PR exec Justine Sacco apologizes for racist joke on flight to Africa; outrage sparks website

Above is the work of someone who is obviously stupid--and who probably thinks she got a cushy job purely
through her own hard work and personal worthiness. I'd like to point out that even if she were drunk, it only means her inhibitions were lowered. She'd be more likely to say what she was thinking, but normally had enough sense to conceal. UPDATE: It turns out that Sacco is from South Africa, so she had plenty of time to develop her attitudes about race and AIDS in Africa.

Below is the work of someone who is the opposite of stupid, and who is obviously concerned about those who lack the good fortune of people like Justine Sacco.

JUSTINESACCO.COM

UPDATE DEC. 22, 2013:

'Ashamed': Ex-PR exec Justine Sacco apologizes for AIDS in Africa tweet
By Brian Stelter
CNN
December 22, 2013
Offensive tweet cost exec her job

[Maura Larkins comment: Maybe this woman really doesn't belong in public relations for international companies. Something more provincial might work.]

(CNN) -- Justine Sacco, a former PR executive who sparked a firestorm of controversy on Twitter, apologized Sunday for her "needless and careless tweet" about AIDS in Africa.

In a written statement. Sacco apologized "for being insensitive to this crisis -- which does not discriminate by race, gender or sexual orientation, but which terrifies us all uniformly -- and to the millions of people living with the virus, I am ashamed."

She added that she is a native of South Africa and was upset that she had hurt so many people there.

"I am very sorry for the pain I caused," she wrote.

Media company IAC "parted ways" Saturday with Sacco after the tweet, which read: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"

"The offensive comment does not reflect the views and values of IAC. We take this issue very seriously, and we have parted ways with the employee in question," an IAC spokesman said in a statement.

"There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally," he said. "We hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core."

[Maura Larkins' comment: A lot of apparently decent people probably share Sacco's attitudes. And perhaps they can't help it, so they don't deserve condemnation. But they should be kept in jobs where they can't offend--or harm--the people they consider inferior.]

The tweet Sacco sent before she left Friday for Cape Town, South Africa, went viral and created a social media firestorm.

The incident -- Boing Boing called it "the tweet heard round the world" -- was a glaring reminder that every word uttered on the Internet can be heard by seemingly everyone on the Internet, sometimes with serious consequences.

Sacco was the head of corporate communications for IAC, the media company chaired by Barry Diller that operates websites such as The Daily Beast, About.com, CollegeHumor and Match.com. Her whole job revolved around communicating with reporters -- which made her Twitter comment about Africa all the more shocking.

Sacco was in London and about to begin a long vacation in South Africa when she wrote the message. Her Twitter account was relatively obscure when she posted it -- fewer than 500 people were following it. But the message went viral on Friday, unbeknownst to Sacco, who apparently did not have Internet access on her flight.

Websites such as Valleywag and Buzzfeed highlighted Sacco's account, and soon it had thousands of followers -- and thousands of harsh replies directed at it. Some were downright hateful. Others said they felt sorry for Sacco, regardless of how offensive her Twitter message was, because she hadn't had a chance to defend herself during the 12-hour flight.

As Twitter observers parsed through her public posts, many were disturbed by her previous messages. ("I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night," she once wrote.)

Her account was a laundry list of banal complaints about poor customer service and other apparent indignities.

"It seems she has left a trail of casual racism across social media on her various travels," Chris Taylor, a writer for Mashable, opined.

Still, Taylor wrote, "it was hard to ignore a disturbing feeling in the mob's response" to the Twitter messages "and something creepy in the trial by social media that was going on in her absence."

On Friday afternoon, with hours to go before she landed, another corporate communications representative for IAC issued a statement that tried to address the online controversy.

"This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC," the company said. "Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action."

The statement led many to believe that Sacco would be reprimanded or even terminated when she landed in South Africa.

