Category: Opinion

Angola’s 2027 Budget and the Comforting Illusion of Numbers

Angola’s proposed 2027 budget deserves one compliment before the questions begin. The Finance Ministry has made its documentation available online with commendable transparency and technical clarity. Readers can examine the government’s assumptions. Whether those assumptions describe the country they live in is another matter. The first difficulty concerns political power. Parliamentary approval will leave the president with considerable discretion to reshape the budget throughout the year. Under Articles 4 through 6 of the proposed law, he may move funds between budget lines, adjust allocations, supplement spending with additional revenue and replace projects making little progress with others he considers strategic. He may also borrow at home and abroad, issue public debt, renegotiate existing obligations and refinance them. Such extensive powers allow him to redefine spending priorities after legislators have approved them. The budget becomes a broad statement of intentions, subject to presidential revision. Parliamentary authorization offers less certainty than the […]

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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? […]

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Inside Lourenço’s Head (Part I)

President João Lourenço has one head. Angola has more than 38 million. Yet a single head does the thinking, makes the decisions and disposes of everyone else’s resources. There is no indication that the presidential head is unusually large or endowed with supernatural intellectual powers. What is extraordinary is that so many institutions — the National Assembly, the defence and security forces, the judiciary, the ruling MPLA and the opposition UNITA — and so many citizens still behave as though the fate of an entire country rested on one man’s will. On the streets, in markets and in family conversations, Angolans accuse Lourenço of treating the country as private property, the treasury as a personal bank account and its natural resources as a family inheritance. Having vented their anger, they return to their routines, poorer and more burdened than before. The president decides. His small court benefits. In a familiar […]

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Carrinho and the Risks Angola’s Central Bank Must Confront

Carrinho has controlled Banco de Comércio e Indústria since December 2021. In August 2024, the competition authority cleared its takeover of Banco Keve, subject to central bank approval. It has also acquired 7.61 per cent of BFA through its subsidiary Congolian Financial. If consolidated, these interests could give the group influence over roughly 30 per cent of Angola’s banking market. This expansion comes as Angola faces heightened international scrutiny. The Financial Action Task Force placed it on its grey list in October 2024, citing strategic weaknesses in its defences against money laundering and terrorist financing. The European Union added Angola to its list of high-risk third countries in 2025, requiring European financial institutions to apply enhanced checks to relevant transactions. Such scrutiny exposes the gap between the government’s rhetoric and the credibility of its financial institutions. The Carrinho transaction brings two systemic risks into sharp focus. The first is the […]

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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: The Country of Lourenço

Over the past years, Angola has come to be governed less as a republic and more as a personalized system of power. What once functioned as a party-state has gradually evolved into something narrower and more concentrated: a president-state. This transformation did not occur through rupture or overt authoritarian declaration. It unfolded quietly, through administrative practice, selective enforcement of the law, and the steady erosion of institutional counterweights. João Lourenço did not invent this system — but he consolidated and personalized it. For decades, Angola operated under a party-state logic, in which the ruling party absorbed state institutions. Under Lourenço, that model shifted. The party was not democratized; it was subordinated. Decision-making migrated from collective party bodies to the presidency itself. Today, the ruling party functions less as a space for deliberation and more as a mechanism of validation. Internal competition is discouraged, dissent is neutralized, and succession is carefully […]

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Peace in DRC Won’t Come From a Signature

The Washington Agreement, presented with great ceremony as a turning point for peace in eastern Congo, unravelled almost instantly. Within hours of the signatures drying, fighting resumed across the region. The M23/AFC rebels—backed by Rwanda and not party to the agreement—accused government forces of launching new offensives. Kinshasa, in turn, reported fresh Rwandan bombardments of Congolese positions. The fanfare in Washington did nothing to alter facts on the ground. What the event did achieve was political theatre. The deal served primarily to bolster Donald Trump’s image as a peacemaker, echoing—deliberately or not—the misguided confidence of Neville Chamberlain in 1938, when he sought to secure peace by conceding Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. Like Chamberlain, Trump appears to believe that conflict can be contained with well-timed handshakes and generous rhetoric. Reality has already contradicted him. Yet buried within the diplomatic spectacle lies one idea with real potential: the Regional Economic Integration Framework […]

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