Manuel Vicente was born poor, in 1956, like everyone else in the Rangel neighborhood, in Luanda, Angola. We were all very poor, not miserable, but certainly poor, a childhood friend reminds the OBSERVER
It was there, between mud houses and never brick houses, that a barefoot Manuel Vicente put into practice everything that was tapes and reviengas, hoping to imitate and perhaps even surpass the players of his club, Benfica. “Like all of us at that time, he made many feints to show he was an ace,” recalls that friend.
At the time Manuel Vicente was showing up on improvised soccer fields in the Rangel neighborhood, the colonial war, which began in 1961, already marked the socio-political life in Angola. Still, nothing was heard of that young man in relation to the conflict. “What he was most involved in was football, really,” stresses the friend who met him at the time.
“It was football and school, too,” he adds. When he was not entertained with kicking a ball, usually of plastic or rubber, it was books that he clung to: “In addition to being a good student, he was a respectable student, who never skipped classes”. He was good with numbers – so much so that when he needed to help his family, he gave math explanations to make money. It also helped friends, but in another way. One of them says that whenever other kids in the neighborhood hit him, Manuel Vicente was the first to appear to defend him. “I sent them to the floor and it stopped,” says this friend.
Later, karma would return the gesture, receiving a push from someone older, and stronger, who accompanied him for most of his life: José Eduardo dos Santos. The contours in which the relationship between the two men began are unclear. Between the reports in the press and those made by Observer sources, there seems to be no consensus except in relation to one thing: Manuel Vicente and José Eduardo dos Santos have a family relationship, which meant that they were cordially referred to as “cousins”. And early on that José Eduardo dos Santos, who unexpectedly succeeded President Agostinho Neto in 1979, knew how to take care of his 14-year-old cousin, pulling him to the center of power in Angola.
Along the way, Manuel Vicente did his studies. In addition to the electrical engineering course completed at the Agostinho Neto University, he did training courses paid by Sonangol (which from an early age allocated 0.15 cents of the dollar for the training of its staff abroad) in places whose geography already denounced what would become his route: in cities like Boston and London, where consultants and management companies proliferate; and also in Dallas and Calgary, two capitals of the energy world.
In 1981, his oldest “cousin” was President for two years, Manuel Vicente headed the engineering division of Sonefe (National Society of Studies and Financing). He stayed there until 1987, when he transferred to the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum. In 1991, after years of closeness, he finally managed to set foot on the Olympus of the business world in Angola: Sonangol, where he joined as deputy general director.
He worked under the tutelage of Joaquim David, at the time director-general. At this time, says a connoisseur of the energy industry in Angola, Manuel Vicente “was a mere ‘yes, sir’” of his superior. “It was Joaquim David who put Sonangol as a channel for financing the war effort, it was not Manuel Vicente”, says the same source. “When Manuel Vicente arrived at the projects, they were all already expanding.”
In any case, José Eduardo dos Santos kept his “cousin” at the top of Sonangol. “It was there that Manuel Vicente grew up, in that kind of dome”, says the politologist Paulo Inglês, the current director of the Research Center of the Jean Piaget University, in Benguela, to the Observer. “Even then, a kind of nepotism was noticed”, adds that academic.
In 1999, José Eduardo dos Santos gave Manuel Vicente a new push: he appointed him president of the board of directors of Sonangol, effectively making him the number one hen in Angola’s golden eggs. At 33, the young man who shone in the naked fields of the Rangel neighborhood became Mr. Petroleum – and he was never the same. Much more than the facilitator who opened the doors in Angola, Manuel Vicente quickly became the door himself.
That was the lesson learned by a diplomat seconded in Luanda and who, at the beginning of his visit to the Angolan capital, ran into several walls. It was easy to reach those who wanted it, often rulers with prominent positions – but it didn’t take anything away. However, after a conversation with Manuel Vicente, he quickly realized that these were not the right people.
“It was Manuel Vicente who told me who was in charge of what in Angola, he pointed out to me all the names I needed to know”, says the diplomat, who asks for anonymity. Manuel Vicente immediately explained what he had to do: “To resolve what you have to resolve, have a few dinners with Isabel dos Santos and with the guys who rule over everything, who are not the ministers, but those below because they are the ones who get their hands dirty ”.
Shortly thereafter, the newcomer, the diplomat, had already sat down at the table with Isabel dos Santos and with her husband, Sindika Dokolo, as well as with other decision-makers. “The problems were all solved right away,” he says.
