Daughter Demands Postmortem After Death of Angola’s Former President

José Eduardo dos Santos in 2009. The former Angolan president died on Friday in Barcelona, Spain. Photograph: Andre Kosters/AP

Jason Burke in Johannesburg and agencies

Fri 8 Jul 2022 10.55 EDT

A daughter of Angola’s former president José Eduardo dos Santos, who died on Friday in Barcelona, has demanded the hospital retain his body for a postmortem following allegations of foul play.

Dos Santos, who ruled Africa’s second-biggest oil producer for nearly four decades, died aged 79 at the Teknon clinic in the Spanish city after a prolonged illness, the Angolan presidency said.

The veteran politician was rushed to hospital and into intensive care after suffering a cardiac arrest two weeks ago.

Angola’s current head of state, João Lourenço, announced five days of national mourning starting on Friday, when the country’s flag will fly at half-staff and public events will be cancelled.

Dos Santos, who was married four times, is survived by his current wife, Ana Paula, with whom he has three children. He is known to have at least three other children and various grandchildren.

The highest-profile is his oldest daughter Isabel dos Santos, long described as Africa’s richest woman, who has been accused of corruption and nepotism. She has strongly denied both charges and says she is the victim of a political “witch-hunt”.

The Teknon medical centre in Barcelona, where José Eduardo dos Santos has died after being hospitalised last month following a cardiac arrest.

Another daughter, Welwitschia “Tchize” dos Santos, on Friday filed a legal case against her father’s current wife and his personal physician for attempted murder, police and her lawyers said.

In a statement, lawyers said her complaint included allegations relating to “attempted murder, failure to exercise a duty of care, injury resulting from gross negligence and disclosure of secrets by people close to her father”.

The complaint accuses Dos Santos’s wife, Ana Paula, and his personal physician of causing the deterioration in his health. Police said they had opened an inquiry.

Dos Santos was one of the last survivors of a generation of African leaders who came to power after bitter struggles for freedom from European colonial powers.

His lengthy rule was marked by a brutal civil war lasting nearly three decades against the US-backed Unita rebels – which the former president won in 2002 – and a subsequent oil-fuelled boom which generated huge funds for the ruling elite but barely benefited most Angolans.

Dos Santos’s record as a freedom fighter was marred by accusations of nepotism, human rights abuses and economic mismanagement.

“There is no human activity without errors, and I accept that I too made some,” he said in a final speech as president of his party, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in 2018.

Dos Santos stepped down five years ago. His successor was Lourenço, a veteran of the ruling MPLA who was then the defence minister.

Within months of taking power, the hand-picked political heir surprised analysts by turning on his predecessor and launching a series of investigations of multibillion-dollar corruption, some of which targeted the former leader’s children.

But many who lived through the decades of fighting, which left half a million dead, credit Dos Santos with bringing stability to a country that had known only war since becoming independent from Portugal in 1975.

Dos Santos 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 just 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.

However, he proved an astute politician, skilled at exposing rivals and forcing them into line.

“He humiliated people,” said Alves da Rocha, a senior economist who worked for many years at the ministry of planning. “That’s one of the reasons support for him collapsed once he left office.”

Although Dos Santos would increasingly be regarded by his critics as a dictator, it was his apparent willingness to compromise and stand by election results in 1992 as part of a UN-negotiated peace process that would seal the popularity of his party.

Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) that fought on the other side of the civil war, refused to accept the result of that election and took the tired country back to war.

When the Angolan army eventually succeeded in killing Savimbi, Unita had lost much of its support.

With peace the allegations of corruption began to mount.

Between 2002 and 2014, as oil production grew in tandem with booming prices, the size of Angola’s economy multiplied by 10, from $12.4bn to $126bn (£105bn). While little of the money trickled down to the poor, those closest to dos Santos became billionaires.

His eldest daughter Isabel became, according to Forbes, Africa’s richest woman and youngest billionaire worth about $3bn. Forbes has since dropped Isabel from its list of billionaires because of the asset freezes.

Isabel also became chairman of state oil company Sonangol, while son José Filomeno headed a $5bn sovereign wealth fund.

Dos Santos, who said in a rare 2013 interview he would like to be remembered “as a good patriot”, never specifically responded to the allegations that he had allowed corruption to become rampant.

The main opposition, Unita, disputed the MPLA’s result in 2017 polls and is set to make gains in forthcoming elections in August.

About 10 million electors will vote for a members of a 220-seat parliament that would automatically select the candidate of the winning party as president.