Parody accounts started to appear on Twitter and Facebook that portrayed Sacco as a mean, bitter person. On Friday evening a Twitter hashtag, #HasJustineLandedYet, became a running commentary about Sacco; some people observed that she'd have to put her crisis communications expertise to the test to save her own career.

Meanwhile, other Twitter users started scoping out Sacco's past messages and flagged other questionable comments she'd made before, like this one: "I can't be fired for things I say while intoxicated right?"

All of those messages disappeared, though, early on Saturday, when someone -- presumably Sacco -- deleted her Twitter account. IAC had no immediate comment about how or why her account was removed.

Some good does seem to have come out of the incident, at least.

Advocates for AIDS relief set up websites to encourage donations; one of the sites read, "The AIDS epidemic is bigger than a tweet from a person in PR. If we want real change, we need to think beyond Justine. Let's turn that anger into something tangible."

ORIGINAL STORY:

PR exec Justine Sacco tweets racist joke on flight to Africa; outrage sparks website, Twitter hashtag
Justine Sacco, director of corporate communications for IAC, tweeted out Friday: 'Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!' The outrage piled up on social media, with someone creating the website justinesacco.com and pointing it toward links to charities that benefit sub-Saharan Africa.
By Nina Golgowski
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
December 20, 2013

Justine Sacco, the chief communications director for IAC, who represents brands like OKCupid — as proudly seen on her jacket — is in hot water after tweeting out a racist joke that's getting few laughs.

It's sounding more like OK Stupid.

The communications director for media conglomerate IAC, which represents brands like OKCupid, is in trouble after publicly tweeting a racist “joke” that’s getting few — if any — laughs.

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Justine Sacco tweeted Friday, apparently from London shortly before departing on a trip.

Sacco, who's represented brands also include Vimeo and CollegeHumor, was not immediately available for comment.

But the offending tweet disappeared late Friday night — which would be early Saturday morning in Africa. Just after midnight in New York, in fact, Sacco’s entire account vanished.

What made Nelson Mandela great

"But in jail -- especially for those who stayed in single cells -- you had enough opportunity to sit down and think," he said.

What made Nelson Mandela great
By John Battersby
CNN
December 5, 2013

Nelson Mandela, the prisoner-turned-president who reconciled South Africa after the end of apartheid, died on Thursday, December 5, according to the country's president, Jacob Zuma. Mandela was 95.

Editor's note: John Battersby served as a correspondent for The New York Times (1987-89) and the Christian Science Monitor (1989-96) before, during and after South Africa's transition to democracy. He was editor of The Sunday Independent in Johannesburg from 1996 to 2001. He interviewed Mandela on numerous occasions and is coauthor of "Nelson Mandela: A Life in Photographs" (Sterling, 2009) and author of the afterword in the updated version of "Mandela: the Authorized Biography" (Harper Collins, 2011).

(CNN) -- Nelson Mandela was always mindful that his leadership role in the liberation of South Africa from apartheid might not have been possible if he had not been imprisoned.

"It is possible that if I had not gone to jail and been able to read and listen to the stories of many people. ... I might not have learned these things," Mandela said of the insights that he gained during his 27 years in jail.

In an interview less than a year after he had stepped down as the country's first black president, Mandela shared with me reflections of how prison changed him.

He said that reading the biographies of great leaders who had been able to overcome their shortcomings and rise to do great things had inspired him. He said it also helped him to realize that behind every seemingly ordinary person lay the potential of greatness.

"I have been surprised a great deal sometimes when I see somebody who looks less than ordinary, but when you talk to the person and they open their mouths, they are something completely different," he said.

Mandela said that prison gave him time to think about the times when he had failed to acknowledge people who had been kind to him.

Mandela said that at the height of the struggle against apartheid, he and other leaders were understandably angry at the humiliation and loss of dignity of those who suffered under the unjust policy. It meant their actions were driven by anger and emotion rather than by reflection and consultation.

