He came to power because he was the weakest of the presidential candidates. In the early years, he didn’t “move a straw”. But he demonstrated the ability to adapt sufficiently to survive the fall of the Berlin Wall, embrace the wildest capitalism and still enrich himself and his family. Article published in December 2015 in the dossier Angola: the dictatorship that the world does not want to see.
José Eduardo dos Santos is the 2nd President of the Republic for the longest time in office on the entire planet. With 34 years in power, he only lost, for just over a month, to Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, from Equatorial Guinea. And he was never elected to office. Whatever the viewpoint of your regime, it is hard not to see the indelible mark of a dictatorship. But the world prefers to pretend it doesn’t see. Especially since this regime is sitting on a plethora of oil wells and diamond mines.
Was never elected by name
José Eduardo dos Santos came to the Presidency of Angola, by the decision of the MPLA, as the successor to Agostinho Neto. The first and only presidential elections that he disputed took place in an interregnum of the civil war, in 1992, after the Bicesse agreements. It was he who won, officially with 49.57% of the votes, against 40.6% of Jonas Savimbi. But, under the previously agreed electoral law, in order to be elected, the winning candidate would have to obtain more than 50% of the votes, which required the holding of a second round. However, this never happened – the MPLA took advantage of the presence in Luanda of part of the UNITA leadership to unleash a massacre, which brought the war back.
Legislative elections were finally held in 2008 only after Savimbi’s death and the end of the war. The MPLA won overwhelmingly, with 81.6%. The presidential elections should have followed, but José Eduardo dos Santos decided otherwise. Instead of carrying them out, he changed the Constitution, which he himself enacted in 2010, establishing that the president is not directly elected, he is automatically the leader of the most voted party. Thus, in 2012 the MPLA won with 71% of the new legislative votes, and Eduardo dos Santos obtained a presidential term of five years, after which he may still run again. It should be noted that the elections were widely contested by the opposition parties.
Rise to power
José Eduardo dos Santos took office at the Presidency of the People’s Republic of Angola on September 20, 1979, when he was 37, succeeding Agostinho Neto, who died in Moscow from complications after surgery for liver cancer.
The choice of young Eduardo dos Santos was, for many, a surprise. At the time, hundreds of ex-MPLA militants accused of “factionalism” and involvement in a failed attempt on a supposed coup unleashed on May 27, 1977, were still in prison. prior to these events, to investigate whether or not there was fractionalism in the MPLA, a commission that produced an inconclusive report and that until today is not officially known. In the events of May 27, in which at least 30 thousand people were massacred, the name of Eduardo dos Santos and that of the then Prime Minister Lopo do Nascimento would have been part of the lists of the leaders to be arrested, which would have ended to occur.
Justino Pinto de Andrade, who at the time was deported in Moxico, East Angola, after being arrested for being part of the current Active Revolt, recalls that when he learned of the death of Agostinho Neto, he feared the occurrence of any form of upheaval, or even a “barracks” stimulated by some internal wing of the party.
“After the trance was over, people began to talk insistently about the various hypotheses to take the place left by Neto: Lúcio Lara? Ambrose Lukoki? Pascoal Luvualu? José Eduardo dos Santos? ”, He recalls. Eduardo dos Santos was to replace the president, as he was the 1st Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs. “JES was too enigmatic. Little was heard of him ”. This character of the then minister helped his choice. “Everyone thought they could easily influence him. The other potential candidates for the succession of Agostinho Neto had controversial profiles, or were too predictable ”, explains Justino Pinto de Andrade, currently the leader of the Democratic Bloc.
