By Tendai Chitapi

“This family has taken Angola hostage and turned it into its own private business empire.”

– Elias Isaac, Director – Angolan office of The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa

I would like to think Africans have an intuitive sense of when they’re being screwed. But I might be wrong.

They might not necessarily know the mechanics of it, but you would think people can tell when things are not quite right. Sometimes this is so blatant and unadulterated; a slap in the face to the average man on the street. But sometimes it is more surreptitious, more insidious – nepotism and self-enrichment packaged as good educated citizens just doing their part.

I would like to tell you about the game of Monopoly, as played out in one corner of Africa. You could think of it as “MONOPOLY Africa Edition”; this is the kingdom of Angola. Whilst on the face of it, Angola is a democracy, in reality it is being ruled and managed more like a monarchy. Home to Africa’s second-longest serving leader – Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in power since 1979 – Angola has systematically been overtaken by the dos Santos family, with influential journalist Elias Isaac describing it as this family “taking the Angolan economy hostage” [1].

The $130 billion economy of Angola is amongst the fastest growing in the world, becoming Africa’s leading petroleum exporter in the 2000s and the continent’s 3rd largest diamond producer [2], with more than half of its reserves still untapped. And yet some 70% of this wealthy country live in poverty, on less than $2 a day [3]. Angola is still in the slow process of recovering from a decades-long civil war, and institutions are weak. In fact, this is the kind of place I’d want my father to run and give me major stakes in every major economic driver, just because he adores me. And this is exactly how it has panned out for Isabel dos Santos, derisively dubbed “the princess” in her own country. In 2013, Forbes named her Africa’s wealthiest woman with an estimated net worth of $3,5billion [4], and whilst some have tried to defend her as being a savvy entrepreneur and investor, her failed business efforts are well-documented.

From a restaurant business that has failed to take off or expand after 16 years, to a failed attempt to venture into waste-management, this is not the type of person that can realistically be seen as having the capacity to create a multi-billion dollar enterprise [3]. Isabel dos Santos is not and cannot be a role model for Africans to aspire to emulate. From Zimbabwean Strive Masiyiwa to the young and brilliant Ugandan Ashish Thakkar, Africa is replete with self-made billionaires worthy of role-model status; Isabel dos Santos simply does not fall into this category. For example, she had a choir flown in from Belgium for her wedding in 2003, along with two charter planes full of catering from France [5]. And then there was the small issue of Mariah Carey being flown in on her own private jet to have her perform for a benefit concert for the pleasure of His Excellency Jose Eduardo dos Santos, but supposedly for the Angolan Red Cross (of which Isabel dos Santos is the President) at a cost of more than $1million dollars, for a fundraising gala that raised little over $65,000 [6].

Mariah Carey with some members of the dos Santos family, including President

Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and “Princess” Isabel (Source: PlatinaLine – c/o dailymail.uk)

Yet there are still a fair few who believe that the presence of dos Santos in nearly every economic institution, is simply evidence of a family with educated children, who want to be involved and contribute to their country and its economy. It is also disturbing when educated, middle class Angolans somehow justify what they see as being the manifestation of an educated family putting the development of their country as a personal priority , whilst also ignoring the reality that these opportunities have been meted out on the basis of bloodline and not transparent and equitable lines. There is a difference between the creation of wealth, and the amassing wealth, and sometimes Africans fail to understand this difference, even if they have an intuitive sense of something not being quite right.

It’s as if people simply can’t face up to the reality that the dos Santos family is playing a game of Monopoly, with Angola providing a game board, and the dos Santos children the major players. In addition to Isabel dos Santos holdings, her siblings, Jose Filomeno de Sousa dos Santos (Zenu), Welwitschia Jose dos Santos Pego (Tchize), Jose Paulino dos Santos (Coreon Du) run the recently established $5 billion Sovereign Fund and state television and entertainment channels, respectively. With no system of public tenders, no parliamentary oversight of the country’s $5 billion Sovereign Fund [1], we cannot just pretend that things in Angola are “all good”.

How has this situation even developed? How has this family and nepotism ravaged the Angolan economy to the extent that it has? Enter the shrewd Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Africa’s second-longest serving head of state, and a largely ignored figure. He has been in power since 1979, when his MPLA party emerged victorious from the liberation struggle with Portugal. He cannot be described as a dictator per se. Mussolini, Pinochet, Stalin, Hitler, and Idi Amin; these were dictators. But he is certainly an autocrat. He has concentrated power around himself, and has largely bought that autocracy using state resources. He keeps a low profile, and his very demeanour lends itself to his being perceived almost as benevolent, a sort of father figure. And yet, whilst occasionally eschewing the inflammatory rhetoric characteristic of some African leaders, he quietly maintains fairly cordial relations with powers that matter, such as the United States, China and Brazil, and has been able to use his relative “anonymity” as a veil to mask his very smooth operation of the enrichment of himself as well as his friends and family.

