Angola President Dos Santos to Quit Politics in 2018
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos will retire from “active politics” in 2018, the state-run Angop news agency reported, citing a statement he made to the ruling party’s central committee.
The Russian-educated Dos Santos, 73, has ruled the southern African nation since 1979 making him the continent’s second-longest serving leader after Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who took power the same year.
Dos Santos won another five-year term in 2012. He’s survived in power during a 27-year conflict in which his Soviet- and Cuban-backed army battled rebels supported by South Africa’s white minority government and the US, Bloomberg reported.
Dos Santos has given mixed signals over the past 18 months as to whether he will actually step down after the next elections in 2017 and his true intentions are very difficult to gauge, said Robert Besseling, the executive director of risk advisers Exx Africa.
Angola has sub-Saharan Africa’s third-biggest economy. Before the oil-price decline, it relied on crude for about 95 percent of its export income. The squeeze forced the government to slash government spending and slowed almost 10 percent annual growth since the end of the civil war in 2002.
