Angola: Still Refighting a Bitter Civil War
Now at the ballot box rather than at gunpoint, the two leading ideological groups of this sprawling nation are choosing a president
This latest episode of Andelman Unleashed continues my pledge to chronicle every national election, the forces at work and the stakes even beyond their borders.
Updates in fourth and fifth paragraphs with official returns.
In so many ways, Angola is still contesting the bitter civil war that marked its birth as a nation more than a half century ago. The same guerrilla groups that once battled each other fiercely across jungles and cities for decades—one side (MPLA) backed by communist nations ranging from the Soviet Union to Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and North Korea, the other (UNITA) by the United States and apartheid-era South Africa—today are battling each other at the ballot box. And Wednesday's latest national elections are no different.
Now transformed into political parties, more or less disarmed, but little less embittered, today the two battle-hardened factions are doing battle again in an election to choose Angola’s president and the 220-member national parliament.
"Nothing has changed in the composition of the Electoral Commission nor in the way the results are to be processed—in other words, there is still room for irregularities, and given the pressure on the MPLA, I think it is highly likely that the results will be cooked in some way," a leading specialist in Angola elections, Justin Pearce of Stellenbosch University, told me. "The question is how exactly the Commission will choose to manage the release of results, what strategy the opposition chooses to contest them, and how quickly the opposition complaints are dismissed." Indeed, as Prof. Pearce suggested five years ago, just after Angola's last presidential election, any "goodwill shown by many Angolans towards Lourenço would quickly dissipate if he is not seen to deliver, and the MPLA’s crisis of legitimacy would likely reassert itself with a vengeance."
The official election results from the National Electoral Commission showed the MPLA holding a narrowing 10 point lead over UNITA. With 86% of the vote tabulated, the Lourenço regime has eked out a 52% majority, over UNITA’s 42%—far narrower than any previous past elections. The lead shrank throughout the counting process from 61% to 34% with just a third counted. UNITA held a substantial (63% to 33%) in Luanda and in Zaire province (52% to 36%) with the other 16 provinces firmly MPLA control. Reuters reported from Luanda that UNITA's vice-presidential candidate Abel Chivukuvuku told Portuguese radio station TSF the party was considering contesting the elections result because they do not "correspond to reality.” Indeed, some of the pre-election political polls suggested a 7 percentage point margin or even the potential for a narrow UNITA win in a perfectly free and tamper-proof election—still apparently an elusive goal in this nation where the ghosts of past armed conflicts still hang heavily over the population.
Polling for the 14 million registered to vote in fact seemed to go rather smoothly and peacefully on Wednesday by the standards of Angola and even other African democracies like Kenya which itself is still working its way through an election. The narrowly defeated challenger there has just filed a demand with the Kenyan Supreme Court to have the process annulled and rerun—just as the court ordered five years ago but with little change in the results. First results from Angola that were exepected to take days, if not weeks, arrived surprisingly quickly, though the pattern of an extended challenge seemed likely to play out here as well. Stay tuned.
On the surface, the stakes should seemed fairly clear-cut. One of these revolutionary-groups-turned-political-party—the MPLA [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola]—has held a firm hold over the country since the nation’s independence was wrung from Portugal, its colonial masters. MPLA is also credited for horrific massacres during the civil war that gripped the country in the early years of independence. Tens of thousands of its opponents were killed in a Halloween Massacre in 1992.
The victims were members and sympathizers of UNITA [National Union for the Total Independence of Angola]. Their successors, now the leading opposition party in Angola, are contesting MPLA's hold on the levers of power, as they have done unsuccessfully since a multi-party system debuted 30 years ago. But little in Africa is ever precisely what appearances might suggest.
Polling suggests that this election was shaping up to be the most closely contested since the two parties first went head-to-head in voting booths in 1992. By one measure, early in the campaign this Spring, the incumbent president, João Lourenço, was hanging on to a slim 7 percentage point lead over his UNITA challenger, the charismatic Adalberto Costa Júnior. But one respected local polling service, AngoBarómetro, predicted that in a fair competition, there would be an outright win for UNITA.
João Lourenço / Adalberto Costa Júnior
Stellenbach’s Pearce holds that there has been a "general downtrend in the MPLA's electoral performance since 2008." Part of that is due to the growing and ever more assertive youth vote. Among this group, strong views of the civil war are increasingly irrelevant, the history of UNITA's early ties to the apartheid regime of South Africa also beginning to fade from memory
At the same time, another recent survey shows barely 21% of Angolans have much respect for the national electoral commission, making it the least trusted of any institution, behind even the much reviled tax authorities. This could bode ill for any peaceful acceptance of any election result.
