Interesting perspective on internal political stability.
"Under dos Santos who ruled for nearly 40 years with an iron fist, Angola moved from socialism to crony capitalism as the MPLA-linked elite amassed control over its natural resources, financial institutions and mass media.
As skyscrapers appeared on Luanda’s coastline to showcase Angola’s post-war boom driven by enormous oil and diamond exports, slums surrounding the city grew exponentially, creating one of the world’s most unequal societies.
Even today, majority of the population lives below the poverty line even though the country is now Africa’s largest oil producer.
In 2017, dos Santos stepped down following calls for reform, handpicking his Defence Minister Lourenço as his successor.
The new president pledged to turn a new page in the country’s history and started with an ambitious crackdown on corruption that affected his benefactor’s family including Isabel dos Santos, once Africa’s richest woman.
However, citizens and civil society say
that promise remains unfulfilled and that his campaign to boost transparency is yet to prompt wider structural reforms that could lead to a more free and equal Angola.
His presidency has struggled to cope with the economic crisis triggered by the global drop in oil prices. The
oil-dependent economy was hit hard and the living conditions of people, particularly the youth, worsened.
More than 60 percent of Angola’s population are under 24.
In recent years, they have been complaining that the post-war boom had benefitted only the elite and has not translated into wider socioeconomic transformation. And the numbers back up their assertions.
The official unemployment rate is approximately 30 percent, but among the youth, that figure doubles.
Indeed, more than half of Angolans under the age of 25 are unemployed, according to its national statistics institute.
In his inauguration speech, Lourenço offered an olive branch to the country’s disenfranchised and largely unemployed youth.
“We will work on policies and good practices … to create more jobs for Angolans, but especially for young people,” he said.
But Luanda-based political analyst Claudio Silva said the youth having witnessed how MPLA has “wasted” the country’s resources, remain far from impressed.
“They have witnessed how billions of dollars were thrown away in multiple monthly corruption scandals”, Silva told Al Jazeera. “Our generation has seen political leaders become fabulously wealthy.”
Since the new generation was born after the civil war and many voted for the first time in this election, they are seemingly less interested in MPLA’s patriotic rhetoric which some say has no effect on current realities affecting their everyday lives.
“We young people can’t do it any more,” Cristovao Semedo in Luanda said. “We don’t work. We don’t have anything. We can’t eat. It’s more suffering than anything else”.
Feeling distanced from the ruling party, the youth overwhelmingly threw its support behind UNITA which went after young urban voters by capitalising on their frustration about the widespread corruption, inflation, rising public debt and unemployment.
Âurea Mouzinho of Global Alliance for Tax Justice says the overwhelming sentiment in the election campaign was that young people would vote for change, “something that became synonymous with voting in UNITA”.
With the youth support, UNITA was able to hit 44 percent of the vote this time, its highest voter share in history and twice what it garnered in the 2017 polls.
Following the calls from opposition candidate Costa Junior to protect their vote, young voters stayed in polling stations to make sure their vote had been counted as per the law.
“In an unprecedented way, they voted en masse and organised civic movements to monitor the results in polling stations”, Mouzinho said.
One of those movements was the youth-led civil society group Movimento Cívico Mudei. Apart from drawing attention to transparency issues in Angola’s electoral system, it has been encouraging more active youth participation in the political process.
Its members also played a vital role in challenging MPLA’s amassing more state power, said political analyst Lourenço.
“Luaty Beirao, a prominent activist, has been very vocal about the darker side of the MPLA regime,” she told Al Jazeera. “He has also been imprisoned before under the dos Santos administration in which he went on a hunger strike.”
Ahead of the elections, the group launched Projecto Jiku, a parallel vote count which showed a slim UNITA lead against MPLA, in contrast to the official results
“The project showed that there were serious concerns about the partiality of the electoral commission”, Lourenço said.
And experts says the youth in general are on the crisp of something big.
“They have established themselves as a force to be reckoned with and can, if not, will determine the outcome of future elections”, Mouzinho said."