“For a long time, José Eduardo dos Santos did not touch a“ straw ”, because he was too conditioned by his peers. But there were even those who thought he was simply the continuator of a project so that he was shaped in his youth as a student in the Soviet Union. I would then be ‘playing the game’ that I liked the most… ”
In the short story “O bom déspota”, recently published in the magazine Granta, the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa perfectly portrays the young president’s performance in those early years. The short story simulates the memories of Eduardo dos Santos himself, in the first person:
“During the first years, I pretended to be dead. I let them see me as a faithful heir to the late President and, at the same time, I freed the factionists who had survived the shootings and concentration camps without fanfare. I have appointed some to important government positions. They never created problems again ”.
Victory in the civil war
In a recent interview with the Bandeirantes do Brasil network, the Angolan president acknowledged that he has been in power for too long and justified this long stay with the contingencies of the war. “I think it is a long time, even too long, but we also have to see the reasons of a cyclical nature that led us to this situation,” he said, arguing that the continuation of the conflict prevented the functioning of democracy. “After independence, I think it was thirty-one years of war, in which the country was postponed, so it was unable to consolidate these State institutions, nor was it even able to regulate the functioning of the democratization process. to be postponed ”.
In his eagerness to justify the unjustifiable, José Eduardo dos Santos, who lived through this episode as president, is strangely inaccurate. In fact, the war lasted not “thirty-something”, but 27 years, between 1975 and 2002, ending with Savimbi’s death and Unita’s capitulation. It served as an alibi for the absolute power of the MPLA during all these years, and the president managed to end it with a capital of strength and prestige strengthened, to which only the victors have access. In those years, he knew how to balance himself within the party and the state, never losing support from military leaders, and maneuvering between military offensives and peace negotiations, such as those of 1992, which would only serve as a springboard for a new phase. of war.
But the decisive transition was the one he undertook after the fall of the Berlin wall. In the aforementioned short story, José Agualusa brilliantly sums up the political turning point undertaken by Eduardo dos Santos. Once again, simulating the thought of the “Good despot”:
“The fall of the Berlin Wall happened at the right time. On the one hand, it allowed me to ward off one or another fanatical Marxist, stumbling ideological mummies, lost in time, who would not let themselves be bought, neither with offices nor with consumer goods. On the other hand, it allowed me to open the country to the delights of capitalism, for the benefit of our entire large family and the country in general. Openness to capitalism was also the major ax in the guerrillas until then supported by the United States and the international right. If we were to join capitalism, why should capitalism fight us? ”
If, until its withdrawal in 1991, the support of Cuban troops had been decisive in the direction of the war, barring South Africa’s offensive in support of Unita, in the 1990s the changes in MPLA policy, burying the busts of Lenine and references to socialism and proclaiming adherence to capitalist theses and to a mockery of a multiparty regime, abolishing proclamatively the one-party system, would be decisive in geostrategic terrain. The oil wells controlled by the Luanda government were worth more than the diamond mines under Unita’s control, and José Eduardo dos Santos managed to convince Washington that his government was now open to all business.
With these assets, Savimbi’s defeat in the new phase of the war, after the failure of the Bicesse agreements, was a matter of time. Without US support, Unita backed down. But the epilogue would still take ten years to arrive, on the day that the leader of the Black Cock was caught and killed in the bush, ingloriously, on February 22, 2002, after seeing his party shatter into dissent.
Condemnation of socialism
Eduardo dos Santos, the petroleum engineer trained by the Petroleum and Chemistry Institute of Baku, in the then Soviet Union, showed no remorse when he moved away from the socialist model he had embraced since his youth. In an interview with the weekly Expresso of 18 July 1992, when asked if, in retrospect, the socialist model was not doomed from the start, he replied: “I think I was doomed to failure. But that was not the conclusion reached at that time when it was thought that socialism was an alternative to capitalism ”.