The issues today are classic—poverty and more recently an inflammatory annual inflation rate passing 20%, overlaid by an inherently corrupt system that has resisted most clamors for change from within Angola and abroad. It is this corruption that gives Lourenço an edge, and that has led to every MPLA victory since there was any real challenge to a president in an election. Moreover, poverty today is ever more immediate and visible even on the streets of the prosperous capital, Luanda, where the unemployed are increasingly seen scrounging for food in rubbish containers, and abandoned construction sites bear tribute to the evaporation of domestic investments based on oil wealth that all too often disappeared into the bank accounts of the privileged and well-connected. And periodic protests continue to erupt into violent confrontations.
This year, another spectre hangs over the country, too—that of the man who ruled Angola from 1979 to 2017. José Eduardo dos Santos died in Spain in July but his peripatetic corpse is still causing a stir back home, even with the family agreeing to delay the funeral and interment until after the elections. His body arrived in Luanda this week in the cargo hold of an Angola Airlines jet rather than with the military escort some supporters thought would be more appropriate. After all, he'd joined the MPLA while still in high school, was schooled in petroleum engineering and communist ideology in the Soviet Union, eventually rising rapidly through the MPLA ranks as the country moved toward a bloody independence and quarter-century civil war with UNITA forces.
Through the nearly half century he controlled Angola, Dos Santos and his family became surpassingly wealthy, Angola's oil wealth spilling into their pockets while much of the nation remained mired in poverty. Today, Angola has the highest per capital GDP in sub-Saharan Africa, and after only Algeria on the entire continent. But in terms of the percentage of its population below the poverty line, it ranks with Rwanda and Benin. More than a third of its people earn less than $1.90 per day. But one of Dos Santos's daughters is ranked as Africa's wealthiest woman, and her late husband had assembled the continent's largest collection of African art—more than 3,000 pieces—before his untimely death two years ago.
Lorenço, too, has some real and tangible links to his country's revolutionary past and to its kleptocratic present—what Esquerda, an opposition news agency based in Lisbon, calls "a cartel of shady deals" that it has documented ranging across the state oil company and mobile phone operators through a host of other industries from banking, pulp and paper to bioenergy and media.
A political and military officer of the MPLA during its civil war with UNITA, Lorenço was schooled at the Lenin Military-Political Academy in Moscow, rising to the rank of artillery general before turning to politics. From 2003 to 2014 he served as a leader of the National Assembly before becoming Minister of Defense, finally replacing Dos Santos as president when he left office. Lorenço is also said to be a close friend of Elliott Broidy, the American venture capitalist who served as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee before being convicted of public corruption and bribery in New York. Angola's wealth has been a constant magnet for officials, entrepreneurs and any number of crooks and charlatans.
For far beyond Angola's borders, from Europe and the United States to Russia and China, there are some serious stakes in this week's elections and in who controls the nation and its vast mineral wealth. Angola is the second largest sub-Saharan oil producer, pumping from vast, largely offshore fields, more than 1.2 million barrels of oil per day—twice the figure turned out by OPEC member Venezuela, five times per capita that of fellow-OPEC-member Nigeria and nearly level with the per capita output of Russia. Indeed, shortly after the end of the civil war and MPLA's emergence as the preeminent political force in Angola, from 2002 through 2008, the nation became the world’s single fastest growing nation as oil output doubled while oil prices surged from $20 a barrel to $147.
Yet much of this oil wealth, by some account billions, have never found their way into any stream that could improve the lives of the Angolan people. Last month, in fact, two of Dos Santos’s leading collaborators were indicted on 233 counts of siphoning at least $1.5 billion of Chinese payments for Angolan oil into their own pockets. Not surprisingly, access to this kind of oil wealth can produce some significant results in elections and goes a long way toward explaining the repeated victory by the MPLA with its stranglehold on the nation's political economic, and military systems. Still, the price of oil has been on a bit of a roller-coaster ride lately, taking Angola’s economy along with it. Indeed, the nation has had some experience with this—particularly as bust followed the earlier boom when oil prices collapsed from $112 in 2014 to $28 in 2016. Moreover, with the Dos Santos family and friends having removed vast sums during the boom years, the country was forced to turn to sources like China that were somewhat inflexible when it came to repayments.
The MPLA has made sure the presidency within Angola retains enormous power including appointment of all the nation's judges and prosecutors—a system that is hardly likely to change in the future. Whoever lays claim to that office today will equally be a force to reckon with in Africa, in OPEC and across the developing world.
Next up: Italy
A month from now, on September 25, Italians will go to the polls for a critical, indeed landmark election for its new parliament that will in turn choose the prime minister to lead this nation. Campaigning kicks off this week. There is much at stake. The last thing Europe needs here is the kind of political instability that could mark the takeover by a populist government in the autumn. Worse yet, some Italian politicians on the right are far too cozy with Vladimir Putin.
And then there is the question of just what the moderate right might give up in order to prevent the far-right firebrand Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy from becoming the next prime minister. The Economist has already asked the central question here: "Can anything stop Italy's radical right [as] its opponents are struggling to put their egos aside."
Andelman Unleashed will be looking for answers.