Dos Santos goes on and on

2008-09-04 18:24

Fran Blandy

Luanda - Jose Eduardo dos Santos, a football lover who has become one of Africa's longest serving leaders, shows little sign of retiring as the country holds a landmark election.

Dos Santos, 64, has yet to declare whether he will seek a new term when Africa's main oil producer holds its first post civil war presidential elections in 2009, when he will have been its leader for 30 years.

After spending most of his presidency trying to defeat Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) rebels, his priority has become rebuilding a country that he estimates suffered about $40bn in economic damage between 1975 and 2002.

Dos Santos cut his revolutionary teeth alongside Agostinho Neto, longtime leader of the Marxist Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) who became the first president after independence in 1975.

A low-key figure who shuns the limelight and rarely attends international summit, dos Santos he is now Africa's third longest-serving president after Libya's Moamer Kadhafi and Omar Bongo of Gabon.

In a rare public speech on Wednesday, he told supporters at the MPLA's final rally before Friday's election that he was ready to overhaul his government in the cause of greater unity.

Consensus agenda 'vital'

"To change public policies which haven't worked, we must change the mentality of people who place their own interests before the general interest.

"We must change the members of the team who are bad," he said, in a speech which appeared to acknowledge the government's failure to distribute massive oil wealth to millions of poor.

According to one of his closest lieutenants, MPLA information secretary Norberto dos Santos, the president's main focus in office during peace-time has been to forge a national consensus.

"A consensus agenda is vital for a country that has been through such a long civil war," he said.

Dos Santos's opponents however question his commitment to democracy. The late Unita leader Jonas Savimbi accused his arch rival of fixing the last elections in 1992 and ordered his men to resume their conflict rather than contest a second round.

At other times, Dos Santos has faced accusations of over-centralising power, at one stage serving as prime minister as well as president and MPLA leader.

"The president is the big man and he is in charge. He is a very secretive person," said Nicolas Shaxson, author of Poisoned Wells: the Dirty Politics of African Oil.

"He is a master of the political game, he knows who to give resources to," he added.

Aged 66, Dos Santos was born on August 28 1942 in Luanda to a construction worker father and a mother who was a domestic worker.

He was partly educated in the former Soviet Union, graduating in engineering in Azerbaijan in the 1960s. He married a Russian woman with whom he had a daughter.

Joining the MPLA in 1956 launched his political career and he became deputy president of the party's youth wing while in exile in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Father of six

He had spent earlier stints in exile in Paris, and only returned to Angola in 1970, working as a radio operator for the MPLA, before moving up the ranks of the party's foreign affairs department.

When Angola became independent from Portugal in November 1975, Neto appointed him foreign minister. Today, he is married to Ana Paula - 18 years his senior - and has six children.

By the time the civil war started shortly after independence, he had risen through the ranks to such an extent that his succession when Neto died was relatively seamless.

He has had numerous health scares, including prostate cancer. A keen amateur football career was cut short by an Achilles tendon injury.

- SAPA