In another interview, published in the magazine Le Courrier from March-April 1992, he would return to the theme: “… The socialist economy’s management system was not able to respond to the numerous problems facing society. The sinking of the socialist system was not a big surprise for us and it did not affect us deeply. We had already engaged in a whole process of readjusting our system. ” The changes started to be implemented by the MPLA in the III Extraordinary Congress of 1992 when the party removes “Partido do Trabalho” from the name, the term “Popular” leaves the designation of the country, and the People’s Assembly becomes the National Assembly, symbolic changes for a more profound change, that of the establishment of an opulent capitalist oligarchy, taking personal profits from the profits of oil exploration,
Free from the war, Angola grew exuberantly. Between 2004 and 2008, the Angolan economy had an average growth of 17% per year; the international financial crisis caused a significant slowdown between 2009 and 2011, with values between 2.4% and 3.4%; but the index rose in 2012 to close to 7%.
To fulfill his new designs, José Eduardo dos Santos started to lead the government as if it were his private investment company ”, says Forbes magazine in an article signed by correspondent Mfonobong Nsehe. In view of the poor socio-economic conditions in which the majority of the population continues to live, according to the article, the president does not allow himself to be shaken and “channels his energies to intimidate the media and divert funds to his personal account and that of his family”, which controls a large portion of the Angolan economy.
MPLA and Santos Family Business
Let’s go back to 1992. In September of that year, MPLA leaders formally created the party’s business conglomerate, GEFI – Sociedade de Gestão e Participações Financeiras. They are members of the party’s Political Bureau, presidents of public companies, advisers to the president. GEFI-SA details the journalist Rafael Marques in his study “MPLA – Sociedade Anónima”, has a business portfolio that includes participation in 64 companies with operations in the field of hospitality, industry, banking, fisheries, media, construction, real estate. The company serves to dispose of, in an obscure manner, of State assets in favor of GEFI, for the financial and patrimonial benefit of the MPLA. The study concludes that this transfer of patrimony “must be understood in the institutional context of the division of State resources among certain figures,
That the first beneficiary is the family of José Eduardo dos Santos himself, no doubt. In January 2013, the eldest daughter of the president of Angola, Isabel dos Santos, became the first African billionaire, according to the American magazine Forbes, which states that the shares of companies listed in Portugal, such as BPI and ZON, together with assets in Angola, “raised the net value [of Isabel dos Santos’s fortune] above the $ 1 billion thresholds, making the 40-year-old businesswoman the first African billionaire woman.”
The origin of the fortune, says Forbes, is that Isabel dos Santos stays with part of the companies that want to settle in Angola or benefits from her father’s providential signature in law or decree. Another article on the president’s eldest daughter’s business states that including her in all the big deals made in Angola is, for José Eduardo dos Santos, a “way to extract money from his country, while remaining at a distance, in a formal way ”. In this way, “if you are knocked down, you can claim your assets through your daughter. If she dies while in power, she keeps the loot in the family. ”
The second child, in order of age, is José Filomeno dos Santos, “Zenú”, born from his connection with Maria Luísa Perdigão Abrantes, José Eduardo dos Santos’ second wife. Zenú has been appointed to manage the Sovereign Fund of Angola, endowed with US $ 5,000 million and, as we will see, is appointed as a possible successor.
Zenú’s brothers are Welwitschia José dos Santos, “Tchizé”, and José Eduardo Paulino dos Santos, “Coréon Dú”, who in 2006 used the address of the Presidential Palace as a private residence to create Semba Comunicação, which today manages the second channel of the Public Television of Angola (TPA 2). Semba Comunicação receives over US $ 40 million from the Presidency’s budget for the management of TPA 2 and other alleged actions to improve the presidential image. Coréon Dú also seeks to cement a career as a musician and in November 2013 he was appointed Member of the Superior Council of Memorial Dr. António Agostinho Neto.
Finally, the three children of José Eduardo dos Santos’ marriage to Ana Paula dos Santos – Eduane Danilo, Joseana and Eduardo Breno – also made their debut in the business world together with their mother, Ana Paula dos Santos, the limited company Deana Day Spa, owner of a Beauty and Aesthetics Center on the Marginal de Luanda. It is not known where the money for this investment came from.
