Category: Articles

Uíge: The Violence of the Angolan Political Police

Neide dos Santos, 24, was sitting in a bus parked near UNITA’s provincial headquarters in Uíge at about 2pm when stones began striking the vehicle. Another activist and the driver were with her. “The driver ran to close the windows,” she recalls. As the attack intensified, he escaped. Neide remained behind. “The police threw tear-gas grenades inside the bus and I passed out.” An ambulance took her to the local hospital, where, she says, a doctor described her condition as “critical”. Officers tried to question her while she was receiving treatment, but fellow activists stopped them. Dina Diangue, 19, was the other passenger. She says she awoke on a seat with her chest burning, got off the bus coughing and collapsed. People carried her to a yard and poured water over her to revive her. She then went back to look for Neide, found her unconscious inside the vehicle and […]

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Angola’s “fake news” law reveals a fear of the truth

Angola’s Law No. 6/26 took effect on Aug. 4 with a contradiction. It reproduces passages from Brazil’s proposed “fake news” bill, PL 2630, which remains pending there. The law contains useful measures. It requires platforms to report removals, advertising, and sponsorship, and targets fake accounts, bots, deepfakes, and coordinated campaigns. Angola needs safeguards. The danger begins when transparency gives way to state control, leaving the government with the power to decide what is true. In June, France’s VIGINUM identified 48 Facebook accounts showing signs of inauthenticity, including AI-generated images. Its report said they amplified Angolan government material and posts promoting the ruling MPLA, in power since 1975. Investigators found angola-plan.blackcore.online, which referred to training for the Angolan government. The report also raised a possible link to BlackCore. These indicators demand answers. But VIGINUM could not identify the network’s sponsors, and its findings do not establish that the government commissioned it. […]

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Unitel Cyberattack Exposes Angola’s Strategic Vulnerabilities

Angola’s largest telecommunications operator has entered a second day of severe disruption following a cyberattack that affected voice calls, mobile data and internet access across the country. With approximately 21 million customers, Unitel carries the most significant share of Angola’s personal, business and institutional communications. The network outage has left families unable to reach one another, disrupted internet-dependent businesses, hindered payments and commercial transactions, and affected ride-hailing services and numerous other daily activities. The losses have yet to be calculated, but the economic and social impact is already apparent. Every hour of disruption means interrupted business, lost customers, suspended transactions and employees unable to work normally. In a statement issued on July 28, Unitel said the attack had been detected at 2.20am. The company said its response and containment mechanisms had been activated immediately and that its technical and cybersecurity teams were working to mitigate the effects of the incident […]

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Angola: Democracy Never Took Root in the MPLA

In December, João Lourenço will again stand as the sole candidate for the MPLA presidency at its ninth congress. The committee reviewing nominations rejected General Higino Carneiro’s bid, citing serious irregularities, including thousands of signatures deemed invalid or forged. Whatever the merits of those allegations, the outcome is clear. The party that has ruled Angola for more than half a century will once again choose its leader without a real contest. Carneiro’s exclusion is not a rupture but the latest expression of a tradition that predates independence. After Agostinho Neto assumed leadership of the MPLA in 1962, the movement organized itself around a simple principle, unity over competition and presidential authority over internal debate. Criticism was treated as disloyalty and dissent as a threat. Resistance emerged during the liberation struggle. Crises ranging from Brazzaville to the Eastern Revolt exposed the movement’s inability to accommodate political and organizational pluralism. Leaders and […]

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Angola: Unitel Sale in Legal Limbo

The public sale of shares in Unitel, Angola’s largest telecommunications company, and the operator’s admission to trading on the country’s stock exchange mark an important stage in a privatisation programme that has so far offered investors few marquee assets. Unitel is a rare exception. On that basis alone, the transaction deserves support. Yet the deal comes with a legal complication that should not be relegated to the small print. Half of Unitel was transferred to the state by presidential decree in 2022, and the former owners continue to challenge that decision in court. If they ultimately prevail, the consequences could extend beyond the state and raise questions about the title acquired by new private investors. Unitel’s prospectus says the offering is intended to make shares available to Angolan and foreign investors, with a separate allocation for employees under the country’s privatisation law. The offer covers 15 per cent of Unitel’s […]

