Angola: José Eduardo Dos Santos, a warlord turned kleptocrat
Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos delivers a speech during a banquet hosted by his Portuguese counterpart Anibal Cavaco Silva at the Ajuda Palace in Lisbon, Tuesday, March 10, 2009. AP - Andre Kosters
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
Died Friday at the age of 79 in a Spanish clinic, the former Angolan president, José Eduardo Dos Santos was accused since his retirement from political life in 2017 of having plundered the economy to benefit his family.
During the thirty-eight years of reign of Eduardo dos Santos, the Angolan population has hardly seen its standard of living improve.
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If he won the war against the Unita rebellion, José Eduardo dos Santos will never have been able to build peace.
However, the Angolans believed in it, when in 2002 after twenty-seven years of civil war, the guns fell silent.
The country then propelled itself to the first rank of oil producers in Africa.
Money is flowing in, skyscrapers are springing up in uptown Luanda, and the economy is kicking off.
For Sebastião Isata, translator of Eduardo dos Santos and university professor, traveling companion of the MPLA, he was above all a builder.
Here is his testimony, at the microphone of journalist
François Mazet
of the Africa editorial staff.
“
He had the responsibility to create and implement a constitutional and pluralist democracy.
Of course, there are always protests and social movements in a country, discontent, that's normal.
But if I had to sum up these almost forty years, I would say that he was the builder of democratic Angola
”.
A leniency that civil society activist Laura Macedo does not share: "
For me, what I remember from José Eduardo dos Santos's passage to power is the increase in poverty within the population, as well as the fact that he allowed certain people to come to the fore and remain there under his protection.
He was a despot, he made possible the unprecedented squandering of the country's wealth.
»
Indeed, economic development only benefits a minority of relatives and businessmen, while the population languishes in misery.
In 2017, when dos Santos leaves the presidency, Angola ranks 149ᵉ out of 189 in the ranking of the Human Development Index.
One in two Angolans lives below the poverty line and half the population has no electricity.
The extent of the damage is fully apparent after the departure of the one who was nicknamed “Zedu”.
Justice then accuses the former president and especially his children of having looted the state coffers.
The
Luanda Leaks
, leaked confidential documents, released in 2020, show that the daughter of former president Isabel dos Santos misappropriated at least one billion euros of public funds, and this is only part of the we disappeared into the clan system developed by dos Santos.
Her son Filomeno served a five-year prison sentence for embezzling $500 million and her daughter is still wanted by the Angolan courts.
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To read also: Angola: former President José Eduardo dos Santos, the "godfather", is dead
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Angola
Jose Eduardo dos Santos
Luanda Leaks