"But in jail -- especially for those who stayed in single cells -- you had enough opportunity to sit down and think," he said.

There was time to listen to the stories of people who were highly educated and who were widely traveled and experienced. "When they told of their experiences, you felt humbled," he said.

Mandela said that he had learned that when you had the moral high ground, it was better to sit down and talk to people and persuade them of the correctness of your cause.

"If you have an objective in life, then you want to concentrate on that and not engage in infighting with your enemies," he said. "You want to create an atmosphere where you can move everybody toward the goal you have set for yourself," Mandela said.

In his twilight, Mandela was at pains to publish and acknowledge his weaknesses and shortcomings in his family life, in his relationships with women and his first wife, Evelyn. He was keen to dispel any notion of sainthood that might be bestowed on him.

He also spoke increasingly about the importance of changing oneself.

"One of the most difficult things is not to change society -- but to change yourself," Mandela said in 1999 at a tribute to billionaire businessman Douw Steyn who had made his Johannesburg residence available to Mandela as a retreat after his prison release in 1990.

Mandela had given similar advice to wife Winnie in a letter written to her in 1981 after she had been jailed by the apartheid regime. Mandela noted that there were qualities "in each one of us" that form the basis of our spiritual life and that we can change ourselves by observing our reactions to the unfolding of life.

Ten years later, Mandela said that it gave him a feeling of fulfillment to see that Douw Steyn had changed and had learned to share his resources with the poor.

"It enables me to go to bed with an enriching feeling in my soul and the belief that I am changing myself" by reconciling with former adversaries, Mandela said.

I believe that the essence of Mandela's greatness was to change himself fundamentally during his period in jail and emerge as a potent leader and example for all humanity.

Opinion: Nelson Mandela saved my life

The reflections took me back to the extraordinary day of Mandela's release. The day the legend became a man. Even now, the moment seems frozen in time.

It was February 11, 1990, and the African sun shone from a clear blue sky on a windless summer's day in Cape Town. About an hour's drive from the city, the international media thronged around the entrance of a neat prison warder's house to await the emergence of one of the century's most iconic figures...

Daddy's Girl: How An African 'Princess' Banked $3 Billion In A Country Living On $2 A Day

Isabel dos Santos, Africa's Richest Woman (Photo credit: Bruno Fonseca/EPA/Newscom)

Kleptocracy ("rule by thieves") is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service. This type of government corruption is often achieved by the embezzlement of state funds.

Daddy's Girl: How An African 'Princess' Banked $3 Billion In A Country Living On $2 A Day
By Kerry A. Dolan and Rafael Marques de Morais
Forbes
8/14/2013

LAST DECEMBER Isabel dos Santos commemorated her tenth wedding anniversary to Congolese businessman Sindika Dokolo with a party. Subtlety wasn’t on the menu. She jetted in dozens of friends and relatives from as far as Germany and Brazil, who joined with hundreds of local guests in Angola for three days of lavishness, including a bash at the Fortress of Sao Miguel in the capital city of Luanda and a beachside Sunday brunch on the posh Mussulo peninsula. The invitation, according to one attendee, came in a sleek white box, promising a celebration of “a decade of passion/ a decade of friendship/ a decade worth a hundred years. …”


Sindika Dokolo

A decade worth $3 billion is more like it. At 40 Dos Santos is Africa’s only female billionaire, and also the continent’s youngest. She has quickly and systematically garnered significant stakes in Angola’s strategic industries–banking, cement, diamonds and telecom–making her the most influential businessperson in her homeland. More than half of her assets are held in publicly traded Portuguese companies, adding international credibility. When FORBES outed her as a billionaire in January the government disseminated the news as a matter of national pride, living proof that this country of 19 million has arrived.

