I
T WAS AUGUST 18TH, SIX DAYS
before the election. Incumbent
President João Lourenço was
delivering a speech to a rather
apathetic public in Benguela province,
southwestern Angola. In it he described
the country’s unaligned civil society as
“lumpens and thieves”.
Such open, contemptuous disdain for
citizens who don’t believe in his political
party or in him as President had become
a hallmark of his increasingly desperate
campaign rallies. Lourenço’s party, the
MPLA, has been in power since Angola
gained independence from Portugal in- They were well aware that they were
deeply unpopular among the country’s
urban population, especially the youth,
and that these would be the most contested
elections they would face in history.
And they proved to be so. MPLA
narrowly won with 51% of the vote, while
Unita, their erstwhile battlefield opponent
turned political foe, gained 44%. The
MPLA heavily lost the capital Luanda, its
traditional homeland, where one quarter
of Angola’s population lives. They also lost
Cabinda and Zaire provinces, where crude
oil, its main export, is extracted.
The majority of Angola’s current
population has no recollection of the
brutal, 27-year civil war, which only ended
in 2002 after the death of Unita’s leader,
Jonas Savimbi. The median age in Angola
is currently 16.7 years. Almost 65% are 25
or younger. Millions of them voted for the
first time in these elections.A corrupt one-party state
MPLA was the victor of the civil war. It is
a Marxist-Leninist liberation party that
quickly lost its ideology and its conviction
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It rules
Angola as a de-facto one party state that
tolerates democracy only when it poses
no direct threat to its hold on power. The
party maintains strict control over state
institutions and absolute control over state
media. It intoxicates the population with
propaganda that equates protesting with
an act of war and voting for the opposition
with a threat to stability.
The end of the civil war coincided
with the vertiginous rise of global oil
prices, by far Angola’s most important
export, and the country’s GDP grew along
with it. From 2002 to 2015, Angola’s
exports rose to nearly $600 billion.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent
on low quality infrastructure projects, but
unfortunately billions of dollars disappeared
from public coffers.
Angola was and remains one of the
most corrupt countries on the continent
and in the world, and well-connected
party members and businessmen became
overnight millionaires. Such largesse did
not go unnoticed to Angola’s burgeoning
young population. When the oil boom
ended in 2014, MPLA’s already waningpopularity began to plummet.
Angola was ruled by José Eduardo
dos Santos from 1979 to 2017; he is
directly responsible for the architecture
and structure of the country’s famously
opaque patronage and corruption system
By the end of his tenure he had begun to
place his sons and daughters as heads
of key state enterprises. These included
Sonangol, the national oil company and
one of Africa’s largest state corporations,
and the Sovereign Wealth Fund. The ex-
president had become so unpopular that
his comrades decided it would be best to
not put him on the ballot in 2017. They did
however give him the option to choose his
own successor. He chose João Lourenço.
Sworn in in September 2017, João
Lourenço set about dismantling his
predecessor’s economic empire and
patronage system. He removed his sons
from positions of power. Most of them fled
into exile after being accused of serious
corruption crimes. One was even put
on trial; his appeal is currently pending.
Former ministers were also put on trial.
Lourenço was roundly supported for these
actions, and his popularity surged.
However, it quickly became clear that
he had set up his own patronage system.
The judicial system appeared to be biased
and continued to be politically controlled.
And members of his own cabinet were
credibly accused of corruption with no
consequences whatsoever.ANGOLA’S
ILLEGITIMATE ELECTIONS
By Cláudio Silva
The MPLA is a party that has an inherent disdain for
democratic ideals and personal freedoms. The government
retained absolute control of mass media and nationalised all
the remaining independent television channels and most of
the existing press.INTERNATIONAL