Angola’s new president flushes out his predecessor’s wealthy clan

WHEN João Lourenço said on the eve of Angola’s election in August that, as president, he would have “all the power”, few took him seriously. The former defence minister had been hand-picked by José Eduardo dos Santos, Angola’s president for 38 years, seemingly as part of a deal to protect his interests. The opposition dubbed him “the chauffeur”, since Mr dos Santos would tell him where to go.

Two months into his presidency, though, the chauffeur seems not to be taking directions. On November 15th he suddenly sacked Mr dos Santos’s flamboyant and ultra-wealthy elder daughter, Isabel dos Santos, from her job at the head of Sonangol, the national oil company. That was followed by the cancellation of a lucrative contract between the state television company and a media company owned by two of Mr dos Santos’s younger children.

Then, on November 20th, in defiance of a law introduced by his predecessor, Mr Lourenço fired the police chief and the head of the intelligence agency. In Luanda, the fabulously expensive coastal capital, rumours fly that another of the ex-president’s children, José Filomeno dos Santos, the head of the $5bn sovereign-wealth fund, will be next for the chop. One of Ms dos Santos’s other interests, Unitel, a mobile-phone company with a near-monopoly, could face more competition.

Some even wonder if José Eduardo himself, who is still chairman of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (known as the MPLA from its Portuguese initials), the country’s ruling party, might be under threat. The new president has not been discreet about his ambitions, says Paula Roque, a researcher at Oxford University. By sacking Ms dos Santos and taking over the security apparatus, Mr Lourenço has seized control of two of the three main sources of power in Angola.

The third is the MPLA. And behind the scenes, party veterans are trying to persuade the former president, who has not been seen in public since the end of October, to step down as party leader early next year. “It’s become clear just how sick and tired the country was with how things were,” says Paulo Faria, a professor of politics at Agostinho Neto University in Luanda. “Successful resistance from within the party seems unlikely.”

Mr Lourenço’s assault on the former president’s gilded empire is winning over at least some Angolans. On social media many have shared an image from “The Terminator”, a film, with Mr Lourenço’s face replacing that of the he-man star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Two guns held aloft, the caption reads: “The Relentless Remover”. The presidential motorcade is said to stop now at red lights. Mr Lourenço was seen queuing for a meal at KFC, a fast-food chain. In a country where the rich and powerful have been above the law for years, such small gestures have carried weight. Even the previous government’s loudest critics have come out in support. Luaty Beirao, an Angolan rapper and activist who was jailed by the old administration, said he was stunned by Mr Lourenço’s actions, calling it a “revolution”.

Will Mr Lourenço’s revolution really transform Angola? The country is in a terrible state. After the end of the civil war in 2002, oil wealth started to flow, bringing new roads and fancy skyscrapers to Luanda. Thanks to epic corruption, little has filtered down. Most Angolans live in penury. Life expectancy is barely 60 years. So dire are health facilities that last year Angola suffered the world’s worst outbreak of yellow fever in decades.

These days there is less money to go around. Economic growth has slowed since 2014, when the price of oil, which makes up over 90% of exports (the rest is almost all diamonds), collapsed. Despite tight monetary policy the currency, the kwanza, trades on the black market at just 40% of the official rate. Reliable data are almost non-existent, so it is unclear exactly how much the government owes international creditors. But the amount has certainly soared. Much of it is owed to China, on terms that are far from generous.

Rafael Marques de Morais, a journalist and anti-corruption activist, fears that not much will change. He thinks Mr Lourenço had little choice but to go after the president’s children. “Isabel was strangling Sonangol with her incompetence,” he says. But, he adds, more junior members of the dos Santos family are still “everywhere in government, in economic and social affairs”. And there is little hint that Mr Lourenço’s government intends to go after corruption or try to build solid institutions to replace the dos Santos’s system of patronage. “He’s not even trying to find figures who have a better reputation,” says Mr Marques de Morais of the new president’s appointees.

That said, by weakening the dos Santos clan, and so quickly after taking office, Mr Lourenço has made a strong start. For as long as Mr dos Santos held the reins, “you could not conceive of genuine reform,” says Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, also of Oxford University. The elderly ex-president warped his country’s post-independence history. With him removed from the picture, perhaps things can start to change for the better.