CERO SANTOS
Longtime Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos has died aged 79. His length of tenure, from 1979 to 2017, pretty much gives away the type of African leader he was. Angola’s second president four years into the former Portuguese colony’s independence, he took power in the thick of a civil war and had no serious opposition until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally ending the civil war in 2002 earned him praise by his supporters as a peacemaker, who nicknamed him “the architect of peace”. This detracted from the architect having a rather flawed blueprint, with his administration rife with corruption, nepotism, and jailing/killing of opposition. His children were among the biggest beneficiaries of his policies, with daughter Isabel becoming the first female billionaire in Africa. His retirement in 2017 stunned Angola, and his handpicked successor João Lourenço was expected to continue his policies. Instead, Lourenço investigated dos Santos’s children for corruption, leading to his son getting imprisoned and his daughter’s assets getting frozen. Whoops. No freezing the DDP points though, which are received by Complications from a fall.
José Eduardo dos Santos
28 August 1942 – 8 July 2022, aged 79
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 + 👻 = 11 POINTS