LUANDA - How much is a dead dictator worth? Quite a lot, judging by the squabble over the corpse of José Eduardo dos Santos, the kleptocratic ruler of Angola from 1979 to 2017, who died in a hospital in Barcelona on July 8th.
However unseemly, the saga reveals much about Mr Lourenço’s presidency. When he took office in 2017 the former defence minister pledged to root out alleged corruption centred on the dos Santos clan. He said he would diversify the economy.
But the campaign against graft has stalled and the economy still depends on oil...Such economic difficulties have helped opposition parties, most notably the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita), the mpla’s old opponent in the civil war.
Under the leadership of Adalberto Costa Júnior, the party is attracting large crowds, especially in the urban areas that account for 65% of the country’s population.
A survey published in May by Afrobarometer, a pan-African pollster, suggested that support for the mpla had dipped from 38% in 2019 to 29% earlier this year, while backing for unita had risen from 13% to 22%. (Some 31% refused to say whom they would support, while the rest did not know or said they would not vote.
Angolans head to the polls next week in what is likely to be a tense standoff between a ruling party in power for nearly five decades and an opposition with growing appeal to a frustrated, impoverished youth.
The MPLA, led by João Lourenço since 2017, has governed Africa's second-biggest oil producer since independence from Portugal in 1975. But longtime opposition party UNITA is stronger than ever, as anger grows at government failures to convert vast oil wealth into better living conditions for all.
Angola, one of the world's most unequal nations, will on 24 August elect a new president and lawmakers in its fifth multi-party election since the first in 1992.
Half of Angolans live in poverty and more than half of those under 25 are unemployed, facts which UNITA hopes to capitalise on in promising a change of regime. Half of voters are under 35.
