Inside Lourenço’s Head (Part II)
Saviours of Convenience
Higino Carneiro embodies another form of complicity: discovering the system’s failings only after being sidelined by it. For decades, he belonged to the MPLA elite and helped entrench a culture of obedience and intolerance of dissent. Now, excluded from the contest for the party presidency, he faces the same absence of pluralism that the system has always imposed on others. The machinery became intolerable to him only when it shut him out.
The party cites irregularities in his candidacy, which the general disputes. That dispute does not erase his political responsibility. Losing access to power does not turn a former beneficiary into a liberator. Democracy does not spring from the resentment of a sidelined official. Citizens were already suffering when he moved comfortably through the corridors of power.
What freedom is Higino Carneiro prepared to defend without office, without privileges and without any guarantee of a return? The freedom of Angolans, or merely his own opportunity to rule? Solidarity with the people counts for little when it emerges only after the loss of personal influence.
The age of self-appointed saviours is over. The people should not have to rally behind Higino; Higino should reach out to the people he once abandoned.
UNITA and the other opposition parties share this failing. Their leaders’ ambitions crowd out the national interest. A credible alternative requires practical policies that citizens help shape, with clear commitments to deliver them.
Instead, public suffering supplies the campaign speeches, while citizens are summoned to fill rally grounds and endorse decisions made on their behalf.
An opposition that demands freedom while denying its supporters a meaningful voice reproduces the authoritarianism it claims to challenge. It seeks to replace those who command while leaving those who obey in the same position.
A Future Held Hostage
Social inertia inflicts its deepest damage through education. The powerful send their children abroad. Those who can afford it buy an escape through private schooling. Millions of families confront the public school system as a predicament each must face alone, unable to turn concern for their children into collective action. Each family seeks its own way out.
When a parent pays to have a child advance to the next grade without learning, that parent helps falsify the child’s future. A certificate takes the place of knowledge. Fraud delivers a small household victory while preparing a collective defeat. A society that accepts this bargain places in the hands of those in power generations less equipped to understand and challenge their own exploitation.
The Ministry of Education has documented this neglect. A 2023 presentation, drawing on a 2021–22 survey, found that 89 per cent of the public schools surveyed had no budget allocation recorded in the state’s Integrated Financial Management System (SIGFE). Six in ten lacked access to water; only 40 per cent had functioning toilets. It also recorded 36,827 makeshift classrooms: precarious straw and mud structures, spaces under trees and lessons held in the open. The state knows exactly what indignities our children endure.
Lourenço announced a program of model schools in 2021. Five years later, what learning outcomes can he show parents? A succession of announcements does not clean a toilet, train a teacher or teach a child to read. Presidential publicity occupies the space where the results of government should be. The pattern repeats itself relentlessly.
Extraordinary technological advances have brought the world into the age of artificial intelligence. Schools trapped in outdated textbooks and teaching methods consign children to a future of ignorance, in which corruption becomes the only viable route to social advancement. An education that rewards repetition and discourages questions perpetuates the intellectual dependence on which MPLA authoritarianism feeds.
When society cannot mobilize to secure its children’s health and education, the promise of a just country becomes a lie. The struggle to survive confines each citizen to an immediate personal problem. People seek a place, an influential connection, a favor. The protection of someone powerful seems more effective than a right shared with millions of strangers. Those who suffer fail to stand together.
Mancur Olson explained the advantage that small, organized groups hold over large, dispersed majorities. In Angola, the beneficiaries of corruption know one another, coordinate their actions and protect one another. Those who bear the costs have every reason to unite yet remain divided. As I argued in the first part of this essay, that fragmentation gives those in power a strength their intelligence, competence and legitimacy could never provide.
Disinformation completes the siege. More than half a century after independence, under uninterrupted MPLA rule, Angola’s only national daily, the state-owned Jornal de Angola, remains a government mouthpiece. The state also controls Rádio Nacional de Angola, the only radio broadcaster with nationwide coverage.
Without reliable information and free debate, public anger dissipates into rumor, intrigue and mutual suspicion. Those in power benefit when neighbors distrust one another more than the ruler who holds sway over their lives.
The General’s Exit
Lourenço benefits from this torpor, but it will not protect him forever. His second and final presidential term is due to end in September 2027, and the Constitution bars him from seeking a third. Running unopposed for the MPLA presidency, he appears intent on retaining power through the party after leaving office, despite the public hostility fueled by his unfulfilled promises.
That question reaches into the barracks. After nine years, what dignity has the general-turned-president afforded the soldiers whose loyalty he expects? The answer lies in their housing, food, sanitation and medical care. Can a general who neglects his troops expect their affection in retirement?
Lourenço inherited the power José Eduardo dos Santos handed him on a plate. Until then, he had distinguished himself neither on the battlefield, nor as an orator, nor through his record in government.
José Eduardo tried to retain control of the MPLA while Lourenço held the presidency. That arrangement of divided leadership did not last a year. Lourenço knows the precedent because he benefited from its destruction. Remaining at the head of the party would mean imposing on his successor the very tutelage from which he freed himself. Why would the next president accept a subordination Lourenço himself rejected?
President Lourenço needs a strategy for a peaceful exit. The people still lack a common strategy to reclaim the state. Caught between one man’s security and the freedom of millions, society continues to postpone its own future.
After nine years of state capture, plunder and incompetent government, how does João Lourenço imagine he can continue to rule Angola as MPLA president once he leaves the presidency of the republic? Has he already arranged a gilded exile, or will he change his thinking to overcome the implacable public rejection his name now evokes across Angola?