Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who kept a tight grip on power as Angola’s president for 38 years as he oversaw its recovery from a protracted civil war to become one of Africa’s biggest oil producers, has died. He was 79.
Dos Santos died at a hospital in Barcelona, the Angolan Presidency said in a statement on its official Facebook page.
His rule was blighted by internal conflict and the plunder of the nation’s oil riches, with his allies and family members among the primary beneficiaries. He appointed his then 35-year-old son, Jose Filomeno, as the head of Angola’s $5 billion sovereign wealth fund in 2013, and named his eldest daughter, Isabel, as chairwoman of state-owned oil company Sonangol three years later.
Prior to stepping down in 2017 in favor of his handpicked successor and defense minister, Joao Lourenco, Dos Santos pushed through a law that gave him immunity from prosecution.
Legacy of Nepotism
Many young Angolans and intellectuals publicly denounced the Soviet-trained oil engineer’s legacy of nepotism and graft, but to others he remained a fatherly figure and the country’s “architect of peace” for ending the 27-year civil war. Angola’s child and maternal mortality rates currently rank among the world’s highest and almost one child in five doesn’t survive past the age of four, according to the United Nations.
Born on Aug. 28, 1942, in the crime-ridden slum of Sambizanga in the Angolan capital of Luanda, Dos Santos was the son of Avelino Eduardo dos Santos, a stonemason, and Jacinta Jose Paulino, both immigrants from Sao Tome and Principe. While still at school, he joined the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, and its struggle against Portuguese colonial rule.
Dos Santos spent part of his youth in exile in the Republic of Congo before moving to Azerbaijan, where he earned a degree in petroleum engineering in 1969. The following year, he returned to Angola to join the MPLA’s guerrilla forces.
Angola won independence in 1975 after the Portuguese withdrew and Dos Santos was named foreign minister in President Agostinho Neto’s government. Neto died four years later and Dos Santos was elected president at age 37.
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‘Worst War’
Known as Zedu, the soft-spoken Dos Santos hung onto power through the civil war, which pitted the Soviet- and Cuban-backed MPLA against Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola — which was supported by South Africa’s white-minority government and the US. The conflict, once labeled “the worst war in the world” by the UN, ended after Savimbi was shot dead by government troops in an ambush in 2002.
Dos Santos pledged to step down when the conflict ended but repeatedly postponed his retirement from active politics. Over the next 15 years, the MPLA won two general elections even as its leader maintained a low public profile.
To rebuild one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, Dos Santos bypassed Western donor demands for transparency by turning to the Chinese, agreeing to billions of dollars in oil-backed loans that helped fuel double-digit growth. A post-war reconstruction boom gave Dos Santos, his family and allies an opportunity to amass extraordinary wealth while the majority of the population remained mired in poverty.
His daughter, Isabel, became Africa’s richest woman. Her net worth peaked at $3.2 billion in 2016, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Subsequent asset freezes substantially eroded her fortune. A handful of senior Angolan officials meanwhile bought million-dollar homes abroad and amassed stakes in some of Angola’s biggest companies.
Graft Crackdown
Lourenco, a former army general, vowed to clamp down on corruption, and a crackdown that has mostly targeted Dos Santos and his family began shortly after power switched hands in 2017.
Isabel Dos Santos was fired as chairwoman of Sonangol and her accounts and assets in Angola and Portugal were frozen. Her half-brother, Jose Filomeno, was prosecuted on charges of taking part in an illegal $500-million transfer abroad during the tail-end of his father’s rule. He was found guilty of embezzlement and fraud and sentenced to five years in prison in 2020 — a ruling he’s appealing.
After ceding power, Dos Santos went into self-imposed exile in Barcelona for three years, returning home in 2021. He wasn’t formally accused of any crime in Angola.
Dos Santos and his wife, Ana Paula, had nine children.