In a very interesting and ironic twist, Angolan-Portuguese relations are not so good after Angolan officials came under investigation [7]. When one examines the ownerships and stakeholder interests of the Angolan economy, the conclusion is very easy to draw. The entire Angolan economy is in the hands of the dos Santos family, some military and government officials. This leaves the ordinary man on the street with a mere illusion of what success looks like. The dos Santos has condemned the perception that “a wealthy African man is a corrupt man”. I condemn that perception myself, but I am ashamed to admit that it is largely a reality in today’s status quo. He is known for keeping a low profile and yet decided to speak up so fervently on this particular issue – I think it just struck a raw nerve for him.

However, Mr Chicotty, Angola’s Minister for External Relations added: “We have right now 250,000 Portuguese living in Angola, doing businesses. And none of them has ever been prosecuted or investigated whatsoever. I think that’s the balance that you need.” So basically, if they look the other way, we’ll also look the other way and that’s how it should be, and how we can all play nicely in the sandbox.

And fate, it would appear, is clearly not without a sense of morbid humour. Portugal is in the midst of a crippling economic crisis, and Angola is experiencing huge growth economically, to the point that in 2011 Angola even offered to help Portugal through the crisis [8]. What an irony! The colonised offers to assist the coloniser. You can’t make this stuff up. But it obviously creates more complexity in an already exceedingly complex situation.

As if to just provide one last shining example of the shameless dealings of the dos Santos kleptocracy and the grey area of double standards in which liberal media resides, Maka Angola, the independent anti-corruption online publication run by Rafael Marques de Morais, has just published an aptly titled piece “Dos Santos Pockets Forbes”. In what can only be described as a cherry of hypocrisy on top of the cake that is liberal media’s dollar-denominated agenda-pushing, the Portuguese arm of the very Forbes that reported strongly on the dos Santos family’s corrupt practices, has just signed a partnership with a company that is 70% owned by Isabel dos Santos, to publish and circulate an edition of the magazine in Portuguese-speaking Africa [9]. You can’t make this stuff up.

With all of these economic and political dynamics being what they are at present, it is an easy conclusion to draw that both the political and economic systems are in need of major overhaul. As with the vast majority of African States, there is a need to change the political guard. Angola currently looks more like a monarchy than a democracy, and people are too busy trying to survive to take notice. Economically, the country has the wealth potential to host one of Africa’s most prosperous populations, yet this will require a more even distribution of control and influence of the country’s resources. Everyone should ideally be enjoying a piece of the pie, and if not, at least communities should be developing and advancing. There need to be policies that reduce the risk of nepotism, and tender systems should become commonplace for all public sector projects. It goes without saying, that parliamentary oversight is required in all arms of resource management, and awareness of the status quo needs to be emphasised and innovation and public engagement should be encouraged in the development of the country. Angola needs to become a more inclusive economy, and the economic policies should take it in this direction. Whilst I am not a fan of how some policies were effected in my motherland Zimbabwe, I do subscribe to the ideal for a more inclusive economy that the Zimbabwean leaders subscribed. Increasingly inclusive economies will take Africa into a major chapter of economic and political progress, and prosperity for all.

References

[1]

L. Redvers, “Heirs to a private business empire called Angola,” Mail & Guardian, Luanda, 2012.

[2]

I. Contributors, “Economy of Angola,” Wikipedia, December 2013. [Online]. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Angola. [Accessed January 2014].

[3]

K. A. Dolan and R. Marques de Morais, “Daddy’s Girl: How An African ‘Princess’ Banked $3 Billion In A Country Living On $2 A Day,” Forbes, 2 September 2013.

[4]

K. A. Dolan, “Isabel Dos Santos, Daughter Of Angola’s President, Is Africa’s First Woman Billionaire,” Forbes, 1 September 2013.

[5]

D. Smith, “Isabel dos Santos, dubbed ‘princess’, named Africa’s first female billionaire,” The Guardian, 25 January 2013.

[6]

Reporter, “Mariah Carey was paid $1million to perform for Angola dictator,” The Daily Mail, 19 December 2013.

[7]

B. Reporter, “Angola’s Jose Eduardo Dos Santos hits out at Portugal,” BBC News Africa, Luanda, 2013.

[8]

BBC, “Angola’s Eduardo Dos Santos offers help to Portugal,” BBC News Africa, Luanda, 2011.

[9]

M.