Angola: President’s relations with predecessor ‘good’ as courts go after family

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Angola: President’s relations with predecessor ‘good’ as courts go after family

8:04 CAT | 30 Jun 2022

File photo: Reuters

Angola’s president, João Lourenço, has described his relationship with his predecessor, José Eduardo dos Santos as “good”, stressing that the country’s justice system is not acting against the dos Santos family in the various cases involving its members, but against corruption.

Dos Santos, 79, is in hospital in Spain, seriously ill, with Lourenço on Wednesday saying that he had sent his minister of foreign affairs, Téte Antonio, to be with him. The ex-president has had health problems for many years, being treated in Barcelona since 2006.

“During this time we have had several meetings and almost always, the one who went to meet [him] was me,” said Lourenço, when asked on Tuesday about his relations with his predecessor’s family in an interview with RTP Africa, a channel of Portugal’s public broadcaster RTP. “I am the head of state and I was the one who went. That is a more than evident sign that relations are good.

But, he added, “one thing is relations between him and me, another thing is the fight against corruption, which is not against people, it is not against families; it is against whoever is involved in these cases – then Angolan justice will be after these people or families.”

Since he came to power in 2017, replacing dos Santos, who ruled Angola for 38 years before hand-picking Lourenço as his prospective successor, Lourenço has made the fight against corruption as the main plank of his platform. Since his accession, several criminal lawsuits have been filed against relatives of the former president or his former associates, in what critics say is selective justice.

In the interview, Lourenço said that Angolan justice is acting at all levels: “it is not only hunting ministers and ex-ministers, directors and former directors; the fight against corruption is covering all levels from the bottom to the top and the courts are doing that.”

On the process of asset recovery and repatriation of capital from abroad, Lourenço acknowledged that the numbers are still far from ideal and that “it is almost impossible to recover one hundred percent” of what was diverted from the public purse but, he stressed, he will “continue to work in these directions.”

He denied that Angola’s judicial system is bankrupt, stressing that it has done in four or five years what the country had not done in over 40 years of independence: “Never has there been so much freedom given to the judicial system to do justice.”

On the use of resources at the disposal of the presidet’s office to campaign as leader of the governing MPLA party, as he is standing for a second term in the general elections on 24 August, Lourenço rebutted such criticism, citing examples from other democracies, such as the US, where this practice is customary.

“I am President of the Republic: I use cars, I use a plane that takes me everywhere,” he reminded the e RTP interviewer. “Do you think that when I go out on party activity I should stop using these cars, these jeeps, the plane? I don’t think so, and I don’t have to hide this way of thinking.”

Lourenço also pointed to the example of the United States, where the President uses Air Force One during the electoral campaign.

He also rejected the idea that the leader of UNITA, the main opposition party, Adalberto Costa Júnior – although he did not mention him by name – is not given the same opportunity and visibility in Angola’s public media, stating that “the leader does not speak because he does not want to” and saying that if the television does not take the initiative to invite him on, he should be the one to make that contact.

Lourenço and other Angolan government officials are in Lisbon for the United Nations Oceans Conference, the largest ever of its kind, which is being co-organised by Portugal and Kenya.

Source: Lusa