South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa will travel to Angola to attend Sunday’s state funeral of former Angolan president, José Eduardo dos Santos.
Dos Santos passed away on 8 July 2022, at the age of 79, following an extended period of illness and hospitalisation in Spain.
The body of Dos Santos arrived in Luanda a week ago, ending a feud between the Angola government and his children over the repatriation of the ex-president’s corpse.
The funeral will take place in Luanda on Sunday (28 August 2022), coinciding with the day Dos Santos would have turned 80.
Dos Santos was the second president of Angola from 1979 to 2017.
“President Ramaphosa will be accompanied by Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Alvin Botes,” said the Presidency on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Euractiv is reporting that the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) – the party that has ruled Angola continuously for nearly 50 years – claimed victory on Friday (26 August) in Wednesdays election, after the electoral commission put its share of the vote at 51%, but the leader of the main opposition coalition rejected the results.
Euractiv – a one-stop-shop for in-depth news about policies and politics from EU institutions and national capitals – said fewer than half of Angolas registered voters turned out for the election.
Results counted so far look certain to give President Joao Lourenco a second five-year term and extend the rule of the MPLA, which has governed the southern African oil producer since independence from Portugal in 1975.
We have reached yet another outright majority. We have a calm majority to govern without any kind of problem and we will do it, MPLA spokesman Rui Falcao told a news conference in the capital Luanda, a city that overwhelmingly voted for the opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
However, UNITA leader Costa Junior, addressing journalists and supporters for the first time since the vote, rejected what he called brutal discrepancies between the commissions count and their own tally.
The final official tally of the poll is yet to be announced.