This was already post-war Angola, where the economy grew uniquely in the wake of oil – boosting the economy’s annual growth to double digits and even surpassing China as a percentage. It was above all in this Angola, where half the world managed to generate fortunes as long as he did not ask too many questions, that Manuel Vicente moved better than anyone, attracting the main oil companies in the market like never before.
“Manuel Vicente was respected by CEOs of oil companies around the world. Not so much for technical reasons, but because he was a tough guy, a nationalist “, says a source from the sector, who, in a tone of a confessed exaggeration, denies merit to” Mr. Petroleum “:” He has no merit, who has merit is the geological formation of Angola. Manuel Vicente’s merit is only that he smashed the oil companies to the bone through the signing bonus ”.
Regarding the signature bonus – the amount paid upfront by oil companies to secure the concession of an oil block -, former BP CEO John Browne tells in his autobiography a symptomatic story of Manuel Vicente’s will at the highest levels of the world. energy sector. The story goes back to 2001 when BP complied with the demands of NGOs such as Global Witness and agreed to disclose the amount it would have paid the Angolan government in signature bonuses: the US $ 111 million, which today is equivalent to about 160 million euros.
“My analysis was that, since we were obliged to report these large payments made by our English branch, if we published this financial information we would not be breaking the contract,” wrote John Browne in the book Beyond Business: An Inspirational Memoir From a Visionary Leader, published in 2010 and without Portuguese edition. “Angola had a different analysis.” “Angola”, in this case, is like someone who says, Manuel Vicente.
Shortly thereafter, John Browne received a letter signed by Mr. Petroleum which was addressed to him but which was also forwarded to the other oil majors. “It was with great surprise, and some incredulity, that we learned from the press that your company released information related to its oil activities in Angola, some of which are strictly confidential,” wrote Manuel Vicente. In that letter, he pointed the finger at “organized groups” that applied “orchestrated campaigns” in the name of “pseudo-transparency” – suggesting with all that BP had succumbed to that “pressure”.
Following the letter, the BP CEO was called to Luanda to speak with José Eduardo dos Santos himself. Aligned with what Manuel Vicente had written, the President explained to the owner of one of the largest oil companies in the world that, if he did something like that again, BP would be expelled from Angola. “After this episode, BP kept the guitar in the bag,” says a source in the energy sector. “And even today they are in Angola, with the rules that Manuel Vicente imposed on them.”
In 2013, in an interview with SIC, Manuel Vicente replied that in order to fight corruption, it was necessary to implement “the so-called culture of meritocracy” – an expression to which he himself responded with a timid laugh, perhaps caused by the nerves of those who are not used to giving interviews. “But it is also a process, you cannot end the corruption from today to tomorrow,” he said, with a new laugh. When asked what the “toughest weapon” the Government of Angola was using against corruption, he replied: “It is transparency, it is objectivity and it is the clarity of the rules and, fundamentally, the legislation”.
All of this was accompanied by José Eduardo dos Santos, who maintained a close personal relationship with Manuel Vicente, but with relative technical “independence”, describes a diplomat to the Observer. “In this, José Eduardo dos Santos was very similar to Agostinho Neto, who put anyone who understood the subject at Sonangol and always preferred to let them work”, summarizes an industry expert.
“Letting them work” means generating money: a lot and quickly. First, to finance the war. Then, to finance the regime – and, inherently, the MPLA. This is what explains Benjamin Augé, a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) and an expert in the energy sector, who speaks of Manuel Vicente as a kind of treasurer of the regime, during and especially after the war.
“Manuel Vicente’s Sonangol did everything necessary for the MPLA to survive. It did not create wealth or technical knowledge, because Sonangol is not a company that produces oil. Instead, it leases the exploration of the blocks to the main oil companies and from there it serves as a sovereign wealth fund ”, says that researcher.
“This would be a total failure if the objective were to guarantee the future of a normal country. But that was not what José Eduardo dos Santos asked Manuel Vicente for, ”he continues. The request, stated by Benjamin Augé, was much more earthly: “The President wanted Manuel Vicente to bring the largest amount of money and as soon as possible to ensure that the regime survived”.
This is where Chinese money comes in – and, once again, it was Manuel Vicente who served as the door.
