João Lourenço
João Lourenço has been president of Angola since September 2017, the general and defence minister whom dos Santos chose to succeed him after thirty-eight years on the understanding that the family would keep what it had. Within months he had removed the old man's daughter Isabel from the state oil company and his son José Filomeno from the sovereign fund. He jailed the son for five years for transferring five hundred million dollars to a London account, froze the daughter's assets and had her charged with embezzlement, which the Luanda Leaks of 2020 documented in seven hundred thousand files. He took the party from the family at its congress of 2018. The years since have been the debt to China of twenty billion dollars paid in oil, the IMF programme of 2018-21, the kwanza's fall and the fuel subsidy's end. There was the privatisation of a hundred and ninety state companies announced and slowly done, and the Lobito corridor railway to the Congolese and Zambian copperbelt that Washington has made its African showcase and that brought Biden to Luanda in December 2024. There was the diamond and oil production that has fallen every year, and the election of August 2022 that his party won with fifty-one per cent against UNITA's forty-four, the closest ever. There were the fuel-price riots of July 2025 in Luanda in which the police killed some thirty. He was born in Lobito in 1954, the son of a nurse jailed by the Portuguese for nationalism, joined the MPLA in 1974, trained as an artillery officer in the Soviet Union and took a master's in history at the Lenin Political-Military Academy in Moscow. He was a political commissar in the civil war, governor of Moxico and Benguela provinces, the party's secretary-general in 1998-2003, when dos Santos removed him for wanting the succession too early. He was defence minister from 2014. He chaired the African Union in 2025, and mediated between Rwanda and the Congo until Washington took the file. He has said he will not run in 2027, when his second and last term ends. The dos Santos family's money has largely not come back, the party's own generals' has not been asked for, and the country of the largest oil reserves in Africa after Nigeria still imports its fuel, which is the measure of the reform.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Angolan
- Roles: president, general, politician
