Category: Politics

Angola’s U$61.5 Billion Contracts by Presidential Decree. No Public Tender

In Angola, major public spending decisions are often not announced in televised addresses or debated on the floor of Parliament. They appear instead in the Diário da República — formal presidential decrees, written in technical language, authorizing contracts that can reshape entire sectors of the economy. Between 2017 and today, at least US$61.5 billion has been approved through one such mechanism: simplified procurement. That figure emerges from a review of 476 presidential decrees, drawn from more than 500 examined during President João Lourenço’s two terms in office. It is not a complete accounting of all direct awards issued over eight years. It is a documented sample. Yet even as a partial record, it reveals the scale at which executive discretion has operated. Of the 476 decrees analyzed, beneficiaries could be identified in 273 cases. In the remaining 203 — representing 42.6 percent — no beneficiary is publicly named. Those unidentified […]

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When Economic Power Becomes Systemic Risk in Angola

Angola’s diversification strategy was designed to reduce dependence on oil and build a competitive, broad-based economy. Instead, a growing body of public records suggests that economic power is becoming increasingly concentrated around a small number of politically connected conglomerates. At the center of this transformation stands the Carrinho Group. Over the past four years, the group has expanded from agro-industry into food importation, military logistics and banking, underwritten by presidential decrees, sovereign guarantees and state-backed financing. The Strategic Food Reserve: Over Half a Billion Dollars Mobilized The Strategic Food Reserve (Reserva Estratégica Alimentar — REA) was launched in 2021 as a national price stabilization and food security mechanism. In its first operational year alone, the Angolan state invested more than $200 million in the program, according to official reporting by the state-owned Rádio Nacional de Angola. Between late 2021 and 2022, President João Lourenço authorized four additional supplementary credit lines […]

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How Angola Is Using the Law to Manage Hunger and Dissent

Faced with hunger and economic decline, Angola’s government is turning to law as a tool of control — building a quiet architecture of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism rarely arrives with tanks in the streets. More often, it slips in through legal texts, regulatory agencies, and administrative procedures that appear technical, neutral, even modern. Angola is now offering a textbook example of how this happens. When President João Lourenço came to power, he invoked the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who argued that political legitimacy rests on a simple foundation: putting food on people’s tables. Economic growth, Deng believed, would do what ideology could not. Angola has followed the opposite path. Living conditions have deteriorated, hunger has spread, and economic opportunity has narrowed. Popular frustration today is not abstract or ideological — it is visceral. It is about food, jobs, and dignity. Instead of addressing these realities, the Angolan government has […]

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Cybersecurity: Angola’s Latest Tool of Authoritarian Consolidation

Angola’s proposed cybersecurity law, presented as a modern response to digital threats, instead deepens the country’s authoritarian drift by centralising state power, weakening judicial oversight and expanding surveillance across the entire digital sphere—posing a direct threat to the already fragile constitutional guarantees that remain in place. Angola has yet to experience a real democratic movement at all. What exists instead is a formal democratic Constitution that permits to entrench an increasingly authoritarian system of power, sustained by the absence of real political democratic alternation, weakened institutions and a systematically shrinking civic space. This system is usually referred to as an anocracy, combining elements typical of democracies with dictatorial practices. These systems are inherently unstable and prone to arbitrariness. Within this context, the proposed cybersecurity legislation must be read not as neutral regulation but as an instrument of authoritarian consolidation. It forms part of a broader legislative package designed to expand […]

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Angola: When the State Needs Terrorists, It Creates Them

The Public Prosecutor confirmed the taxi strike involved no crime, no violence and no terrorism — yet the court insisted on a fabricated “state of terror.” The real danger was not in the streets, but in a judiciary willing to turn protest into national security fiction. The Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) has formally confirmed in writing that the alleged “terrorist conspiracy” connected to the Luanda taxi strike of 28–30 July 2025 never existed. There was no incitement, no violence, no material damage and no criminal plan orchestrated by the leaders of the taxi associations and cooperatives that called the strike. The accusation collapsed entirely, leading to the immediate release of those who had been detained. What had been presented as a national security threat was, in reality, a case of preventive repression and the political manipulation of criminal law.  On 12 December 2025, Public Prosecutor […]

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How Angola Turned a Fashion Designer into a “Terrorist”

Arrested at dawn, stripped of her dignity, and accused of ISIS links without a single act of violence or any evidence, Aisha Lopes became the symbol of a state willing to criminalise faith and invent enemies to justify repression. This report summarizes the case of Aisha Lopes and co‑accused, originally published by Maka Angola in 2017. It demonstrates how the Angolan state fabricated terrorism allegations against innocent citizens — using intimidation, torture, and legal manipulation — in ways that mirror the recent cases of “terrorism” and “espionage” against journalists, youth leaders and association members. The Aisha Lopes case is included here so observers can understand the continuity of abusive investigative methods, the criminalization of religious minorities, and the systematic invention of internal enemies for political purposes. Background of the case On 2 December 2016, just before dawn, more than twenty agents from the Criminal Investigation Service (SIC) and associated security […]

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Amor Carlos Tomé: From Journalist to “Terrorist” (Part I)

A public broadcaster journalist is charged with terrorism for texts describing a taxi strike that urged citizens to stay home. The case raises urgent questions about press freedom and criminal law in Angola. The Public Prosecutor’s Office accuses two Russian citizens and two Angolans of jointly committing the crimes of espionage, terrorism, terrorist organization, influence peddling, and criminal association. In this second article of the series, we examine in detail the case of Amor Carlos Tomé, a sports journalist at Angola’s public broadcaster Televisão Pública de Angola (TPA), portrayed in the indictment as the principal executor of an alleged Russian operation of terrorism and espionage aimed at staging a coup d’état against President João Lourenço. On 8 January, the Luanda District Court, 3rd Criminal Section, will begin hearing the defendants in the adversarial pre-trial phase. The accused are the Russian nationals Lev Lakshtanov (65) and Igor Ratchin (38), Francisco Oliveira […]

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Angola: When the Party Enters the Bank

Angola’s continued placement under enhanced monitoring by the Financial Action Task Force(FATF) has once again exposed deep structural weaknesses in the country’s banking system. More than the existence of laws, what is at stake is Angola’s ability to demonstrate, in practice, an effective separation between political power, bank ownership, and financial supervision. The high concentration of politically exposed persons (PEPs) within the financial system — often concealed through opaque corporate structures — continues to undermine institutional credibility in the eyes of international regulators and partners. When the FATF placed Angola under enhanced monitoring in October 2024, the decision was framed as a technical alert. It led to clear political-institutional and economic consequences: heightened international scrutiny, increased compliance costs for correspondent banking relationships, and a higher perception of country risk. The overlap between political power and the banking system is not new in Angola. Over the years, several financial institutions have […]

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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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