It was a case of mutual convenience, in which one country’s hunger joined the other’s desire to eat. On the one hand, Angola needed financing to launch its post-war economy. On the other hand, China had an urgent need for oil to maintain voracious growth. “After the civil war, Angola had many difficulties in obtaining financing from institutions like the IMF. And China, which in 2003 had a huge energy crisis, because it had access to fuel below its needs, saw an interesting opportunity in Angola to be able to receive more energy ”, sums up South African researcher Lucy Corkin, attentive money watcher Chinese in Africa, in particular in Angola.
Read on paper, this would be a mutual benefit relationship, in which both parties would gain from the agreement: China would have more oil, and Angola would have not only Chinese direct investment but low-cost work by construction companies that would help to build a war-torn country. It made so much sense that, according to data collected by think-tank American American Enterprise Institute, China invested a total of 24,420 million dollars (22.32 billion euros) in Angola between 2005 and 2019. With these figures, Angola has become the country in which China has invested the most per capita in the entire African continent.
But in practice, the reality that formed there was different.
“If Chinese money had been used as intended, it could have been a big deal. The problem is that, for example in the construction sector, there needs to be a series of checks and balances and an environment of transparency to ensure that the contractor does his part ”, explains Lucy Corkin.
This is where Manuel Vicente once again comes in – not only as a de facto representative of the Angolan state to China but also as an individual businessman and businessman. “Manuel Vicente was at the peak of his political influence when he starts doing business, as a private citizen, with China”, contextualizes the South African academic. And it was at this point in his life that he helped found an enigmatic and above all profitable, conglomerate of companies based at 88 Queensway Avenue in Hong Kong.
The address ended up naming what became known as the “88 Queensway Group”. The scheme around the group was exposed in a report published in 2009 by the US government’s US-China Commission (USCC). There, it was explained that in addition to the credit lines signed between the Export-Import Bank of China and the Angolan State, which would take place “relatively transparently”, a much more opaque parallel system was set up – and, at the same time, profitable for its participants and detrimental to Angolan public coffers.
Within the 88 Queensway Group, there are two entities whose names are worth retaining: China International Fund Limited (CIF) and China Sonangol. The latter is a joint venture between Sonangol itself (which owns 30%) and another company in the 88 Queensway Group universe. Both CIF and China Sonangol were in the hands of the same man: Manuel Vicente.
Through the Queensway Group, Manuel Vicente was able to simultaneously dress as a seller and a buyer, doing several business with the Angolan State. And in the rest of the world, too. With partners as the enigmatic Sam Pa or arms dealer Pierre Falcone, Manuel Vicente and Queensway Group bought several buildings in New York – including 49% of the New York Times building.
According to the USCC report, as director of China Sonangol, Manuel Vicente tried to sell services to the National Reconstruction Office (GRN) and to Sonangol itself. In this way, Manuel Vicente was simultaneously dressed as a seller (in China Sonangol) and a buyer (in Sonangol), contrary to Angolan law.
Despite having concentrated most of its turnover in Angola, 88 Queensway Group and its various branches have expanded their business to other countries: Argentina, Congo, Venezuela, and North Korea. In the US, they drew attention in October 2008 when they bought leading real estate in New York, such as the JP Morgan Chase investment bank building, 49% of the Clock Tower, and an equal percentage of the old building of The New York Times – and who sold them was Lev Leviev, Israeli diamond magnate and partner of Isabel dos Santos.
None of this was, however, a one-man show. Alongside Manuel Vicente, there were names of members of the political-military elite of Angola, such as General Hélder Vieira Dias, better known as Kopelipa, responsible for the GRN; the Portuguese banker Hélder Bataglia, founder of former Escom, a non-financial arm of the Espírito Santo Group in Angola; Franco-Algerian businessman Pierre Falcone, who starred in the Angolagate scandal in the 1990s, for illegally selling weapons to the MPLA during the civil war; and also a mysterious Chinese businessman named Xu Jinghua but known by Sam Pa, the real brain behind the 88 Queensway Group, who would have met José Eduardo dos Santos when they both studied in the 1970s in Baku, Azerbaijan, then a republic Soviet.
Manuel Vicente became particularly close to Sam Pa, a man who besides being Chinese is also Angolan, having documentation in the name of António Sampo Menezes. In the book The Pillage of Africa (Vowels, 2015), by journalist Tom Burgis, of the Financial Times, the story is told of how Sam Pa managed to do business in Guinea thanks to Manuel Vicente. Received by the then Minister of Mines and Energy, Mahmoud Thiam, Sam Pa referred to the proximity he had to the president of Sonangol. “If you are so close to Manuel Vicente, come back with him”, challenged the Guinean. Three days later, Sam Pa complied: he landed in Guinea, this time with Manuel Vicente at his side. It was enough to arrange an immediate meeting with the then President of Guinea, Moussa Dadis Camara.
