Author: Rui Verde

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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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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Carrinho: The Sanctions Shadow Behind Angola’s Industrial Showcase

Angola’s most celebrated industrial project was financed in part by a trader later sanctioned by the European Union and the United Kingdom. There is no proof of wrongdoing by Carrinho — but the absence of transparency leaves troubling questions unanswered. After examining how public contracts and sovereign guarantees have concentrated economic power in Angola (see the first part of this dossier), this second investigation looks at the international ties of the Carrinho Group — including partnerships with entities linked to sanctions proceedings in Europe — and the due-diligence and transparency questions that follow. Carrinho’s business relationships with several international entities warrant heightened scrutiny, particularly given the lack of publicly available financial information and the complexity of the corporate structures involved. Confirmed links connect Carrinho to Manty AG, based in Switzerland and led by Maurice Taylor, and to Paramount Energy & Commodities, founded by Dutch trader Niels Troost. Manty AG appears […]

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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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Judges Breaking the Law to Jail Critics of President Lourenço

In Angola, judges are breaking the law to keep critics of President João Lourenço behind bars. The case of social activist Osvaldo Caholo is not an isolated judicial failure. When examined alongside the detention of Serrote José de Oliveira, widely known as “General Nila,” it reveals a consistent pattern of judicial non-compliance with the law in politically sensitive cases in Angola. On 12 January 2026, the Guarantees Judge of the 5th Section of the Criminal Division of the Luanda District Court, Maria Nazaré Dias, ordered activist Osvaldo Caholo to stand immediate trial on charges of Rebellion, Public Incitement to Crime, and Public Apology of Crime. At the same time, she unlawfully refused the adversarial investigation (instrução contraditória) requested by the defense counsels Bruno Xingui and Simão Afonso, despite clear provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code requiring adversarial judicial scrutiny when legal or factual objections are raised. Caholo had already been […]

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Shot by Police, Jailed Without a Crime

“General Nila” has now been detained for six months. He was shot by officers of the Criminal Investigation Service while walking to a hospital with his siblings before being taken into custody, as documented by Maka Angola. On 14 October 2025, the Office of the Presiding Judge of the Luanda District Court denied a habeas corpus application submitted by defense counsel Hermenegildo Teotónio for street bookseller Serrote José de Oliveira “General Nila”. The ruling held that he was charged exclusively with the offence of Disruption of the Provision of Public Services, under Article 4 of the Law on Crimes of Vandalism, and with no other offence. “General Nila” has now been detained for six months. He was shot by and officer of the Criminal Investigation Service while walking to a hospital with his siblings, before being taken into custody, as documented by Maka Angola. On 4 December 2025, however, the […]

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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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