The death of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos on July 8 2022 was overshadowed by the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo on the same day.
Perhaps his grief-stricken daughter, Isabel, once the richest woman in Africa, preferred it that way. In addition to mourning her father, she also has to contend with a warrant for her arrest for corruption.
It cannot be an easy time for the family, and she certainly would not want to draw more attention to herself. While newspaper headlines focused mainly on one thing: corruption.
There was certainly a lot of that on his watch. However, while no-one becomes a saint merely by dying, there was more to his presidency than only graft.
Dos Santos became president of Angola in 1979 after the death of Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first postcolonial president. Having studied in the Soviet Union, where he met Isabel’s mother, he turned Angola into a Marxist-Leninist state, with Soviet support, much to the irritation of the US and apartheid SA, both of which supported the opposition Unita and its leader, Jonas Savimbi.
This led to the brutal long border war that cost many young SA, Cuban and Angolan lives. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the threat of Soviet influence in Africa deemed to be gone, the US and SA withdrew their support for Unita.
However, that did not deter Unita, which embarked on a civil war that ended only in February 2002 when Jonas Savimbi was killed by Angolan government troops.
That led to a peace process in which Dos Santos showed magnanimity and ushered in a government of national unity of some sorts, where the Unita generals were given the same recognition as Dos Santos’s MPLA brass.
With the war over, the Angolan economy bloomed. Dos Santos was forced to abandon the Marxist-Leninist economic model after the collapse of the Soviet Union and embrace a partial market economy, full of bureaucracy and red tape, but that did not seem to scare off investors, who poured billions of dollars into Angola.
Doing business in Angola was slow, frustrating and at times illogically complex, but perseverance paid off ... many Brazilian entrepreneurs went to Angola with modest means and made lots of money.
My first foray into Angola came in early 2004, when I was part of a team sent to Angola on a UN-funded mission to study its fisheries laws. I had just returned from a two-year stint working at a law firm in São Paulo, Brazil, where I learnt to speak Portuguese, and was eager to build up a legal practice in the Lusophone world.
That was followed in the first decade of this century by many return trips to Angola, with instructions from clients including some of SA’s and Brazil’s best companies, all eager to get a slice of the Angolan pie.
During the 2008 financial crisis, one of my clients, which had opened its first store in Angola in 2007 (it has since become a household name there), told me that Angola had carried the company through the worst of it.
It certainly did the same for me. Doing business in Angola was slow, frustrating and at times illogically complex, but perseverance paid off. I personally know many Brazilian entrepreneurs who went to Angola with modest means and made lots of money.
Huge Brazilian multinationals followed, greatly encouraged by former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva whose African vision led many Brazilian companies to invest in Angola (again, with spin-offs for SA).
Unfortunately, with all this newfound prosperity, for which Dos Santos must be credited, corruption followed. Billions were siphoned off, leaving present-day Angola broke, where it is near impossible to send dollars out of the country.
An Angolan law firm recently asked me to pay their invoice in euro, as they can no longer receive dollars thanks to restrictions imposed on the flow of US dollars to Angola by the US Federal Reserve.
This has been immensely difficult for all these foreign investors who cashed in during the heady days of the noughties. Some are now closing up. SAA lost millions there after it could no longer get the money for ticket sales out of Angola.
That leaves Dos Santos with a very ambivalent legacy. Thanks to him, many South Africans and Brazilians, and others, did well there. The country’s infrastructure improved, Luanda is now even a pleasant city to visit. They should really exploit Angola’s tourism potential. But he left his country bankrupt, with millions still living on the breadline, resentful of foreigners who made money and then departed when the tide turned.
Revered
But Dos Santos remains revered among Angolans. I had a long chat with one of my longest Angolan clients, Antonio Bete, who owns a small Angolan airline called Airjet, and is a pilot with 29,000 hours.
He was friends with Dos Santos and calls him an exceptional man, reserved (he was certainly no flamboyant Mugabe or Ghaddafi), who treated everyone with respect. He ruled for Angola’s benefit, he told me, and had no grand pan-African visions. He remembers Dos Santos as a charismatic man, who could turn his adversaries into allies, and, while he did not alleviate poverty, he ensured no Angolan went to sleep hungry.
Yet, he also recalls a flawed man, who could be selfish at times, especially when it came to favouring his own family. He blames Dos Santos’s advisers, keen to benefit themselves from the economic boom and in whom Dos Santos placed total faith, for the rise of corruption.
Bete is confident that Angola will grow again. It still has abundant resources and a young and vibrant population that he says is now far more entrepreneurial than 20 years ago.
• Emile Myburgh is an attorney practising in Johannesburg and São Paulo.
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