But not everything went well for everyone.
Mahmoud Thiam, the Guinean minister who challenged Sam Pa to show him, Manuel Vicente, was sentenced in 2017 to seven years in prison in the USA (since he also has American nationality) for accepting $ 8.5 billion in bribes from CIF and China Sonangol. Sam Pa himself would also be arrested in October 2015, following the fight against corruption within the Chinese Communist Party led by Xi Jinping. Since then, Sam Pa has been disowned by Beijing and is partly uncertain.
There is nothing to suggest that Manuel Vicente could ever experience such luck in Luanda. On the contrary. “Everything Manuel Vicente did during those crazy years, he did it because his back was warmed by José Eduardo dos Santos”, assures the Observer a person who followed Manuel Vicente’s business with China in particular. “One of the ways that José Eduardo dos Santos found to remain in power for so long was to feed all the mouths around him, which were not few. Manuel Vicente acted as the gatekeeper for people who wanted to feed on José Eduardo dos Santos. ”
As close as he was to “cousin” José Eduardo dos Santos, Manuel Vicente was inevitably seen as his successor. This belief gained even more strength when “Comrade President” exonerated Manuel Vicente as president of Sonangol and called him to be number two on the MPLA lists for the 2012 general elections. After a victory with 71.84% of the votes, President José Eduardo Santos would continue to have Manuel Vicente at his side, now as vice-president of the country.
Still, for many, the name of Manuel Vicente was far from being known. Despite being famous in oil companies’ corridors around the world, his profile was nothing more than the discretion imposed on him under the figure of José Eduardo dos Santos. Until, from one day to the next, his name became part of the common lexicon not only in Angola but especially in Portugal – a bad sign for a man used to working in the shade.
It all happened when it was news that the Portuguese prosecutor Orlando Figueira was suspected of receiving alleged bribes from Manuel Vicente. In return, the Angolan will have asked the Portuguese to file an investigation that questioned the 3.8 million euros used by Manuel Vicente to buy a luxury apartment in Estoril.
The timings described by the Portuguese justice point to the first meeting between those two men in Luanda, in April. At that time, they would have had an informal conversation where the Portuguese prosecutor would have complained about his salary. In a continuous act, in October 2011, Manuel Vicente and Orlando Figueira closed an alleged agreement in which, according to the prosecutor’s conviction, resulted in the payment of about 760 thousand euros to the Portuguese in exchange for the archiving of the investigation. That was exactly what happened at the beginning of 2012 – motivating, however, a new investigation around Orlando Figueira and Manuel Vicente, now for suspected corruption, in what would come to be known as Operation Fizz.
Orlando Figueira was later sentenced to six years and eight months in prison in December 2018, after the Portuguese justice determined at first instance that he was guilty of several crimes, including that of passive corruption. In the decision, it was even determined that Orlando Figueira’s corruptor had been Manuel Vicente. However, the then former vice-president was not even notified by the Portuguese court. Behind this practical detail was an enormous discomfort between the governments of Portugal and Angola.
The case dragged on for several years, eroding the image of Manuel Vicente and also the relations between Portugal and Angola, where the discomfort skyrocketed before the pretension of justice to try a ruler of a former Portuguese colony, even though he enjoyed immunity by position performed. Both under the government of Pedro Passos Coelho and António Costa, alarms about the diplomatic consequences of the case were raised. In the socialist government, this whole process became known as “the irritant” – an expression coined by Augusto Santos Silva and repeated by António Costa and Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa – and would only come to an end when the Manuel Vicente process was transferred to Angola, already with João Lourenço as President.
In addition to this public and assumed “irritant”, another one was generated around Manuel Vicente in the corridors of power in Luanda. Seeing how Manuel Vicente served as a door for José Eduardo dos Santos, many understood that the best thing to do was to break in.
Tired, and already affected by the disease that would require him to undergo treatments abroad, first in Brazil and then in Spain, José Eduardo dos Santos began to delegate more and more functions – with special attention to Manuel Vicente when he became vice-president. President. “There were days when he just didn’t go to dispatch. At the end of the day, I just asked if there were problems. Manuel Vicente took care of everything for him ”, says a source who has known Angolan power for several decades.
