This week, a powerful piece of news echoed across Africa and the world: Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the former Angolan despot who ruled for a full four decades until recently, had her sentence confirmed by the Supreme Court.
With that decision, all her assets, both domestically and abroad, are being confiscated. Once officially the most powerful woman in Africa, who extended her influence all the way to the European Union—namely Portugal—staying in the most elite hotels, touring her properties across multiple countries by private jet, she was so flush with cash she didn’t know what to do with it. And she had plenty: not long ago, she was valued at 3.5 billion US dollars (according to Forbes). Her beginnings were aided by her father, who appointed her head of the national oil company, after which she privatized the telecom sector and then began expanding her empire across other Portuguese-speaking countries.
In doing so, she employed money laundering schemes involving numerous shell companies in tax havens and similar methods of obscuring the money trail. On top of that, she is very charming, intelligent, educated in London, and speaks multiple world languages. It seemed the sky would not even be her limit. The judicial system of Angola—a nearly dysfunctional state still under the grip of structures loyal to her father—could hardly stand up to someone like Isabel.
From the modern queen of Africa, a woman for whom powerful tyrants sighed, she has now been reduced to a persecuted, disenfranchised, and soon-to-be imprisoned criminal who will not be able to evade international arrest warrants for long. The Supreme Court did not ask many questions about the origin of her wealth but immediately ordered the confiscation of approximately one billion dollars’ worth of shares and real estate in three foreign countries, plus everything she owns in her home country of Angola. There were skeptics, especially among African totalitarian regimes where Isabel and her father Eduardo were viewed as ideals, and who, for the sake of themselves and their families, believed that day would never come.
But it did. From the heart of Sub-Saharan Africa, like a bolt from the blue, a final verdict rang out—the end of a legal battle and the beginning of justice for a people from whom billions of dollars were stolen, who are still struggling with poverty and divisions precisely because of such four decades of rule.
But Angola is far away.
I then open these inflammatory, mercenary portals from Republika Srpska. The enemies say that President Dodik is estimated to be worth 3.5 billion BAM. Well, BAM is not the same as the dollar. And Bakinci is not London. Nor does the Lijevče dialect rank among world languages. Admittedly, the charm is undeniably there. He flies practically by private jet. His assets are in multiple countries. The first billion was laundered through the privatization of the refinery. Other totalitarians cast envious glances toward our Baja.
There is also the next generation of family leaders who can carry both the public and private sectors on their shoulders when Baja’s weaken, in the distant future. If Isabel had ever had the honor of visiting the famous lake, I believe she would have left all the splendor of London, Dubai, and Lisbon behind and recognized that fairytale idyll in Aleksandrovac. But Angolan justice would have caught up with her, even under Baja’s protective cloak. Perhaps Baja would have even mocked her.
He would have told her: what backwater do you come from when the Supreme Court deals with you like this? Listen to this—confiscating your assets! You had forty years in power and that’s the best you could do? Well, I’ve been at it a little over twenty and they can’t do ANYTHING to me. Did you prepare your children to ascend to the national throne? They’ll live in misery—you didn’t even leave them a crust of bread. Look at my children: they didn’t do drugs only to fail now.
There you go, now you see what happens when you don’t cover all the institutions, right up to the Supreme Court. If they don’t all work for you. All of them. As one. There’s no security in that. Change them constantly like shoes; don’t let anyone who isn’t yours stay. It’s a small investment. Well, well, when you don’t think ahead.
Isabel is thinking somewhere today. Hiding from the manhunt, this world growing smaller and tighter around her… Where did they go wrong. She reads articles about her would-be mentor and how the largest refinery in the Balkans was ruined, a billion BAM stolen on that deal alone, how there is no public sector tender that doesn’t stay within the family, both then and now… and she realizes… 3.5 billion BAM still sounds a bit low. The poor are being indebted like the worst kind of slaves, while wealth is shoveled onto proven locations. Let’s see the court that will say a word or investigate anything.
Now that’s business.
Angola is far away. No worries in BiH. A candidate country for the EU. Milk and honey. Everyone’s doing well. God forbid Africa—ugh, far be it!
