Tag: Barcelona

Sonangol on the Brink

Putting the President’s daughter in charge of Angola’s national oil company has been such a ‘good move’ that the company is now reported to be on the brink of bankruptcy. The ‘genius’ businesswoman and her cabal of Portuguese consultants have succeeded only in a level of mismanagement greater than ever before. And so it has come to pass that the state monopoly that controls Angola’s main source of income is now reduced to the role of beggar. Maka Angola is reliably informed that on May 17 Isabel dos Santos went to see the Finance Minister, Archer Mangueira, to request an injection of three billion dollars (!!) to rescue Sonangol from imminent bankruptcy. A source close to the Portuguese consultancy firm which has been the de facto administrator of Sonangol on behalf of Isabel dos Santos, told Maka Angola that the Minister had to inform the President of the Sonangol Board […]

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All the President’s Children

Are you suffering from corruption fatigue? Yes, it gets to us all. There is just so much of it. Everywhere. Shameless, unethical, immoral, illegal, self-serving behavior is rampant. From the USA to North Korea, it seems few countries are immune to the self-enriching predations of the “one-percenters”. So how should we react to the news that the jobless, student, twenty-something year-old child of an ageing African dictator threw down €500,000 on a charity bid just so he could be photographed alongside some Hollywood stars like Will Smith? Before you yawn and turn the page, consider this. While this pampered princeling was quaffing champagne at the AMFAR gala in Cannes, dozens of his fellow countrymen of all ages were dying unnecessarily for lack of the most basic medicine and medical equipment. That’s because his country’s oil wealth has been siphoned off year after year, leaving little in the state budget for […]

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The President’s State of Health: A State Secret?

It makes you wonder: just how bad is the Angolan President’s health? Things must be grim if the entire state apparatus zips their lips, leaving it to the big man’s tiny grandson (as quoted in a social media posting by his mother Tchizé dos Santos) to tell the world that “vovó” (his grandpa) is “living a normal life”, “watching the TV news” in Barcelona. Really? Is that the best the Dos Santos family’s highly-paid Public Relations firms can do? Is this the MPLA’s strategy for deflecting the growing national anxiety about the state of the man and the nation he has ruled for 37 years? If he’s well and living a normal life, then why is he doing so in Spain instead of at home running his government? The truth, or bits of it, have leaked from multiple sources. At the beginning of this month (May 2017) something happened to […]

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