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In the field of ostentation, he remembers, for example, the birthday of the daughter of an Angolan businessman, a member of the Central Committee of the MPLA, in Portugal. “The 15-year-old adolescent went down by helicopter to the farm where the party was held,” which cost 200 thousand euros, involved a white limousine and had as guests several Angolan ministers and former Portuguese ambassador António Martins da Cruz. “Today many of them would probably be ashamed to prove that.”
It was not what happened in 2015, when the daughter of Bornito de Sousa, today Vice President of the Republic (and then Minister of Territorial Administration of José Eduardo dos Santos) not only paid 200 thousand dollars (178 thousand euros at that time) for nine dresses, two for her, one for mom and one for bridesmaids in New York, while letting herself be filmed. She participated in the program “Say Yes To The Dress” of a television channel in the United States, TLC, which broke all records for spending on dresses and was widely commented on in Angola.
The wedding dresses that made the daughter of an Angolan minister the star of a television program
The reaction of today’s Angolans to X’s wedding dress or Y’s party is not the same as in the past, Sérgio Calundungo compares. “So, they were seen as something more than normal; those who reacted did so out of envy. Today, it is due to decency. The fight against corruption had this effect, in a way, moralizing ”.
During Lourenço’s tenure, there were two millionaire marriages that irritated many Angolans. That of the daughter of the president of the National Assembly, Fernando Dias dos Santos “Nandó”, one of the key pieces of José Eduardo dos Santos, appeared on social networks in 2019, as well as that of the daughter of General Leopoldino this year . Nascimento “Dino”.
Corruption “was so normal, it was so installed in the different levels of the State and society,” that those who opposed it were frowned upon, a Portuguese-Portuguese businessman who has worked for more than three decades in Angola tells the Observer. This was the case of a retired Secretary of State when he proposed to end the monthly income of $ 200,000 paid by the respective ministry in one of the CIF buildings. The rules at his service were so strict that when the businessman wanted to offer a simple pen to the young secretary of the governor, he heard her refuse because she was not authorized to accept any gifts.
There is no doubt that João Lourenço marked a milestone in Angola’s history by choosing this fight as a priority for his government. In fact, the issue was on the MPLA’s electoral program in 2017 and the previous president had launched “zero tolerance for corruption”, even mentioning that after the war it was the country’s cancer, recalls Justino Pinto de Andrade, president of the Bloque . Democratic.
Except that “He spoke to appease the system, to lower the pressure, but he did not act, that was his mistake”, explains the cousin of the MPLA, Mário Pinto de Andrade (they are the two nephews of one of the great Angolan figures, the essayist Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade, co-founder and first president of the MPLA), who revealed everything that José Eduardo dos Santos announced attack corruption,
The MPLA leader repeats the phrase from a song by the Brazilian Roberto Carlos (one of José Eduardo dos Santos’s favorite singers) “Everyone knows that I love you / Only you don’t know” to say that in “Angola, everyone knew that corruption it existed and everyone pretended it did not exist ”.
Sitting at the Lusíada University of Luanda, of which he is dean, he continues: “Nobody worked. The PGR did not work, nor did the criminal investigation services. Or better, acted but put the documents in the drawer. Today, all the instances of the State and the justice are acting ”.
It is not surprising, then, that the leader of the CASA-CE coalition speaks of an important turning of the page in the country. “For four decades we have been saying that there was corruption and bad government in Angola, and the MPLA, which has always been in government, says no. When João Lourenço, president of the country but also of the party, appeared, saying that after all there was, it was a big step forward ”.