The real story, however, is how Dos Santos–the oldest daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos–acquired her wealth. For the past year FORBES has been tracing Isabel dos Santos’ path to riches, reviewing a score of documents and speaking with dozens of people on the ground. As best as we can trace, every major Angolan investment held by Dos Santos stems either from taking a chunk of a company that wants to do business in the country or from a stroke of the president’s pen that cut her into the action. Her story is a rare window into the same, tragic kleptocratic narrative that grips resource-rich countries around the world.


President José Eduardo dos Santos

For President Dos Santos it’s a foolproof way to extract money from his country, while keeping a putative arm’s-length distance away. If the 71-year-old president gets overthrown, he can reclaim the assets from his daughter. If he dies in power, she keeps the loot in the family. Isabel may decide, if she is generous, to share some of it with her seven known half-siblings. Or not. The siblings are known around Angola for despising one another.

“It is not possible to justify this wealth, which is shamelessly displayed,” former Angolan prime minister Marcolino Moco tells FORBES. “There is no doubt that it was the father who generated such a fortune.”

Isabel dos Santos declined to speak with FORBES for this article. Her representatives failed to respond to detailed questions sent months ago but last week issued this statement: “Mrs. Isabel dos Santos is an independent business woman, and a private investor representing solely her own interests. Her investments in Angolan and/or in Portuguese companies are transparent and have been conducted through arms-length transactions involving external entities such as reputed banks and law firms.” In turn, the spokesman accuses this article’s coauthor, an Angolan investigative journalist, of being an activist with a political agenda. The Angolan government jailed Marques de Morais in 1999 over a series of articles critical of the regime and has brought new criminal defamation charges against him over his 2011 book, Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola.

Finally, a representative of Mrs. Dos Santos said that any allegations of illegal wealth transfers between her and the government are “groundless and completely absurd.” That could well be. When your father runs the show, and can dictate which national assets are sold and at what price, what’s theft of public resources in one country can be rendered legal with a swipe of the pen.

President José Eduardo dos Santos could not be reached for comment. That is unfortunate, because the Dos Santoses, as Moco notes, have “some explaining to do.”

FOR THREE CENTURIES the Portuguese extracted wealth from this mineral-rich country on Africa’s southwestern coast. Almost immediately after Angola won independence in 1975, various internal factions began battling one another for the right to do the exact same thing. From this chaos, which lasted 27 years, Dos Santos, who had studied oil engineering in Soviet Azerbaijan and served as foreign minister upon independence, eventually emerged as president in 1979. He’s held on to power ever since, making him the planet’s third-longest-serving nonroyal head of state.

The president met his first wife (he’s been married at least twice), Tatiana Kukanova, while a student in Azerbaijan, and his first child–Isabel–was born there. By age 6 Isabel dos Santos was in Angola’s presidential palace, and while the family’s lifestyle wasn’t over-the-top by profligate African dictator standards (save the president’s dalliances–at least five of his children are from various mistresses), the family had Christmas trees flown in from New York and $500,000 worth of bubbly imported from a Lisbon restaurateur. There was decadence enough for Isabel to earn the nickname “the Princess.”

During Isabel’s upbringing the Angola economy sputtered, crippled by two factors: ongoing civil war and Dos Santos’ socialist policies. “In the 1980s you’d go to the supermarket and there would only be noodles on the shelves. There wasn’t much there,” says University of Southern California associate professor emeritus Gerald Bender, who’s been studying Angola since 1968. For cloistered Isabel that reality was likely invisible; she eventually attended King’s College in London, where her mother, now a British citizen, lives, and earned an undergraduate degree in engineering.

However, as civil war resumed by the end of 1992, Isabel left for Angola’s capital city, Luanda, in a rush, allegedly after receiving death threats in London.

By the late 1990s, when the civil war was winding down –a ceasefire was formally declared in 2002–President Dos Santos, like the Soviets he had studied under in the 1960s, was embracing a grab-what-you-can form of capitalism. Over the past decade Angola has been one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. GDP grew at an 11.6% annual clip from 2002 to 2011, driven by a more than doubling of oil production to 1.8 million barrels a day. The government budget sits at $69 billion, up from $6.3 billion a decade ago.