So much so, that several sources guarantee the Observer, it is Manuel Vicente that José Eduardo dos Santos initially thinks of as his successor. The first effective step in this direction was taken when he called him MPLA number two in the 2012 elections and made him vice-president. And the second was when, later on, he imposed him as his successor within the party.
“José Eduardo dos Santos had a concern, which was to ensure that the family’s interests were not touched when he left. And Vicente was, in a way, a family man ”, says a connoisseur of the MPLA corridors.
But it was precisely in the halls and halls of the MPLA that José Eduardo dos Santos shocked by a reality that, especially years later, would change his life completely: the party was no longer his. And that was what they saw when José Eduardo dos Santos, old and tired, proposed the name of Manuel Vicente for his successor. “They made him understand the obvious, which is that Manuel Vicente is an unloved figure within the party”, says a source from the MPLA’s central committee. Another person, also from the party, explains how the fact that Manuel Vicente was never a military man in the war of liberation or in the war against UNITA, besides having a lawsuit pending in Portugal, was raised by several members of the Political Bureau as an inescapable impediment to being number 1.
By this time, a confidential and internal Sonangol report was released. Signed by Francisco de Lemos, president of Sonangol and cousin of José Eduardo dos Santos via the then-first lady, Ana Paula dos Santos, the report admitted that Sonangol was “unsustainable” and therefore was close to technical bankruptcy. Especially because, read in the report, Sonangol’s operating model had “failed” – that is, Manuel Vicente’s recipe had failed.
In those years, Manuel Vicente learned that when you are called Mr. Petroleum, it is impossible to be only for the good parts. The bad ones are also part. Its prestige and the state of grace with the MPLA were inextricably linked to the value of oil: in a growth trend in the 2000s (with a peak in 2008, when the barrel was worth $ 151), in apparent consolidation between 2010 and the first half of 2014 (when the barrel stabilized comfortably above $ 100) and a free fall from 2014 that dragged on in the following years. In 2016, the barrel of oil sank to $ 26. And Manuel Vicente fell with him.
But Manuel Vicente did not fall alone – for such a giant to fall, there would have to be someone pushing him. Among the more than twenty people heard by the Observer for this article, there is no consensus on who did it, or how or why. What is certain is that José Eduardo dos Santos, after so much pushing his “cousin” upwards, let him be pushed downwards.
And there are those who understand that the push really came from José Eduardo dos Santos.
The journalist Sedrick de Carvalho talks about an attempt by José Eduardo dos Santos to fit even more reputational damage by associating himself with Manuel Vicente. “He has a habit of distancing himself from the closest figures to make it appear that he has nothing to do with what is happening,” says the journalist, stressing that “[Manuel Vicente’s] reputation was burned internationally”. A veteran of the opposition believes that it was also José Eduardo dos Santos who pushed Manuel Vicente, all because of money. “After having promoted him to vice-president, with the prospect of being a dauphin, José Eduardo dos Santos realized that Manuel Vicente was richer than him,” says this opponent, who asks for anonymity. “We Africans have the habit of saying that the President has to be the richest person in the country.”
That is also where Justino Pinto de Andrade, a well-known opponent, and former MPLA activist, points out, which he left during the decolonization process. “José Eduardo’s idea is that power is money. And Manuel Vicente also had a lot of money to have power ”, he says. “I think that that also scared José Eduardo dos Santos a lot.”
Journalist Graça Campos, former director of Semanário Angolense, made a similar analysis: “It was the money that separated José Eduardo dos Santos and Manuel Vicente” .
However, explains that journalist, José Eduardo dos Santos’s push to Manuel Vicente only happened after he was pushed to do it himself. And, although she does not neglect the influence of the MPLA’s Political Bureau with the “Comrade President”, Graça Campos points first to a person we haven’t talked about in this article yet: Isabel dos Santos, the oldest and favorite daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos.
This same account is corroborated by a well-placed MPLA source, who guarantees: “Whoever arranged the succession to Manuel Vicente was Isabel dos Santos, who totally destroyed him”.
The moment when Sonangol’s near-bankruptcy state was exposed in the internal report signed by Francisco de Lemos will have created a huge gap between Manuel Vicente and José Eduardo dos Santos – and Isabel dos Santos, at the time already considered by Forbes to be the richest woman from Africa when receiving government grants in areas such as telecommunications, saw an opportunity with his father.
