthrow the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola , or dos Santos’ MPLA.
The MPLA had financial support from the Soviet Union and military support from Cuba in its fight against UNITA. Savimbi is backed by the United States and South Africa.
The war would drag on, with brief periods of peace mediated by the United Nations, until 2002 when troops finally tracked down Savimbi in eastern Angola and killed him.
Angola’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of the elite
Dos Santos abruptly abandoned his Marxist policies after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. He moved closer to Western countries, where oil companies had invested billions of dollars in the exploration mainly abroad.
His supporters praise his ability to adapt to changing circumstances. His critics call him immoral.
Dos Santos was invited to the White House by then-President George W. Bush in 2004 as the United States was looking to reduce its dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Angola became sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer after Nigeria, producing nearly 2 million barrels per day. It also unearths more than $1 billion in diamonds a year.
However, wealth never came to the people of Angola, who during and after the civil war suffered from large areas of untapped minefields and little access to amenities. basics, such as running water or roads. Education and healthcare were – and still are – sparse.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a 2004 report, based on an analysis of International Monetary Fund figures, more than $4 billion in oil revenues had disappeared from coffers. of the state of Angola from 1997 to 2002.
The US State Department says that wealth in Angola is “concentrated in the hands of a small class of people who often use government positions to enrich themselves.”
Dos Santos is said to own valuable real estate in Brazil, France and Portugal, as well as offshore bank accounts.
Under his rule, and despite the general poverty, street protests were rare and were quickly picked up by heavily armed riot police, commonly known as “Ninjas”. break. A well-paid and well-equipped presidential bodyguard was stationed inside dos Santos’ palace and lined up on the city’s dirty, pothole-filled streets whenever he appeared.
He is not expected to last long in politics
The son of a bricklayer from Luanda, the coastal capital of Angola, dos Santos began his political life with boots and a rifle in 1961 as an 18-year-old guerrilla for the MLPA in war of independence from Portugal.
MPLA bosses withdrew him from the battlefield in 1963 and sent him to the Soviet Union to train as a petroleum engineer and military communications specialist.
When he returned to Angola in 1970, he skillfully negotiated compromises to keep the MPLA from splitting into small groups and as a reward being appointed to the party’s central committee.
Upon independence in 1975, dos Santos became foreign minister and later minister of planning and deputy prime minister in a one-party Marxist state.
In a surprise choice, the MPLA elected dos Santos at the age of 37 as president following the death of Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first leader, in 1979. Dos Santos was seen as a consensus figure among the formers. party warrior, but few predicted his political longevity.
Dos Santos never sought to establish a personality cult and remains a mysterious figure. He has said privately that he feels his true vocation as a monk.
He’s also not known for his political sensibilities: He built a multimillion-dollar mansion on the edge of a Luanda slum while millions of Angolans were battling hunger during the war. civil war.
He had an unexpected victory that sparked a series of internal conflicts
He was seen as a sure-fire loser to Savimbi in the country’s first democratic elections in 1992, following a peace treaty signed the previous year.
Margaret Anstee, former United Nations special representative to Angola, describes dos Santos as almost the opposite of Savimbi.
“His demeanor is serious and reserved, to the point where I detect a sense of shyness or timidity, which seems silly. The contrast to Dr. Savimbi’s pompous personality couldn’t be more vivid. “, she wrote in her 1996 book on Angola. entitled “Cold War Orphans.”
But in yet another testament to his staying power, Santos continued to maintain, narrowly overtaking Savimbi for the presidency while leading the MPLA to a parliamentary majority in concurrent legislative elections. .
As Savimbi denied his defeat at the ballot box and returned to his armed struggle, Western support gradually turned behind dos Santos.
The adversaries signed another peace agreement, brokered by the United Nations, in 1994, but that was also cleared up four years later.
Meanwhile, dos Santos – with an army of about 100,000 men, many with years of experience fighting in the jungle – has acted as a power broker in the region, starting with neighboring countries.
He sent 2,500 troops to the Republic of Congo in 1997 to help President Denis Sassou-Nguesso take power and the following year sent an army to Congo to help President Laurent Kabila’s government fight insurgents led by Rwanda. and Uganda backing.
The end of the Angolan Civil War in 2002 brought broader economic development opportunities to the southern African country, which is three times the size of California.
Corruption has become a problem in Angola
But public infrastructure has been devastated; 4 million people – about a third of the population at the time – had to leave their homes because of the fighting; and oil and diamond wealth continued to be in the hands of political and military elites.
The Berlin-based Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2005 ranked Angola as one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world.
John McMillan, a Stanford University economics professor, wrote in a 2005 study of Angola: “As children beg in the streets begging, the wives of politicians fly to New York on a budget. government medical for eyelid plastic surgery. corruption.
Under pressure to finally hold a vote, dos Santos announced legislative elections in 2008 and a presidential election the following year.
Dos Santos’ MPLA won the most votes for congressional seats. But then the head of state changed strategy, first postponing the presidential vote and then scrapping it.
He changed the constitution so that the president was chosen by which party won the congressional elections. That kept him in power for another eight years.
However, with his health worsening, Dos Santos announced in 2016 that he would retire from the sport.
He was replaced by Lourenço, a staunch member of the MPLA, whose anti-corruption policy promoted its flagship policy. He was targeting the grown children of dos Santos, who possess substantial personal fortunes, but not his predecessor.
The change in dos Santos family fortune has led one of his daughters to suspect that there is a conspiracy behind her father’s illness and death. Spanish prosecutors and police are looking into Tchizé dos Santos’ allegations that people close to the former president tried to kill him, did not take proper care of him and acted negligently.
Dos Santos, who has been married four times, is survived by his current wife, Ana Paula, with whom he has three children. He is known to have at least three other children and various grandchildren.