In addition to the family, “the circle of the most affluent Angolan businessmen is closed by people very close to José Eduardo dos Santos, among whom are the generals Kopelipa (Minister of State and head of the Military House of the President of the Republic), Dino Fragoso ( former head of Communications for the Presidency of the Republic and current advisor to the head of the Chief of Staff) and Manuel Vicente, the newly appointed Minister of State for Economic and Productive Coordination ”, lists an article by Maka Angola.
“The primitive accumulation of capital in Angola”
In a recent speech, José Eduardo dos Santos explained his thesis on the need to create an elite of wealthy entrepreneurs: it is the theory of “primitive capital accumulation”. In a vaguely Marxist language, it is a reissue of Deng Xiaoping’s famous saying “getting rich is glorious”, or Bukhárin’s oldest, but no less famous, appeal to peasants who own large estates in Soviet Russia: “Kulaks, get rich ! ”
The Angolan president said in the State of the Nation speech of October 16, 2013:
“The primitive accumulation of capital in Western countries occurred hundreds of years ago and at that time its rules of play were different. The primitive accumulation of capital that takes place today in Africa must be adapted to our reality ”.
This adequacy, he explains, implies that any national citizen can have access to private property and “create personal wealth and heritage”, just like foreign citizens, who can “create companies under Angolan law and integrate into the national economy”.
Now, says the president, American, English, and French companies in the oil sector, companies, and commercial banks with Portuguese interests “take tens of billions of dollars from Angola every year”. Therefore, “why can they have private companies of this size and Angolans cannot?”
José Eduardo dos Santos’ answer is: “We need strong and efficient companies, entrepreneurs and national economic groups in the public and private sector and capable elites in all areas, to progressively emerge from the situation of an underdeveloped country”.
The problem is that this “capable elite in all areas” does not remove the country from underdevelopment, because the people remain miserable. The Africa Progress Report 2013, prepared in May by a group of personalities coordinated by Kofi Annan and which includes Graça Machel, shows how Angola has one of the most unequal patterns of income distribution in all of Africa. The strong growth of the last decade has had almost no effect on the way the majority of the population continues to live. “While the Angolan elite uses the income from oil to buy assets abroad, in Angola children are hungry,” notes the report. Angola’s infant mortality rate, up to the age of five, is at the top of the list: it is the eighth highest in the world, with 161 deaths per 1000 children per year, which represents 116,000 deaths every year.
About half of the ten million Angolans continue to live on less than the US $ 1.25 a day (just under one euro), but Angola is the second-largest oil exporter in sub-Saharan Africa and the fifth largest producer of diamonds in the world. among the third of countries that grew the most between 2000 and 2011 in the world.
“In the name of economic development, under the aegis of capitalism, there are justifications for the practice of corruption, the lack of transparency in the State’s accounts, and the lack of recognition of property rights. Morals and ethics are not part of the culture of the ’emerging Angolan bourgeoisie’, which ‘legitimizes’ the coercion of democracy in defense of the status quo of the reigning elite, ”says economist José Dias Amaral.
“José Eduardo dos Santos has been in this position for so long that he started to govern the country as an authentic monarch”, accuses political scientist Nelson Pestana, from the Catholic University of Angola, and leader of the Democratic Bloc.
The Prince wants to perpetuate himself in power
The year 2008 marked the heyday of José Eduardo dos Santos. Four years of growth at 17% on average in a country at peace after so many years of conflict offered the MPLA leader an overwhelming victory in the legislative elections – his party had more than 80% of the votes. But even with that political capital in hand, he preferred to play it safe. Instead of calling for presidential elections for the following year, as provided for in the current Constitution, he preferred to change it and create an “atypical” model. The new Constitution, approved by the National Assembly, started to determine that the president will be the head of the party with the most votes in the legislative elections, thus ending the direct elections for the Presidency.