“When it comes to Sonangol’s debt, José Eduardo dos Santos no longer trusts anyone but his own daughter,” explains a well-placed source. It was at that time that José Eduardo dos Santos started two processes. On the one hand, that of his withdrawal, which he announced in March 2016, with the guarantee that he would leave active political life in 2018. On the other, he gave the green light to a revolution at Sonangol – first, by hiring a consultant for his own daughter to design a new model for the oil company; then, handing over that which is the greatest source of wealth to the hands of her firstborn.
“He and his daughter are two people, but deep down they are the same meat. He has a huge weakness for his daughter, ” says a source in the oil sector. Benjamin Augé explains that, in doing his daughter a favor, José Eduardo dos Santos also dealt a heavy blow to Manuel Vicente. “The fact that he accepted all the changes that happened at Sonangol, including the change of several people, was a direct attack on the man who was his protégé for more than two decades”, he underlines.
In June 2016, when Isabel dos Santos sat in the chair of Sonangol’s president, nobody needed to convince José Eduardo dos Santos that Manuel Vicente was not a good choice for his successor.
But the question remained: if not Manuel Vicente, who? José Eduardo dos Santos had other names in his pocket.
Sources close to the process tell the Observer that “Comrade President” proposed his own son, José Filomeno dos Santos, better known as “Zenú”, who since 2012 was director of the Angola Sovereign Fund. The refusal within the Political Bureau of the MPLA was broad, but cautious in tone: although José Eduardo dos Santos made his son a brigadier even though he had no experience or training, he was made to see that he was not really a soldier.
Next step, José Eduardo dos Santos proposed Bornito de Sousa, himself a member of the Political Bureau. He is quickly told that he, too, is not a military man, of little value being a leader of the MPLA Youth (JMPLA) – an argument that the then President will have tested, without result. José Eduardo dos Santos will also have suggested names of military personnel, but who were associated with him across the board, such as Higino Carneiro. The insistence on naming who was close and indefectible, without taking into account the party’s different sensibilities, proves that José Eduardo dos Santos hoped that this process would be much simpler and faster.
It was only after all these names that João Lourenço’s was put on the table by whom he gave José Eduardo dos Santos so many negatives. General of three stars in the reserve and politician of good relations within the MPLA, where he cultivated friendships even during his crossing in the desert, João Lourenço was a well-regarded name within the party, of which he was elected vice-president in August 2016. Armed Forces, he gained prestige when he was appointed Minister of Defense in 2014 – already at that time, a concession by José Eduardo dos Santos to the party, after he exonerated the minister and his cousin Cândido Van-Dúnem, caught in an alleged scheme of overfilling army combat rations. In addition, during his long crossing in the desert, João Lourenço never raised waves inside and outside the party.
“ João Lourenço was the least of the evils, from the perspective of José Eduardo dos Santos”, summarizes an MPLA source. José Eduardo dos Santos relented. In return, several sources confirm to the Observer, he demanded that Bornito de Sousa be a candidate for vice-president – a will that was eventually done to him.
All these movements took place behind closed doors, under the cover of silence that marks the performance of that party which, although ideologically distanced from Marxism, has never lost until today the typical functioning of democratic centralism. For this very reason, the electoral campaign was made up of smiles and complicity, with José Eduardo dos Santos and his family, including Isabel dos Santos, appearing at the rallies of João Lourenço dressed in MPLA.
Even so, behind that closed door, there was already an atmosphere of some discomfort between the hosts of José Eduardo dos Santos and those of João Lourenço. At a campaign rally where the President was not yet present, João Lourenço would have rejected what was taken for granted by José Eduardo dos Santos’ entourage: that the candidate would have his speeches written by the “Comrade President” team. “He started surprising them and making his own speeches against the crystallization of corruption”, points out Justino Pinto de Andrade. Another source, who asks for anonymity, corroborates this report – and adds that the speech that João Lourenço rejected was handed over to him by Kopelipa.
The campaign was then guided by the slogan “improve what is good and correct what is bad” – a phrase that José Eduardo dos Santos himself had already said in the 2012 elections – and, in the midst of all that, promises of the fight against corruption. From the outside, many did not believe those words, attributing to them the little importance that the worn and empty slogans deserve. Unsurprisingly, the MPLA won the elections with 61.1% of the vote and a majority in the National Assembly.
Everything seemed to be the same. Until the well-behaved “Mimoso” decided that much better than leaving the yard (as he never dared to do as a child) would be to rule him.