But predictably, precious little of the windfall has made it to the people. Some 70% of Angolans live on less than $2 a day. And by the government’s own count, 10% of the country’s population is scrambling for food due to drought and bureaucratic neglect. So where’s the money going? Start with a paranoid president-for-life. The state security apparatus sucks more funds from the budget than health care, education and agriculture combined. A lot is clearly stolen: Between 2007 and 2010 at least $32 billion of oil revenue went missing from the federal ledger, according to the International Monetary Fund, which later tracked most of the money to “quasi-fiscal operations.” Angola comes in at 157 out of 176 nations ranked by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. It trails shining stalwarts of participatory democracy such as Yemen and Kyrgyzstan. And it’s within this environment that Isabel dos Santos has surfaced with an estimated net worth of $3 billion.

Page 2 of 2

ISABEL DOS SANTOS’ formative business experience came at Miami Beach. Not the Florida city, but rather a rustic chic beachside bar and restaurant in Luanda that tries to emulate its namesake, down to the mediocre food and indifferent service. In 1997 the owner, Rui Barata, was having issues with health inspectors and taxmen. His solution: bringing in Isabel dos Santos, then 24, as his partner, with the idea, contemporaries say, that her name would keep pesky government regulators at bay. Her initial investment was negligible, according to a source with knowledge of the deal, and the restaurant thrived: Sixteen years later it’s still a weekend hot spot.

The lesson–the equity stake available to those with a gilded name–couldn’t have been lost on Isabel dos Santos, who was entering adulthood at the exact same time Angola’s riches were being unlocked. Here’s what followed:

First, Grab the Diamonds. Angola is the world’s fourth-largest diamond producer, selling an estimated $1 billion in gems every year from mines situated in the country’s northeast. The mines’ exclusive concession-holder is the state-owned company, Endiama.

In 1999 President Dos Santos pushed Endiama to form a diamond-selling partnership. Three Israeli diamond merchants, including Lev Leviev, who FORBES now estimates is worth $1.5 billion, promised contacts and expertise. The power behind the venture, according to British court records, was Russian arms dealer Arkady Gaydamak–a former confidant of President Dos Santos during the civil war of 1992-2002. The new company would be called Ascorp.

Leviev and his partners, including Gaydamak, would wind up with 24.5% of Ascorp. The government would retain 51%. The most surprising major shareholder? Isabel dos Santos, who emerged with a 24.5% stake through a Gibraltar investment company, Trans Africa Investment Services, that she had set up with her mother, according to TAIS’ annual report. (Leviev did not respond to a request for comment, and Gaydamak could not be reached at press time.)

Angola’s 2010 constitution bars the president from stealing public money and acts of corruption, which would seem to prohibit the use of his position for the private enrichment of his family. No matter: Angola’s Council of Ministers, controlled by her father, approved the Ascorp deal anyway. “In a country with separation of powers and real democracy, these presidential actions to enrich his family would have caused legal procedures for his impeachment,” says lawyer Salvador Freire, president of the human rights group Maos Livres. “In Angola he is the law.”

Ascorp was a cash cow, yielding millions of dollars in dividends per month, according to British court documents, but as the “blood diamond” business attracted international scrutiny in the middle of the 2000s, Dos Santos transferred to her mother total control of TAIS, now renamed Iaxonh Limited, according to Gibraltar’s Registry of Companies records accessed by FORBES. It’s quite a parking spot, safely under the control of a British citizen, with Isabel dos Santos conveniently sitting in Angola as her mother’s sole heir. The mother could not be reached for comment.

Telecom: Father Knows Best. In 1997 President Dos Santos issued a decree concerning the increasingly valuable telecommunications spectrum it controlled: The government must undertake a public bidding process for new telecom licenses.

