Category: Articles

President Dos Santos Illegally Inflates Daughter’s Fortune

Recently, Maka Angola published an article about Isabel dos Santos’ purchase of 65% of Portuguese power solutions company Efacec, for 200 million Euros. In reaction, the Portuguese weekly, Expresso, published a front-page article saying a large part of the money used by Winterfell to buy Efacec was financed by a Portuguese bank. This article was an attempt to dispel suspicions about the dubious source of the money.  The article raised more doubts as it became clear that the Angolan government financed the other part of takeover. The interested parties rushed the deal, and settled it on October 23. The banks that financed this “large part” are Caixa Geral de Depositos, the BCP, BPI, Montepio and BIC, according to an official press release. BCP, BPI, Montepio and BIC are dominated by Angolan capital; that is, Isabel dos Santos and Sonangol.  Therefore, this is a situation in which banks lend money to […]

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Rapper Calls in Court for End of Dos Santos 36-Year Rule

The rapper and activist Luaty Beirão, one of the seventeen accused in Luanda with preparing a rebellion, said Angola is a “pseudo-democracy” and once again called for the president to step down. Beirão is the seventh activist that Judge Domingos Januário has questioned in the twelve sessions of the trial that have been held at the Luanda Provincial Court. The judge asked several questions and the examination will continue today. Luaty Beirão denied before the court that the meetings the group used to have, from May until the detentions in June, were meant to promote violent acts to overthrow the president.  He said the gatherings were solely academic discussions around a book, and that there were no personal political agendas. Beirão criticized what he called Angolan “pseudodemocracy” and repeated calls he has been making since 2011 for the resignation of President José Eduardo dos Santos whom he called a dictator […]

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Princess Isabel dos Santos and the Looting of Angola

Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos recently gave an interview to the BBC to talk about some of the challenges Angolans face. The Princess, as she as referred to in Angola, is one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in the world, according to BBC. She said one of the main challenges that Angola faces is educating its people. President José Eduardo dos Santos’ daughter came across as being quite well-informed and pleasant: the beautiful face of the dictatorship. I do not doubt Isabel’s intelligence; however, I am not taken in for minute with this fairytale they are trying to impose on us. What is behind the success of this daughter of Angola’s almost life-President? There is this myth that her fortune can be traced to when, as a a six-year old child, she started selling eggs. The business, goes the myth, apparently grew from there. During a case in […]

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After Dos Santos: More of the Same?

  In Angola’s only open and free election in 1992, the question on the minds of most voters was: Should I vote for the “Killers” or the “Thieves?” The former rebel movement UNITA of today bears no resemblance to the killers of old, but the ruling MPLA has taken stealing to a new and unprecedented level. Once MPLA leaders got a green light and carte blanches from their boss that they could steal with impunity, they plundered the national treasury without fear of punishment. President José Eduardo dos Santos made a famous speech in 2009 in which he said that he would have “zero tolerance for corruption!” The fact that no senior MPLA leader has been prosecuted suggests that either dos Santos’ campaign was successful in shutting down crime altogether or he has an acute case of myopia and is not able to see anything below his nose. The fact that […]

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Another Day in Court

Across the street, a police camera van monitors the movements outside the courthouse. The trial of the 17 activists charged with plotting a rebellion and attempting to assassinate the president by discussing literature on nonviolence, has attracted many other activists who want to express their support for the defendants. There is also another element of sophistication in this trial. The Military Intelligence and Security Service of the Angolan Armed Forces has deployed 80 officers to the trial. Half of them pose as either unknown relatives of the defendants or law students to fill the courtroom and, thus, enable the police to keep the unwanted activists, diplomats, observers and public away, with the excuse of the courtroom lacking space. The other half is deployed in the vicinity. Each defendant has the right to have two relatives in the courtroom, to whom the police issue credentials. No credentials no entry. That is […]

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Presidential Guard who Shot Dead Opposition Activist Acquitted

