The man accused of creating one of the most corrupt regimes in Africa is as chaotic in death as he was in life. José Eduardo dos Santos died in a Barcelona hospital almost two weeks ago, and his family’s skeletons are starting to emerge from the closet.
Preliminary autopsy results show his death was due to natural causes, a Spanish court said on Monday while ordering further examination. Dos Santos, who ruled the oilrich African nation with an iron first between 1979 and 2017, died in Barcelona on July 8 at the age of 79 after suffering a cardiac arrest, AFP reported.
Since then, the question of when and where he will be buried has pitted the Angolan government and his widow, Ana Paula, against some of his adult children.
This week, Isabel dos Santos, his daughter – who was once Africa’s richest woman – along with some of her siblings, have decided to allow Dos Santos’s remains to be returned to Angola for a state funeral, but only after the elections there on August 24, to avoid an “unacceptable political use” of the event Portuguese news agency Lusa and Reuters reported earlier this week.
Dos Santos made history by becoming president of Angola at the age of 37, and leaving the seat in 2017, 38 years later, and dying recently at the age of 79.
He frequently described himself as an accidental president, taking the reins after Angola’s first leader, Agostinho Neto, died during cancer surgery in 1979.
With Neto having served for only four years and the 37-year-old Dos Santos regarded as a relatively weak outside candidate, few could have imagined he would go on to rule for just shy of four decades.
Dos Santos proved an extremely astute politician. A master-manipulator, he was skilled at exposing rivals and forcing them into line. In 2003, Dos Santos banished his party’s secretary general to a junior position for appearing a little too eager to replace him.
João Lourenço would have to wait 14 years to finally get his wish to become Angola’s next president. “He humiliated people,” Alves da Rocha, a senior economist who worked for many years at the ministry of planning told Reuters.
“That’s one of the reasons support for him collapsed once he left office.” With allegations of rampant corruption during his tenure and with mounting evidence pointing towards his children who have benefited from their father for most of their adult lives, things are starting to get more and more uncomfortable for the Dos Santos offspring.
Source: IOL
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