PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday to attended the State Funeral Service of former President José Eduardo dos Santos, who served as the second President of Angola from 1979-2017.
Dos Santos passed away on 08 July 2022, at the age of 79, following an extended period of illness and hospitalisation in Spain.
The body of the late president arrived back in Angola on Saturday, 20 August and some citizens lined up outside the residence of dos Santos to offer condolences to his family.
The state funeral service took place in Luanda on Sunday – the day of President dos Santos’ 80th birthday.
Ramaphosa was accompanied by the Deputy Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, Alvin Botes.
Dos Santos’ rule was marked by a 27-year on-off civil war against U.S.-backed rebels from Unita, who he defeated in 2002. The country also enjoyed an oil-fuelled boom, but more than half the population of more than 30-million live in poverty.
“Today we pay tribute to the former president for the contribution he made to the nation as the architect of peace,” social affairs minister Carolina Cerqueira said, using the honorific title Dos Santos earned for ending a conflict that killed half a million people.
The presence of foreign VIPs enabled authorities to seek to head off possible protests over the disputed provisional results, which gave the MPLA and President João Lourenço a 51% majority while Unita, now the main opposition group, got 44.5%.
The national police force said that due to the state funeral, citizens intending to organise activities should “contain themselves out of respect for the former head of state,” according to a statement reported by the Lusa news agency on Saturday.
Unita’s leader, Adalberto Costa Júnior, has rejected the election results, and there have been sporadic protests that were quickly shut down by police.
The electoral commission has repeatedly said the process was fair and transparent.
Although he was handpicked by Dos Santos to succeed him, Lourenço moved quickly to probe allegations of multibillion-dollar corruption and nepotism during the former president’s era. Those investigations landed dos Santos’ son in jail and saw assets linked to one of his daughters, Isabel, frozen. Both have denied wrongdoing.
The former president’s eldest daughter, Tchize, who had requested the autopsy in Spain that delayed the return of her father’s body until last weekend, added her voice to accusations by opponents of the government that the timing of the funeral was a deliberate distraction.
“The funeral is shameful … because it is trying to hide what many people are calling a scandalous (election) fraud,” she said in an audiotaped message on her Instagram account.
The authorities did not respond to a request for comment.
Angolans who remember the war credit Dos Santos both with bringing stability and willingly stepping aside to maintain it.
However, 60% of Angola’s population is under 25 and so have no memory of the war. Many of these youths are furious at being left out of decades of growth, a factor that helped Unita achieve its best election result yet.
REUTERS
