2009-09-21

Jose Eduardo Dos Santos celebrates 30 years as President of Angola on Monday. He is now Africa’s second longest serving leader after Moamer Kadhafi of Libya.

“He was brought into Angola as a kind-of compromise candidate,” Nicolas Shaxon, an oil industry analyst, told RFI. “He turned out to be an incredibly sophisticated operator and he very quickly established his control. He’s been very, very dominant in Angola ever since,” he added.

But the anniversary coincides with a period of upheaval for Dos Santos’ ruling MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) party, after delayed presidential polls.

“He will definitely get his way with a new constitution, the ruling MPLA has the overwhelming majority in parliament after elections last year,” said Shaxon. “They have on occasion in the past shown very small signs of being prepared to concede minor points to opposition parties, but generally the MPLA is absolutely dominant,” he added.

The polls will not take place until a new constitution is adopted, which will outline the electoral system.

There are no significant plans to mark Dos Santos’ 30th anniversary on Monday, in one of Africa’s biggest oil producing countries.

“There’s huge amounts of corruption, lots of members of his family have built up very large stakes in the economy,” said Shaxon.

But the London-based analyst, who specialises in West Africa, questions whether he is worse than other African leaders, “is he any more corrupt than other oil-rich leaders? Probably not,” he said.

Angola has crude oil reserves of 9.5 billion barrels, and in 2008 exported 64 billion dollars of petroleum. It joined Opec (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) at the start of 2007. But in the UN’s Human Development Report of 2007/2008 Angola remained at the bottom of a list measuring human poverty, ranking 162 out of 177.

www.rfi.fr