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Angola’s Hidden Succession Crisis

The election that may decide Angola’s future is not the general election scheduled for 2027. It may be the internal election of the ruling MPLA, at the party congress in December 2026. In Angola, the head of the national list of the party that wins the general election becomes president. The MPLA has governed since independence; its internal choices often become state decisions. Yet President João Lourenço is constitutionally barred from seeking a third presidential term in 2027. A serious ruling party would already be debating its next candidate, program, team and transition. Instead, Angola is being asked to stare into a fog. Lourenço wants to remain MPLA president. What he has not done is name a successor, organize a credible transition or open a real contest over the future of the party and the country. The silence is the message. It keeps the party dependent on his timetable, his […]

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Tax Bill Risks Turning Every Citizen into a Suspect

Reading some of Angola’s recent legislation can leave one wondering whether the problem lies with the reader, the drafter or a lawmaker legislating for a country that exists only on paper. Article 45(2) of the proposed Personal Income Tax Code, known by its Portuguese acronym IRPS, states: “Financial institutions must also submit to the Tax Administration, by January 31 and through the electronic transmission of data, information concerning receipts credited to clients during the previous financial year.” The language may sound merely bureaucratic. Its implications are anything but. The provision would require banks to report every amount received on behalf of every client during the previous year. In effect, every sum entering a depositor’s account would be transmitted to the tax authorities — even a small gift from a grandmother to pay for biscuits. This is a striking example of how lawmakers, whether under pressure from international institutions or driven […]

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Angola’s Garbage Tax, Imported Folly

A Disguised Tax There is also an institutional dimension that makes the measure still more problematic. Angola’s Constitution provides for local authorities as territorial bodies organised at municipal level and endowed with representative organs of their own. The municipal assembly is to be elected by universal, free, direct, secret and periodic suffrage, while the head of the most-voted list becomes the president of the local executive.   Yet Angola still has no functioning elected local authorities and has never held municipal elections. The result is a clear democratic distortion: a levy is being raised for municipal purposes, but municipalities remain run by structures dependent on the central executive rather than by locally elected bodies accountable to residents. Instead of strengthening the local autonomy envisaged by the Constitution, the garbage levy would feed municipal administrations that do not derive their authority from the direct will of the citizens being asked to […]

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Words That Imprison: Caholo and the Crime of Public Incitement

Activist Osvaldo Caholo, detained for nearly ten months since his arrest on 19 July 2025, was sentenced on 27 April 2026 to two years and six months in prison for the crime of public incitement to commit an offence. Initially, the Public Prosecutor’s Office had also charged him with rebellion and public glorification of crime. Maka Angola examines the judgment. Freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, protected under Angola’s Constitution, are essential pillars of any democratic order. They cannot be treated as mere rhetorical ornaments to be activated or suspended by the State according to the political convenience of the moment. The conviction of Osvaldo Caholo, handed down on 27 April by the judges of the 5th Section of the Ordinary Criminal Chamber of the Luanda District Court, sentencing him to an unsuspended prison term of two years and six months for public incitement to commit an offence, falls […]

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Isaac dos Anjos Is Undermining Angola’s Credibility

Angola’s minister of agriculture, Isaac dos Anjos, deserves a peculiar kind of congratulations. By speaking so bluntly, he has done the country a public service: he has stripped away the pretence and exposed the national self-sabotage in which parts of Angola’s ruling elite still indulge. The masks fall. The choice becomes clear. On one side stand those who want a modern, prosperous Angola with a free and credible economy. On the other stand those who prefer the familiar fog of an oligarchic, clientelist and closed development model, condemned to delay because it cannot survive transparency. Dos Anjos’s recent public rebuke of the African Development Bank and the International Finance Corporation was not a diplomatic slip. It was a worldview made audible: the belief that Angola belongs, by historical right, to those who took power in war and kept it in peace, and that any external rule limiting their room for […]

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