Designer of Angolan economic planning and MPLA theorist
Appointed economy minister in November 1975 and, from 1976, minister of the plan and second deputy prime minister, he was a designer of Angolan economic planning. He gave up his government and party posts after the repression of 27 May 1977.
Carlos Alberto da Rocha Oliveira Dilolwa (2 December 1939, Sumbe – 16 November 1996, Luanda) was an Angolan economist, anticolonial activist and university professor, and a theorist of socialist economics counted among the MPLA's leading intellectuals. He joined the MPLA in 1961 under the influence of Viriato da Cruz, adopting the war name Dilolwa, and founded and taught at the 1st Revolutionary Instruction Centre at Dolisie before being sent to East Berlin in 1963 to study economics. In 1974 he entered the MPLA Central Committee and Political Bureau and joined the 'delegation of 26' received in Luanda on 8 November 1974. Appointed economy minister in November 1975, he served from 1976 as minister of the plan and second deputy prime minister. He gave up his government and party posts after the repression of 27 May 1977 and from November 1978 taught at the Faculty of Economics in Luanda.
Also known as: Carlos Alberto da Rocha Oliveira Dilolwa
Activities and affiliations
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1975–
Angola state institutionsMinister of Planning, Second Deputy Prime MinisterMain
Economy, finance and planning
Career Timeline
- 1961Joined the MPLA and adopted the war name Dilolwa
- 1963Sent to East Berlin to study economics and finance
- 1974Member of the MPLA Central Committee and Political Bureau; joined the 'delegation of 26' to Luanda
- 1975–1978Economy minister (1975), then minister of the plan and second deputy prime minister (1976–1978)
- 1978–1996Professor at the Faculty of Economics, Luanda; researcher and writer on politics and economics
Related historical events
Building people's power and the Politburo left wing, 1974–1978
After the MPLA leadership was reconstituted through the Lusaka congress of August 1974 and the Lundoji conference that September, Dilolwa entered the Political Bureau and Central Committee in 1974, taking charge of the party's ideological sector and its contacts with Eastern Europe; his place in the 'delegation of 26' received in Luanda on 8 November 1974 belonged to that same work. After the delegation's visit the party fixed him in Luanda to coordinate the institutions of people's power for implanting the People's Republic of Angola, and with Nito Alves, José Van-Dúnem and Sita Valles he became one of the political architects of the socialist government's support base in the capital and its immediate region. His January 1975 assignment to the Insurance Industry Coordination Commission, working in the Technical Studies Office, was intended to secure his continued presence in Luanda and culminated in the National Insurance and Reinsurance Company of Angola (ENSA), founded in 1978. The MPLA's 1st Ordinary Congress in December 1977 constituted the party as a vanguard of the working class, and the revised constitution of February 1978 wrote into law that MPLA-PT was a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. The party's left wing in this period argued for closer economic cooperation with the Eastern bloc and an all-out fight against 'anti-revolutionary' practices, for filling the top party and state posts by revolutionary ideological criteria rather than ethno-regional demographic weight, and for rejecting any concession on US and South African demands for the withdrawal of Cuban troops. According to Fragoso Vidal, this left-wing position was led by Carlos Dilolwa as minister of economy and planning and second deputy prime minister. That attribution rests on interviews conducted with Dilolwa himself and other party cadres in Luanda, mostly in 1994, and the left-right cleavage of those years has partly been schematised in retrospect; the alignment should be read with that caveat in mind.