Two years later he defied his own decree–by issuing a new one. The government could grant such a license without a public tender, as long as the grantee was a joint venture with the state. Eleven months after that the president, backed by his rubber stamp Council of Ministers, granted Unitel the right to be the first private mobile telephony operator in the country–with the condition that he had sole power to approve the project and to decide on the shareholding structure of the company, since it involved state funds. The state-owned oil company got a 25% stake, and Isabel emerged with her own 25% stake. A spokesman for Isabel dos Santos said she contributed capital for her Unitel stake but declined to specify how much. A year later Portugal Telecom paid $12.6 million for another 25% stake.

It was one hell of an investment. Mobile phones have revolutionized Africa, and as one of just two mobile phone networks in Angola, Unitel had amassed 9 million subscribers. Revenue last year was $2 billion, making it Angola’s largest private company.

Her share is worth at least $1 billion, based on discussions with several analysts who follow Portugal Telecom.

Banking: A Friend in Europe. As Isabel dos Santos diversified her Angolan business interests, in 2005 she diversified her network of powerful patrons. Enter Americo Amorim, a Portuguese billionaire worth $4.3 billion who has spent his life expanding his family’s business empire from cork to real estate, tourism and, especially, oil. The billionaire, who did not comment for this story, was early to seek deals in Angola after hostilities ended. When the Dos Santos clan made a move into banking in 2005, they did so in partnership with Amorim and Fernando Teles, a Portuguese national who had been CEO of another Angolan bank. They formally opened Banco Internacional de Credito, known as BIC, according to the company’s annual reports.

The hand of Isabel’s father again played a role: President Dos Santos, as head of the Council of Ministers, formally authorized the foreign investment in the capital of the bank. Specifically how it was financed is murky, as there is no public record showing who put money into the bank. BIC’s latest annual report shows that Amorim owns 25% of the bank. Various documents reveal that another 25% is held through an investment vehicle controlled by Isabel dos Santos. Her spokesman says she was a founding member of the bank and had independent means to pay her share from her early business ventures.

Regardless, BIC was a hit, in large part because of a deal to lend money to … the Angolan government. BIC made loans to the state worth $450 million, in addition to more than $350 million made to private ventures. BIC had assets of $6.9 billion in 2012. Isabel dos Santos’ stake is worth at least $160 million, FORBES estimates, based on the bank’s book value listed in its latest annual report. BIC officials could not be reached for comment.

Oil: A Strange Partnership. Oil is Angola’s greatest natural asset. The country produces 650 million barrels per year, most of it exported. The state-owned oil firm, Sonangol, is so profitable that it was only a matter of time before the Dos Santos family would start looking for ways to hitch a ride on its success. Isabel’s banking partner, billionaire Americo Amorim, would play the key role.

In 2005 Amorim set up a subsidiary, Amorim Energia. He would control it with a 55% stake. The remaining 45%, at least originally, went to Sonangol via a Netherlands holding company called Esperaza Holding B.V. At the end of that year Amorim Energia went shopping, acquiring 33.3% of Galp Energia, Portugal’s former state-owned oil company, for roughly $1 billion, according to press reports. At the end of 2006, according to investigative not-for-profit Global Witness, 40% of Sonangol’s stake in Esperaza ended up with a Swiss company called Exem Holding. No documents could be found that definitively tie Exem Holding to Isabel dos Santos, but her fingerprints are everywhere. Her husband, Sindika Dokolo, was put on the Amorim Energia board at the request of Esperaza, according to Global Witness. And the chairman of Isabel dos Santos’ holding company is also on the boards of Fidequity, a subsidiary of Exem Holding, and entities called Exem Energy and Exem Oil & Gas, according to public filings. Last year Amorim Energia paid $726 million for an additional 5% of Galp. Isabel’s estimated 6.9% stake in Galp is worth a recent $924 million.

