Head of State and the popular Liberation Movement of Angola for almost four decades, he led his country with an iron fist, diverting to the benefit of his clan oil income before being forced to exile. He died on July 8, at the age of 79.
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In his latest speech, delivered on September 8, 2018, the former Angolan head of state, José Eduardo Dos Santos, said his past “mistakes” assume, without specifying which ones. A year after leaving power at the end of elections, the septuagenarian weakened by the disease gives in that day the presidency of the popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the powerful Party-Stat of Marxist Inspiration -Leninist. The “Comrade number one” led him at the same time as the country, for almost four decades, before leaving for politico-medical exile in Spain.
For his successor, Joao Lourenço, the “number one enemy” is none other than nepotism and corruption embodied by José Eduardo Dos Santos and his billionaire children targeted by justice since he left power. Having entrenched, since, in a luxurious villa in Barcelona, Spain, the former Angolan president died on Friday July 8 at the age of 79. He was treated in a city clinic from cardiac arrest on June 23.
His life was punctuated by the armed struggle against the Portuguese colonist followed by twenty-seven years of civil war (1975-2002) before starting the reconstruction of the country with billions of petrodollars partly diverted by its clan. The red thread of his career is none other than the MPLA, in which the young and beautiful independence activist, born August 28, 1942 in a popular district of Luanda, barely committed from the school. At 19, he entered this politico-military movement led by the doctor, poet and hero of the Agostinho Neto anti-colonial struggle, his mentor. He admires the verses and the courage of this intellectual in the face of the brutality of the Portuguese dictatorial regime of Antonio Salazar, which even refuses the idea of a decolonization of Angola.
tactical intelligence
In hiding, José Eduardo Dos Santos crosses the region, from Brazzaville to Léopoldville (current Kinshasa), where the management of the MPLA then sits. Then, he was sent in 1963 to the big brother of the “Progressive Camp”, in the Soviet Union, where thousands of African scholarship fees are formed to occupy responsibilities in their countries soon “liberated”. It is in Bakou (current capital of Azerbaijan) that the Angolan studies oil engineering and telecommunications, meets the one who will be his first wife and perfect his knowledge of Marxism. Upon his return to Angola in 1970, he resumed the fight within the MPLA military wing, in particular deployed in the oil zone of Cabinda, in the north of the country. He does not really fight, but develops a tactical intelligence which he will later apply to the exercise of this power which he secretly dreams of.
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