In December, João Lourenço will again stand as the sole candidate for the MPLA presidency at its ninth congress. The committee reviewing nominations rejected General Higino Carneiro's bid, citing serious irregularities, including thousands of signatures deemed invalid or forged.
Whatever the merits of those allegations, the outcome is clear. The party that has ruled Angola for more than half a century will once again choose its leader without a real contest.
Carneiro's exclusion is not a rupture but the latest expression of a tradition that predates independence. After Agostinho Neto assumed leadership of the MPLA in 1962, the movement organized itself around a simple principle, unity over competition and presidential authority over internal debate. Criticism was treated as disloyalty and dissent as a threat.
Resistance emerged during the liberation struggle. Crises ranging from Brazzaville to the Eastern Revolt exposed the movement's inability to accommodate political and organizational pluralism. Leaders and commanders were imprisoned, expelled, or killed. The murder of one of the MPLA's founders, Matias Miguéis, marked the point at which conflict over power ceased to be merely political.
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At the 1974 Lusaka Congress, the Active Revolt attempted to reverse the trend. Its leaders denounced concentrated authority, the absence of collective leadership, and the abandonment of democratic principles. They were defeated.
After independence, the suppression of dissent reached a new scale. The purges that followed May 27, 1977 became one of the harshest episodes of political repression in modern African history. By various estimates, tens of thousands were killed, imprisoned, or disappeared. Challenging authority was no longer merely a political risk but an existential one.
Neto remains the man who proclaimed Angola's independence on November 11, 1975. Yet while independence established national sovereignty, democracy has never returned that sovereignty to Angola's citizens. His other, less examined legacy was a conception of power centered on the near-absolute authority of the president. José Eduardo dos Santos inherited it. So did Lourenço.
The problem, then, is neither Lourenço nor Carneiro. Leaders change, but the system endures.
For decades, Angola's failures were explained through the personalities of its rulers, with one deemed more authoritarian, another more corrupt, and yet another less capable. That is insufficient. The machinery now used to eliminate internal challengers is essentially the same one that marginalized reformers, removed dissidents, and treated organized pluralism as a threat.
The MPLA has long selected leaders not through competition between political programs but through the gradual removal of alternatives. A party that never learned to distribute power within itself could hardly teach the state to distribute it across society.
This is the central paradox of Angolan politics. The MPLA governs a constitutionally democratic state, contests multiparty elections, and presents itself as a modern party, yet it continues to operate according to the logic of a liberation movement. Whereas democratic parties accept dissent as part of electoral competition, liberation movements tend to view it as an existential threat and power as something to be won and retained. After 51 years in power, the MPLA has faced elections but little genuine political competition.
The MPLA completed the legal transition to multiparty politics but never completed the political and psychological transition to internal democracy. Under Lourenço, Angola recast itself as a market-friendly partner of the West and a credible interlocutor for the United States, the European Union, and international financial institutions. Yet this foreign-policy shift was not matched by a comparable transformation in the organization of power at home. The distinction between party and state remained blurred, allowing the MPLA's internal culture to continue shaping public institutions.
Consequently, the state came to mirror the MPLA's political culture. As the principal architect of independent Angola, the party projected across public institutions the same internal logic that governed its own ranks. The concentration of power became not simply a characteristic of the regime but its defining governing principle. In turn, this facilitated the capture of state institutions by a small political and economic kleptocratic elite.
Angola's challenge is therefore larger than changing a president or even a party. The state must stop behaving as the owner of society and dismantle the arrangements that concentrate authority, subordinate citizenship, and encourage any leader, whatever his intentions, to preserve the same system of control and dependency.
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Political alternation alone is not enough. Angola needs a constitutional, administrative, and economic redistribution of power. Local government must finally become a reality, with municipalities managing a meaningful share of their own development. Public primary schools should be granted legal and financial autonomy. The fact that they are not even allowed to hold bank accounts illustrates how deeply power remains centralized. Independent institutions must no longer depend on a single center of decision.
Authority must return to municipalities, schools, communities, institutions, and above all, citizens. Democracy does not end with choosing who governs. It begins when citizens take part in governing their own lives. Angola's unfinished transition is not from one president to another, or even from one party to another. It is from a state designed to concentrate power to one organized to distribute it. Until that happens, speeches, alliances, leaders, and constitutions may change, but the system will endure. Only then will Angola cease to be governed by a logic of power and begin to be governed by a culture of citizenship.