Cement: Safeguarding the “Public Interest.” For most of President Dos Santos’ reign there’s only been one cement factory in Angola, owned by a firm called Nova Cimangola. By mid-2004 the government owned 39.8% of it, state-owned oil company Sonangol’s captive bank, BAI, owned 9.5%, and the remaining 49% was owned by Swiss firm Scanang, which was in the process of being taken over by Portuguese cement company Cimpor. The government began demanding a bigger stake, arguing that the factory was a strategic asset for national reconstruction in the aftermath of the war. On Oct. 29, 2006 the president’s Council of Ministers’ Resolution 78/06 approved a $74 million payment to buy out Cimpor, declaring that the expenditure was necessary to safeguard “public interest, to restore the legality and to maintain the shareholding control of Nova Cimangola by national entities, incorporated in Angola.” The $74 million payment, according to an Angolan newspaper, came from BIC, the bank half-owned by Amorim and Isabel dos Santos. The government would now own 89%, while BAI and Angolan individuals would control the remaining 11%.

What followed, however, showed that the larger goal wasn’t to give Angola a larger stake but rather certain Angolans. Prior to the council’s approval a company called Ciminvest was incorporated in Angola. Ciminvest was initially fronted by the president’s former legal counsel, according to the articles of incorporation he signed. At one point Portuguese billionaire Americo Amorim owned an estimated 30% of Ciminvest, but his representative confirms that he transferred his stake in 2009. He would not comment on who took over the stake or what was paid for it. The real owners are now widely understood to be Isabel dos Santos and her husband, though documents detailing ownership are not publicly available. However, Isabel admits on her resume that she chairs the board of Nova Cimangola, which she controls through Ciminvest. Without much ado, at no apparent cost, the company that was presidentially mandated to be controlled by “national entities” had become controlled by Isabel dos Santos.

ISABEL DOS SANTOS’ holdings are more than just squirreled away assets to be unearthed in case of a rainy day. They throw off hefty dividends that allow her to buy yet more assets in businesses seemingly unrelated to the exploitation of Angolan properties, such as her $500 million stake in Portuguese media firm ZON.

Meanwhile, her father has taken steps to legally protect himself from all the plundering. Under Angolan law President Dos Santos’ decision to grant a license to Unitel for the personal benefit of his daughter could be considered an abuse of power. To cover his legal bases, in 1992 the president fiddled with the law to reduce it to two grounds: taking bribes or betraying the country. Technically, he can argue, neither was violated in the case of Unitel.

The larger strategy, though, is to portray Isabel as a hero. In January, after FORBES declared her a billionaire, the Angolan regime’s mouthpiece (and the country’s only daily newspaper), Jornal de Angola , claimed that “while we give our best for Angola without poverty, we are elated with the fact that businesswoman Isabel dos Santos has become a reference in the world of finances. This is good for Angola and it fills Angolans with pride.” Angolans should be mortified, not proud.

Co-author Rafael Marques de Morais is an Angolan investigative journalist based in Luanda. He runs the corruption watchdog website Maka Angola.

Horn of Africa aid caravan too late, again

Horn of Africa aid caravan too late, again
By Barry Malone
EL ADOW, Kenya
Jul 26, 2011

(Reuters) - A besuited U.N. official wearing well-buffed shoes crouches in the orange dust near a cluster of huts in northern Kenyan, and, as his tie wafts in the breeze, raises an iPad and carefully films the rotting carcass of a cow.

Since drought gripped the Horn of Africa, and especially since famine was declared in parts of Somalia, the international aid industry has swept in and out of refugee camps and remote hamlets in branded planes and snaking lines of white 4X4s.

This humanitarian, diplomatic and media circus is necessary every time people go hungry in Africa, analysts say, because governments -- both African and foreign -- rarely respond early enough to looming catastrophes.

Combine that with an often simplistic explanation of the causes of famine, and a growing band of aid critics say parts of Africa are doomed to a never-ending cycle of ignored early warnings, media appeals and emergency U.N. feeding -- rather than a transition to lasting self-sufficiency.

