For African country policy scholar, government seeks political capital in recession
The actions of the Angolan government to fight corruption are transformative, but seen by the population of the African country as a reckoning within the party for four decades in power.
This is the opinion of the Portuguese professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, from the Department of Political Sciences and International Relations at the University of Oxford, author of “Magnificent and Miserable: Angola since the Civil War” (ed. Tinta da China, 2015).
In an e-mail interview, he says that the evidence against ex-president José Eduardo dos Santos (1979-2017) and his family is robust and gives the current president, João Lourenço, political breath in a context of economic stagnation.
Do the “Luanda Leaks” mean the end of the influence of ex-president José Eduardo dos Santos and his family in Angola? The Dos Santos family was weakened as early as 2017, with the arrival of President João Lourenço in power. He made it very clear by his actions, such as the dismissal of the former president’s children and by the rhetoric of confrontation, which was not going to stop there.
Over the past two years, this political encirclement has increased steadily. The “Luanda Leaks” are a very important qualitative step, since they denounce the origins of Isabel dos Santos’ fortune and undermine her reputation at an international level.
It will be very difficult for this family to return to politics in Angola, and even exile seems to be a more complicated option than they expected.
What kind of power does ex-president José Eduardo dos Santos maintain in the country? Mr. do you see the possibility of him being arrested? Today it has little power. José Eduardo was never popular, and few feel personally loyal to him. If João Lourenço started a truly systemic anti-corruption crusade, the elites might turn in favor of the ex-president, who was the person who allowed them to get rich, without creating complications.
For now, there is a perception in Angola that the offensive is not a total cleansing of the corrupt, but a political game more focused on the family and a few allies of the former president. As long as João Lourenço does not question the regime’s great barons, José Eduardo will be abandoned in his exile.
What made the current president turn so intensely against his predecessor? There are many reasons. Personal hostility is one. The other is the fact that the Dos Santos family is unpopular in Angola. Turning against her, the president not only made a decision that was well received by many Angolans, but gave the ruling party an alibi: “It was not us, it was them, this family of corrupt people”.
The truth is different. What we saw in Angola until 2017 was organized corruption that involved elites in power, and many are still there. We could mention the hypothesis that the president even has a transformative anti-corruption plan, which starts with the Dos Santos family, but which, sooner or later, goes after the big corrupt in the country.
If this hypothesis were real (and for now there is no reason to think about it), it would create unpredictable dynamics among the Angolan elite, which would not tolerate them.
Angola still has little opposition, excessive military influence and fragile cuts. What is missing for the country to become a complete democracy? The policy that counts remains within the ruling party, the party that also controls the state apparatus. Of course, the opposition benefits from the mistakes and unpopularity of the MPLA [government party] and has been improving its electoral results, but it remains poorly organized and with few resources.
In this context, it is impossible to call Angola a democracy. It is rather a state in which the same party has had a hegemonic position for decades. However, it is undeniable that the space for freedom of expression has expanded considerably since 2017, in contrast to the last years of President Dos Santos. This is an improvement that has to be noted.
Is it possible to predict that the MPLA will remain in power for a long time in Angola? Or can the opposition grow? It is very difficult to predict. Many analysts swore that regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, etc. they were very strong, and then the Arab Spring came in 2011. Angola is in a situation of severe economic stagnation, and there are a lot of young people with deep feelings of frustration in relation to the status quo.
On the other hand, the MPLA remains the dominant force in the country. I don’t think I can lose power overnight. If that were to happen, it would be due to his own mistakes, and not because of the opposition’s capabilities and dynamism.
The economy remains stagnant after a long period of decline. What risk does this situation pose for the country’s political and social stability? It is potentially a time bomb. Oil is in decline, and diversification (which is always a structural task, which takes a long time in economies concentrated on raw materials) is not happening significantly.
In part, all this focus on the guilt of Dos Santos and his family is an attempt to generate political capital, since at a concrete level the economy is in a terrible state and the government is not in a position to show improvements in the short or medium term.
However, Angolans now want an improvement in their quality of life, and it does not seem to me that efforts against the Dos Santos family are enough to satisfy these demands.
