Month: April 2026

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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Angola Needs a New Constitution — Now

Angola’s constitutional order is not merely dysfunctional but economically distortionary. Since taking office in 2017, President João Lourenço has authorized an estimated $61.5 billion in public spending by presidential decree, without open tender or transparent contracting, frequently benefiting private interests linked to his inner circle. This is not an aberration. It is the predictable outcome of a constitutional design that concentrates executive power while neutralizing oversight. In Angola, the presidency is not anchored in a direct popular mandate but in party hierarchy, and its authority operates with incipient institutional restraint. The result is a system where political power and economic allocation are tightly fused. It undermines market confidence, distorts competition, and erodes the legal certainty on which long-term investment depends. If Portugal adopted Angola’s presidential model, the current president would not be António José Seguro. It would be Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, the top candidate of the most voted party in […]

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