"Although humanitarian agencies are gearing themselves up to mount a response, it is far too late to address anything but the worst symptoms," Simon Levine, an analyst at the Overseas Development Institute think-tank, wrote on its website.

"Measures that could have kept animals alive -- and providing milk, and income to buy food -- would have been much cheaper than feeding malnourished children, but the time for those passed with very little investment," Levine said.

The drought gripping the region straddling Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia is the worst for 60 years, some aid groups say, and is affecting more than 12 million people. In the worst-hit area in Somalia, 3.7 million people are at risk of starvation.

"It seems once again that slow onset disasters don't get attention until they become critical," said a senior humanitarian adviser at a U.N agency in the region

"One can understand this with rapid onset disasters as they come out of the blue, but drought ... we've seen it before and we will again," said the official, who declined to be named.

The man filming the dead cow with an iPad was just one in a series of incongruous episodes when the director of the U.N. food agency, Josette Sheeran, flew for a day-trip to a small village and the world's biggest refugee camp in Dadaab to see how her organization is delivering emergency food.

Sheeran posed awkwardly next to the dead carcasses, an uneasy almost-smile on her lips as her staff snapped away with cameras and phones, watched by bemused locals.

Officials then had stilted conversations with refugees used to answering questions from Western aid workers who come with sometimes sympathetic nods, always promising that they can make things better.

"While international NGOs can be very active around humanitarian response many of them don't have a long-term development strategy for these areas," Andrew Catley, an expert on the Horn of Africa at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, told Reuters.

THORNY POLITICS

Reporters accompanied Sheeran, knowing they might need the iconic, loathed-by-Africans footage of the most emaciated babies they could find to get air time, or chance upon the "haunted" mother with the most dead children.

For many analysts, however, the story being told in the Horn of Africa by the humanitarian and media caravan is simplistic and misleading.

There is clearly a drought, they say, but the reason tens of thousands of people are leaving their homes in search of food is also because a festering insurgency in Somalia -- along with the forced recruitment of youths -- is making things worse.

Much of southern and central Somalia is controlled by al Shabaab Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda who imposed a ban on food aid in 2010. They have since lifted the ban but maintained the embargo on the WFP, calling it a "spy agency."

"This is not political," Sheeran briefed frontline aid workers in northern Kenya, saying that responding to the crisis was all that mattered now. "It's about saving lives."

Al Shabaab accused the United Nations last week of exaggerating the severity of the drought and said it would not allow agencies with "hidden agendas" to return.

Part of the problem, analysts say, is that much of the funding for WFP, and some other aid agencies, comes from the United States, opening them to charges of skewed objectives.

"What they are really interested in is security in Somalia. Since 9/11 a development for security agenda has come in with big donors like USAID and (Britain's) DFID," said a former senior aid worker in the Horn of Africa.

"Humanitarian issues and real development have basically played second fiddle to their security agendas," he said.

The State Department website says that although USAID is independent, it "receives general direction and overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary."

According to WFP's website, the United States has contributed 45 percent of its government funding since the start of 2007 -- or $7.3 billion out of $16.3 billion.

Analysts say that, without tackling the political complications that influence the distribution of food aid, and even the use of the word "famine," droughts will remain difficult both to prevent and to manage.

"Whilst it is tempting to say that the causes of the crisis are natural causes, it's much more difficult to look at the man-made causes of the crisis such as governance, conflict and economic trends," Catley said.

Several senior aid officials spoken to by Reuters did not want to be named when criticizing the aid system for fear of losing their jobs or being banned entry by African governments, but said the industry desperately needed an overhaul.

"Some of these organizations have been in these regions for 20/25 years and they're doing the same things today that they were doing 25 years ago," one said.

"If you were in any other sector -- and you had such a terrible impact -- you'd be out of business."

(Editing by David Clarke)