Tag Archives: Armando Guebuza

The Case for Term Limits, Angola Edition

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The erasure of Jose Eduardo dos Santos’ 38-year rule in Angola appears to be accelerating. Angola does not have executive term limits, but Eduardo dos Santos finally stepped down as president in late 2017.

On Wednesday his successor, Joao Lourenço, removed replaced his son (Jose Filomeno dos Santos) as head of Angola’s $5b sovereign wealth fund. This follows the sacking of Isabel dos Santos (Africa’s wealthiest woman) as head of the country’s state oil company last year. President Lourenço has also moved to replace key security chiefs in sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest economy and second biggest oil producer.

When Eduardo dos Santos said he’d retire I was skeptical. The anointment of his defense minister, Joao Lourenço, as his successor (while retaining position atop the ruling party) did little to change my mind. But like in Mozambique and Zambia before it, the mere change of guard in Angola appears to have initiated a process of elite churn that is accompanied by a dismantling of the old order (at the very least within the ruling party).

Now, there is no guarantee that this will lead to normatively desirable outcomes (such as better governance and service delivery in Angola). Change for its own sake is only good up to a point. But it is a testament to the political importance of term limits. Regular leadership turnover is a nice way of ensuring that no single interest group or ruling cabal completely dominates a country’s political economy.

Relatedly, I am not a close watcher of Angola but recent events have led me to update my view of the level of institutionalization of MPLA. For a long time I thought that it was just an electoral/patronage SPV for Eduardo dos Santos. But news events seem to suggest that its powers transferred almost intact to Joao Lourenço (I could be wrong of course).

 

Resource Dependence in Africa (with some thoughts on Mozambique)

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Source: The World Bank

Source: The World Bank. Click on image to enlarge  

This map shows resource rents as a share of GDP for the period 2009-2013. Note that the colouring on the map is about to change, with the Indian Ocean east coast getting some of the hydrocarbon action that has hitherto been a preserve of the Atlantic coast and a couple of landlocked states like Chad, Sudan and South Sudan (The biggest change in West Africa will most likely be in Guinea once the mining of its high grade iron ore in the Simandou Mountains gets going. A few contractual and logistical hurdles still stand in the way of the mega mining project).

The eastern African states of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique are about to get a shade or more redder. Kenya and Uganda will start producing oil between 2016-17. Tanzania and Mozambique have massive amounts of natural gas, with Mozambique having recently climbed to top four in the world with a capacity to meet total global demand for more than two years.

As you may have guessed Mozambique is by far the country to watch out for as far as the ongoing eastern African resource bonanza is concerned. The country will continue to see a rapid rise in coal production, ultimately producing an estimated 42 million tons in 2017. Mozambique’s Gold production is also expected to more than triple by 2017 relative to its 2011 level. Estimates suggest that based on the full capacity exploitation of coal and gas alone the Mozambican economy could rise to become SSA’s third or fourth largest (after Nigeria, South Africa and (or ahead of) Angola). Going by the 2012 GDP figures from the Bank, that would be a change from US$14 billion to about $114 billion.

Have you enrolled in Portuguese classes yet?

As Mozambique gets wealthier in the next five years at a vertiginous pace, it will be interesting to see if it will go the Angola way. Both are former Portuguese colonies that had drawn out civil wars. Both tried to have democratic elections but then the ruling parties managed to completely vanquish the opposition. And both continue to be ruled by overwhelmingly dominant parties that appear to have consolidated power.

My hunch is that Mozambique is different, as FRELIMO is less of a one man show than is the MPLA. Indeed FRELIMO just selected a successor to Guebuza, the Defense Minister Filipe Nyusi (Nyusi’s background in engineering and the railway sector should prove useful for the development of the country’s coal industry).

The Tanzanian model of dominant/hegemonic party with term limits appears to have spread south. And that is a good thing. The other African country that appears to be embracing this model is Ethiopia (I think I can now say that the Zenawi succession was smooth and that Desalegn, also an engineer, is credibly term limtied).

Kampala, Kigali and Yaounde should borrow a leaf from these guys (that is, as a second best strategy given that their respective leaders do not seem to be into the idea of competitive politics).

For more on the politics and management of natural resources in Africa see here, here and here.