Everything seemed millimetrically well tied. Five years ago, after 38 years at the helm of Angola, President José Eduardo dos Santos prepared his replacement at the helm of the country, the end of an era, with the spirit of someone who does not want a turn of the wheel. To do this, he raised his faithful dolphin for years, João Lourenço, a stalwart of the party in power Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), trained in the Soviet Union and artillery general without excessive decorations. An ambitious and smart guy but manageable and docile.
Dos Santos erred in assessing his loyalty. After giving him the baton, everything changed and Lourenço, raising the flag against corruption, turned to his leader and attacked what he loved most: his children. Shortly after, the eldest daughter of the former president, Isabel dos Santos, was removed from command of the public oil company Sonangol – the goose that lays the golden eggs in a country truffled with black gold – whom he accused of having fraudulently appropriated hundreds of millions of euros and later pointed to another of the sons of Dos Santos’ first marriage, José Filomeno, alias Zenú, who was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing 500 million dollars when he was director of the Sovereign Fund.
For the Angolan journalist, José Gama, that anti-corruption crusade of the new leader, highly applauded internationally, soon acquired the aroma of a vendetta. “There are many more people suspected of being corrupt on whom he could have acted, but he did nothing, he only focused on the family of the former president. It seemed something personal, as if there was a hidden grudge.
The subsequent investigations, encouraged by Luanda, against the gargantuan wealth of the Dos Santos family – Forbes attributed to Isabel a fortune of 3,000 million dollars and named her as the richest woman in Africa – further unleashed a spiral of hatred between the powers of yesterday and today in Angola.
This week in Barcelona, ??the definitive twist took place when Tchizé dos Santos, daughter of the former president and sister of Isabel and Zenú, denounced a conspiracy to end the life of her father, admitted in an induced coma at the Teknon clinic in Barcelona.
He pointed directly at Lourenço, whom he accused of wanting to silence his father, who maintains strong popular support, fearing that he would support opposition leader Adalberto Costa Júnior in the August 24 presidential election.
According to journalist Gama, the reason is far-fetched. For the analyst, the attempt to demonize the Dos Santos family as the only symbol of corruption stings among an impoverished population that has not seen other reforms in a country that still lacks freedom of expression, with violent police or politicized justice. “Lourenco may even be interested in the Dos Santos family, whom he points to as a symbol of the corrupt elite, undermining the reputation of the opposition.”
Lourenço does need a turnaround: according to polls, for the first time in 47 years, the MPLA party, decimated by internal divisions, could lose the elections. That is why in September of last year there was speculation of a truce between opposing factions, when Dos Santos returned to Angola after more than two years without setting foot in his country. The approach did not work. Dos Santos, who officially traveled to Angola to attend the wedding of one of his sons, planned to return to Barcelona a few days later, but problems with his documents delayed the engineer’s departure for several months.
His daughter Tchizé believes it was a trap. “My father is six feet tall and came home weighing 110 pounds, although he always has a government doctor by his side; he had lost 30 kilos and was depressed, very bad ”. The weakness of the former president, who had been ill for years, worsened on Thursday, June 23, when an incident at his home in Pedralbes, where he had lived since 2019, caused him to go into cardiorespiratory arrest and was admitted to the ICU in an induced coma. The family suspects that it was not an unfortunate episode and believes that Dos Santos, who was in a wheelchair, suffered a strange fall down the stairs. In addition to the members of security, placed by the Angolan Government, which also pays the hospital bills, in the house was the second wife Ana Paula dos Santos, whose marriage is not legal in Spain and who maintained a distant and distant relationship with her husband of five years.
In his denunciation of the conspiracy against his father, Tchizé slipped into this newspaper a contempt for President Lourenço full of rancor. “He owes everything to my father, he put him there and named him his successor. If my father had put a monkey as a candidate, people would have voted for him too.
It sounded like a declaration of eternal hatred.
