dictatorship

A New Angolan President

9 de September de 2017 Rafael Marques de Morais

On September 21 we will have a new president, after 38 years with José Eduardo dos Santos. The National Electoral Commission has named João Lourenço president-elect, without legally validating the votes in 15 of the 18 provinces. The MPLA, already in power for 42 years will continue to rule for a further five-year term. Anyone who things that the law is worth when MPLA’s leaders’ interests are at stake, is mistaken. It is worth taking a look back at the history of presidential power in Angola and its popular legitimacy. In 1975, Agostinho Neto became president through the unilateral declaration of independence, after expelling the other liberation movements, FNLA (led by Holden Roberto) and UNITA (led by Jonas Savimbi), from Luanda. The three movements had formed a transitional government, and the process of declaring independence ought to have happened only after elections were held. Instead, the most cunning and strategic […]

The Schoolboy Who Shook the Regime

14 de September de 2013 Maka Angola

At age 15, Nito Alves had a simple but generous idea: to share critical information about everyday events in Angola with neighbors and passers-by. Inspired by the Arab Spring in 2011, Nito Alves created a newspaper mural that he displayed outside his home in Viana, Luanda. Each week he chose articles from weekly papers and pasted them to a wooden board. This attracted dozens of readers who, each day, would stop at his doorstep to catch up with events. Nito Alves is proud to be the namesake of the man who, in 1977, led a faction within the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) for regime change. Although controversial and brutally crushed by the security forces, such a movement continues to inspire opponents of the Angolan regime. Young Nito Alves’ mother says she simply liked those names and was unaware of their significance when she named her […]

Human rights