“By proposing what he called an“ atypical indirect election ”, he invented a political model in which there is no election of the President of the Republic”, says political scientist Nelson Pestana. For the leader of the Democratic Bloc, “this“ atypical ”model that removes citizens from the political sphere and drastically reduces their sovereignty, transferring it to the party apparatus, appears to comfort the Prince’s desire to be legitimated retroactively because it was head of the list of the party winning the 2008 legislative elections (hence the commitment to the big cheat) and to eliminate the republican presidential elections that should take place this year, according to the commitment that it assumed with the country in 2006, reiterated in the electoral campaign and following, after all, many others, also not honored ”.
For the professor at the Catholic University of Luanda, the objective of this constitutional change was clear: “The advantage that the Prince sees in this is to perpetuate himself in power without being subjected to popular scrutiny. It is, therefore, an ax to the sovereignty of the People, under the terms of the Constitution, it is a real setback in the political system and in the catalog of citizens’ rights and freedoms. (…) In fact, one of the objectives of the so-called “new cycle” was to remove politics, the choice, the decision about citizens’ res publica. In analogous terms, we are in the presence of a return to the single party that, as the vanguard of the people, chooses wisely in its name ”.
The dread of the street
Thus, in 2012, José Eduardo dos Santos would once again be “elected” to the presidency without the people endorsing his name, with the MPLA’s victory in the legislatures, by 71.8%, followed by UNITA with 18.6% and CASA-CE with 8%. But, despite the enormous margin of victory, the decline in his power had already begun, and this was reflected in the regime’s hardening in the face of demonstrations by young people who were calling for his resignation.
The example of the Arab Spring spread fear in the presidential circle. After all, Ben Ali was also elected in 2009 with 89.6% of the votes, and in a short time, since a young man, in the interior of the country, decided to immolate himself in protest, a movement in the streets took shape and, unstoppable, overthrew it and its regime as if the foundations were made of cardboard.
Couldn’t the same happen in Angola? Eduardo dos Santos prefers not to take any risks and for that reason represses until the funeral of an opposition member. At the same time it multiplies the accusations, as in the speech he gave in 2011:
“In the so-called social networks, which are organized via the Internet, and in some other media, there is talk of revolution, but there is no talk of a democratic alternation.
For these people, revolution means bringing people together and making demonstrations, even unauthorized ones, to insult, denigrate, cause disturbances and confusion, with the purpose of forcing the police to act and to be able to say that there is no freedom of expression and there is no respect for rights.
It is this path of provocation that they are choosing to try to overthrow elected governments that are fulfilling their mandate ”.
In another passage of the speech, the president responds in this way to the accusations related to his enrichment:
“On the Internet, someone circulated the news that the President of Angola has a fortune of twenty billion dollars abroad.
If that person were honest and serious, he should immediately indicate to the Financial Intelligence Department of the National Bank of Angola (BNA) the names of the banks and the account numbers in which that money is deposited, so that the National Treasury can transfer this amount to your accounts ”.
Undefined succession
With 34 years in power, José Eduardo dos Santos suffers from the evil of the rulers who remain in office for too long – the urge to perpetuate themselves forever, the vertigo of monarchic succession. But nothing is very clear in terms of succession, and the situation could be complicated if rumors are confirmed that the president suffers from cancer.
There are those who bet that Eduardo dos Santos intends to make his son José Filomeno dos Santos, “Zenú”, his successor. Proof of this would be his appointment to the presidency of the Angola Sovereign Fund, with five billion dollars to spend. “I believe that my appointment was transparent because it was widely publicized and because I have the professional background to perform these functions,” said José Filomeno in an interview, justifying the appointment.
He may have a resume in the financial area to run a millionaire fund, but he does not seem to have the political experience to govern the power oligarchy without the presence of Eduardo dos Santos. At 36, Zenu seems too young to be President. But let’s not forget that the father came to the office at 37.
About the author
Luís Leiria
Esquerda.net Journalist
Fonte: FreeMind FreeWorld.Org