The Luanda Provincial Court yesterday acquitted the soldier from the Presidential Guard Unit who shot dead an opposition activist in November 2013.  After the judge pronounced the acquittal, there were protests outside the courtroom prompting the intervention of the police. The prosecution had charged the soldier Desidério Barros of murder, which would have been punishable by up to 20 years in prison.  The soldier had fired two shots that killed Manuel Hilberto Ganga, leader of the youth wing of CASA-CE [Electoral Coalition for the Salvation of Angola]. According to the Angolan police, the youth leader, then aged 32, was found violating the security perimeter of the presidency, to put up anti-regime posters, which the court found to be offensive to president José Eduardo dos Santos. The court concluded that the soldier, aged 30, had acted properly, taking into account the security perimeter wall around the president’s palace, and that the victim, after being […]

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Rapper MCK Forbidden to Leave Angola

The Angolan immigration services have barred the well-known rapper MCK, from leaving Luanda’s International Airport, to perform at a Rap Festival in Brazil on November 26. MCK told Maka Angola that the immigration officials told him that they had “superior orders” to prevent him from leaving the country. According to the rapper, he asked the immigration authorities “whether this order was based on some legal procedures, whether there was a problem with his passport or visa.” ” They only told me that these were ‘superior orders’ and that the instructions were that they should return my passport only after the TAAG [Angolan airliner]  flight for Rio de Janeiro had left,” said MCK. Once the plane had taken off, the immigration officials returned the passports and the boarding passes of MCK and his back up singer, Toy Fox. Maka Angola tried repeatedly to speak to the immigration services authorities but none […]

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Rememberance of the Activist Shot Dead by the Presidential Guard

Your Excellency, the president of Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos, By 23 November 2015, my brother Ganga will have been dead for two years. Your presidential security unit killed my brother. The National Police issued a statement the next day, in defense of my brother’s killer that read as follows: “The Police General Command would like also to inform that in the early hours of the [November] 23 [2013] , around 01.30, here was a violation of the presidential security cordon, at Rua do Povo, by eight elements of  CASA-CE, who were  unlawfully posting subversive propaganda against the state and it’s leaders, the same having been promptly neutralized by a patrol unit from the presidential palace guards, resulting in their detention. “Meantime, during the transfer of this group to the Presidential Security Unit, to be presented to the officer in charge, who would have forwarded them to the National Police, one of the group, […]

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The Attorney General’s Office and Business Blackmailing

I am writing this letter from a hospital bed as a citizen who has been persecuted for years by the Attorney General’s Office which you lead. In 2013, some women who had had children with my father Valentim Amões — the late businessman and member of the [ruling] MPLA Central Committee – as well as one of my paternal uncles, made public statements against me, and filed several lawsuits against me as the firstborn and court-appointed administrator of the estate in a dispute over the inheritance my father had left. The lawsuits against me served as an excuse for the Attorney General’s Office, without any valid reasons, to hastily  make me formerly a  suspect, and to subject me to the following restrictions: (i.) [required to declare identity ] and residence; (ii) denied freedom  to change address (without authorization) or to leave Luanda or the country; (iii) Required to report to […]

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The Comedians’ Justice

Over two days (Thursday and Friday), the clerk of the court read out some 90 pages of the 187-page manuscript of the “Tools to Destroy a Dictatorship and Avoiding a New Dictatorship – Political Philosophy for the Liberation of Angola,” written by political prisoner Domingos da Cruz, during his trial in which he and 16 other youth activists are charged with plotting a rebellion to overthrow the government and attempting to assassinate the president. The manuscript, which served as a manual for the youths’ debates on peaceful means of protest, is being used as the primary evidence of the youths’ intentions to seize power through violent means. Last June, the police arrested 15 of them. The attorney general, army general João Maria de Sousa, and President dos Santos, publicly accused the youth of plotting a coup. Two young female activists were later charged with the same crimes, but remain free while […]

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