José Eduardo dos Santos, father of the Luanda Court – Observer

With the collapse of oil prices in 2014, Angolan stability trembled. “A kleptocratic system only works when there is income to distribute,” says a senior administrator working with Angola. When this is over the established interests are disturbed, the underprivileged revolt.

There were clear signs of discontent. Not only did street protests, which had started in 2011 after the Arab Spring, increase, violently repressed, since, in a rare moment, there were voices of dissent within the MPLA, such as Ambrosio Lukoki, who left the party leadership.

“People identified José Eduardo as the cause of their ills, they were fed up with him,” recalls Luaty Beirão. Zédu could have “a good, calm air, with that little saint’s face in photographs from 20 years ago scattered throughout the country,” Luaty highlights, but “I couldn’t create empathy with people.”

In a simpler way, the tailor Francisco Bastos in Sambizanga, or José Teixeira, driver from Kubinga, say the same thing. “He didn’t like people. He didn’t want to hear from us. “

It has always been like this? Rafael Marques uses an episode from the 1980s to emphasize that JES “never had great concerns about serving his own people.” A Cuban researcher, who was in Angola, says “how in that decade Fidel Castro was furious because Cuban doctors in Luanda performed operations without anesthesia, because there wasn’t ”. According to Piero Gleijeses, quoted by Rafael Marques, “the Cuban leader wanted to send basic medicines and José Eduardo, for a long time, postponed the signing of a 600 thousand dollar letter of credit so that Angola could have basic medicines. Fidel ended up sending them, even without payment, because something had to be done ”.

The former president “was not an individual with great human sensitivity to perceive the problems of the people. He did not care. It is also necessary to have a certain vocation. Or some kind of responsibility. Besides being a political leader, he never worked ”.

He was not, therefore, a president of affections. Many do not forgive him for the coldness with which he reacted to some tragedies. In 2015, for example, torrential rains killed 71 people, 35 of whom were children, in Lobito. JES has just issued an official note of condolence, he was unable to visit the area, despite flying over it on the way to the inauguration of the new president of Namibia.

At the beginning of 2017, 17 people died in a tragedy at the Uíge stadium, at the inauguration of the football championship. Once again, there was only a statement from the Civil House of the Presidency. “People felt that he didn’t care about them,” says an executive from one of Angola’s largest foreign oil companies.

The little capital of sympathy that José Eduardo had was wearing thin in recent years. People even complained that Luanda was surrounded when the president left the Cidade Alta, when in the past they shrugged off the security apparatus that blocked an already infernal traffic for hours. And they ridiculed the servility that they previously respected, in funny situations like this: JES didn’t sit on any chair, in soccer there was a special one, “at events they also took a different chair to sit down,” laughs an Angolan journalist.

In 2016 he said that he would retire from active politics in two years, but the news was met with skepticism. A similar announcement had been heard in the past simply to fail. Some analysts concluded that it was a political strategy: he created a sense of orphanhood with his supposed departure, and at the same time allowed others to outline his succession and later annihilate them politically. That would have happened to Lopo de Nascimento or João Lourenço, who had to make his “journey through the desert” for more than a decade for having revealed presidential dreams at the wrong time.

JES used the tactic “Golungo Alto [no Cuanza Norte]: when we want to cross the river, we don’t know where the alligator is; so we are throwing stones here and there and when it raises its head we know that it is there and passes by the other side ”, comments Filomeno Vieira Lopes. “The stage is dark, you have to lighten it and lighten it with banana peels. It happened internally in the MPLA ”, adds the university professor.

In 2001, when JES said that he would not be a candidate if there were elections in 2002 or 2003, João Lourenço, then secretary general of the MPLA, put himself in the right place. Shortly after, the then president of the country and the party said what was not said and, in the MPLA congress of 2003, he removed João Lourenço from the stage of power: he removed him as secretary general of the party and appointed him first vice president. President of National Assembly, “the valley of the fallen of the MPLA”, says Rafael Marques.

However, this time, JES even left in 2017, after the general elections, when the country was going through a serious economic and financial crisis, highlights Carlos Rosado, former editor of the Angolan daily Expansão. Angola was (and is) the African country most likely to enter default, without paying your debts.

Why did you decide to leave the Presidency? The most caustic say it is because the money cycle has ended. José Eduardo explained himself in one of the meetings of the Central Committee: “Man is born, grows up and dies. My ability to meet for six hours straight is over. Can’t you see how I look? ”. He was only a few months away from his 75th birthday and he was ill.

Since 2013, the year in which he spent eight weeks abroad, the news was known that he was being treated for cancer in a clinic in Barcelona, ​​which was denied to him by his son-in-law Sindika Dokolo. But, already in 2006, a diplomatic telegram spread by Wikileaks between the Brazilian embassy in Angola and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with knowledge to the United States, reported rumors that JES would have prostate cancer and confirmed that he had been in a clinic . from Rio de Janeiro.

In 2017, months before leaving the Presidency, he was taken to Barcelona in an emergency and it was circulated that he had died, forcing Isabel dos Santos to deny it.

Illness was the reason why he left power, believes Justino Pinto de Andrade: “I think it was his doctor, there in Catalonia, who should have said ‘if you lose power, lead a normal life, rest, still live another 15 years. If you continue with all these pills, with this busy life, you will live another two years. So choose. And he chose ”.

Or, again, he could read the times. His power was no longer the same. More and more disputed in the streets, “JES was an expired product.” “The party itself realized this after the pressure after the Revu movement,” says Filomeno Vieira Lopes. And to survive, the party “sacrificed the JES and the party’s high command,” concludes Sedrick de Carvalho.