Angola: Out With The Old

ANGOLA

Out with the Old

When longtime strongman José Eduardo dos Santos announced he was stepping down as president of Angola after 38 years late last year, few expected that much would change under his handpicked successor. But President João Lourenço has proven to be more independent than anybody expected.

Saying on the eve of elections that as president he would have “all the power,” Lourenço – who is popularly known as JLo and has been christened “the Relentless Remover” on social media – wasn’t speaking rhetorically. Under a new constitution adopted in 2010, Angola’s president controls all organs of the government, making the country an authoritarian state.

He lost no time in wielding that power, either, the Economist reported.

Two months after taking office, Lourenço on Nov. 15 ousted Isabel dos Santos, the oldest daughter of the former president and said to be Africa’s richest woman, from her position at the head of Sonangol, the national oil company – a clear signal JLo wasn’t taking instructions from her father. On Nov. 20, Lourenço fired the police chief and the head of the intelligence agency. And last week he fired another of the ex-president’s children, José Filomeno dos Santos, from his post as chairman of the nation’s $5 billion sovereign-wealth fund, shortly after devaluing the country’s currency, Bloomberg reported.

Alongside those moves, Sonangol announced an investigation into its former chief executive for a “possible misappropriation” of funds, Agence France-Presse reported.

For her part, Isabel dos Santos denied any wrongdoing and blasted a CNN report on the probe as “fake news,” according to Africa News.

“Fake News CNN. There is NO corruption probe! Totally False allegation by @cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News), get your facts right,” she said in a tweet posted on Twitter following the report.

Her official statement said, “The public prosecution service of Angola has informed that it has not received any criminal complaint against Ms. Isabel dos Santos.”

AFP confirmed that statement as accurate. But the agency quoted a Sonangol spokesman as saying the company had indeed launched “an internal commission of inquiry to investigate the information published.”

Earlier, the local Novo Jornal and Portugal’s Jornal Económico reported that the firm had identified a suspect transfer of $67 million to Dubai and said investigators were looking into an almost $12-million monthly payment to a Portuguese company in which Isabel was the principal investor. The payments began when she became the head of the state oil giant.

To many, Lourenço’s shakeup is more than welcome. The stupendous wealth of the dos Santos clan never sat too well with ordinary people – who mostly live in poverty, with a life expectancy of just 60 years. But frustrations have grown as the drop in oil prices further eroded the country’s economy, which depends on oil for more than 90 percent of exports.

It’s too early to tell if Lourenço will really bring about the “revolution” forecast by Luaty Beirão, an Angolan rapper and activist who was jailed by the old administration.

But by cleaning house, observers say he’s made a strong start.