Eduardo dos Santos: Angola's 'eternal president' dies

Jose Eduardo dos Santos was known as a quiet autocrat. He was one of Africa's longest-serving heads of state and fundamentally impacted Angola's history.

He passed away on Friday, July 8, 2022, at a clinic in Barcelona, Spain, where he was undergoing treatment after a long illness.

When dos Santos was born on August 28, 1942, Angola was still a Portuguese colony.

By the age of 16, he joined Angola's liberation movement MPLA. After the MPLA took up the armed fight against the colonizers in 1961, dos Santos went into exile.

Later, he studied in the former Soviet Union (USSR) and became an oil engineer. Finally, in 1970, dos Santos returned to his home country of Angola.

Once Angola became independent in 1975, dos Santos took up the position of Foreign Minister in the newly formed government.

The MPLA converted into a political party. Along with fellow politicians, dos Santos established a one-party government inspired by the Soviet system.

It didn't take long until a civil war broke out with the conflicting UNITA movement. Whereas the USSR backed the MPLA, South Africa and the United States supported UNITA.

This did not harm dos Santos' career, however. First, he became minister of planning, then acting head of state.

Then, in 1979, he finally reached his goal when Agostinho Neto died, dos Santos became both President of Angola and MPLA's party leader.

Peace as a political project

In the meantime, Angola's civil war continued. It was only after rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was killed during combat in 2002 that the country had a chance to come to rest.

Dos Santos also mediated conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.

"Eduardo dos Santos was an exceptional leader," party colleague Joao Pinto said of him. "Only few African politicians followed his example. Most of them came to power through a coup d'etat or clung to their power without carrying out any significant reforms. But dos Santos was different."

But critics oppose this view. Instead, they argue that dos Santos clung to power like others.

In 2001, he declared for the first time that he wouldn't run for president in the next elections. Yet, in the election seven years later, he still offered himself as a candidate.

Angola's parliament adopted a new constitution in 2010. It stipulates that the chairman of the strongest party becomes the new president by default.

In the 2012 parliamentary elections, the ruling MPLA party secured a majority of the votes – again. Dos Santos stayed on as the president. Election observers criticize that the opposition never stood a fair chance during this election.

It was only in the 2017 elections that dos Santos did not seek reelection.

On September 26, 2017, dos Sandos' successor, Joao Lourenco, was inaugurated. However, dos Santos kept his position as party leader even after his resignation.

He kept controlling the parliament, the courts, and the government using the money and power he had accumulated over the years. He intimidated the media and the opposition.

Angola's opposition criticized dos Santos for the widespread prevalence of nepotism.

"In Angola, we have a dictatorship masked as a democracy," political activist Pedrowski Teca told DW. "When you want to be successful in your academic or professional career, you have little choice but to become a party member."

Rich Angola, poor Angolans

Regarding political and economic decisions, dos Santos also had a firm hold on the reins. Since the 1990s, he moved Angola away from Marxism and put the market economy in its place. As a result, Angola became the third-largest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa until Kenya overtook it in 2020. 

Nonetheless, Angola remains the second-largest producer of crude oil and the third-largest producer of diamonds in the continent.

In 2014, Africa World Magazine declared him "man of the year" for his services to the economic development of his country.

Angola also became popular with investors, with China its favorite trading partner as it is the primary purchaser of Angolan crude oil. In addition, Beijing gave credits worth billions of dollars for critical infrastructural projects.

Unlike Western nations, China does not voice criticism regarding human rights issues and the lack of transparency in government spending.

Large profit shares from the crude oil business ended up in dos Santos's pockets or those of his benefactors. According to the 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index by Transparency International, Angola ranks 136 out of 180 nations.

The government in Luanda has repeatedly faced accusations of embezzlement. At one time, $31 billion (€30 billion) went missing from Angola's national oil company Sonangol.

But dos Santos dismissed the accusations during the 2013 State of the Union address. "Western organizations purposefully spread this image of rich, corrupt Africans to intimidate those people who wish nothing but to have access to their own countries' wealth."

He accused American, English, French, and Portuguese oil companies of taking away billions from Angola yearly. "Why can private companies earn in such dimensions but not us Angolans?" dos Santos asked.

The reality is that most Angolans do not profit from crude oil money. More than half of Angolans live below the poverty line. Mass unemployment is rampant. Nearly 87% of people living in urban areas reside in slums.

Moreover, about a third of the population depends on foreign food aid. "We were doing better under Portuguese colonial rule than under the MPLA's," Julio Baiao, a veteran who used to fight the MPLA with the Portuguese army, told DW. 

Once Angola became independent, he joined the UNITA opposition movement. "At least all Angolans had food during the colonial rule. The suffering that MPLA brings over our people is bigger than any suffering we faced during the colonial rule."

The dos Santos dynasty

The suffering does not apply to dos Santos' family, though. Eduardo dos Santos started taking over many companies during the civil war. When the Angolan parliament later prohibited the president from holding company shares, dos Santos transferred them to his daughter Isabel dos Santos. According to the US magazine Forbes, Isabel is Africa's first billionaire. Out of the ten richest Africans, she is the only woman. Isabel had stakes in several banks, a soccer club, and Angola's national oil company as part of her empire.

Isabel's father operated the country like a family business, putting his children in many key positions.

But this changed when dos Santos' successor, Lourenco, took power.

His first official act after taking office was dismissing Isabel dos Santos who her father had put in charge of the national oil company Sonangol.

The Angolan prosecutor's office investigated the business relations between Isabel dos Santos' various private businesses and the state. As a result, several contracts were canceled. In 2020, the Angolan government brought criminal charges of fraud and money laundering against the billionaire.

Her brother Jose Filomeno dos Santos was sentenced to five years in prison in 2020. President Lourenco dismissed him as chairman of Angola's sovereign wealth fund, valued at $5 billion. By then, the ex-president's family had lost most of its credibility.

Edited by: Chrispin Mwakideu