She joins her brother Jose Filomeno de Sousa dos Santos, who is in charge of the country’s $5 billion sovereign wealth fund.

It is easy to obtain the best jobs in a country if your father Jose Eduardo dos Santos is head of state.

Nevertheless, 43-year-old Isabel at least has some commercial experience.

She has stakes in Angola’s banking, diamonds and media industries as well as the energy sector, and is said to be worth $3.3 billion, making her Africa’s richest woman.

What we do not know is how she would get on without her dad having been Angola’s president for the past 36 years.

There are suspicions that Isabel is being hoisted into this key job to ensure no rival dynasty emerges ahead of Jose Eduardo dos Santos stepping down as leader in two years time.

Being chief executive of the state oil company is, next to the presidency, the most powerful position in the country, according to Angola analyst Aslak Orre.

“The way he is channelling resources and public jobs to Isabel and his other children implies he is planning almost a monarchical succession,” Orre, a researcher at Norwegian development institute CMI told the BBC.

Certainly, the sacking of the old guard at Sonangol comes at a time when low oil prices are forcing new thinking to be adopted in crude producing countries.

Angola needs renewal. Its currency is at record lows against the dollar, while corruption remains endemic.

Around 95% of the wealth in the former Portuguese territory on the coast of south-west Africa comes via state-owned Sonangol. And if you believe the critics, much of it stays largely in the hands of a small group of families rather than being used to solve the country’s pressing poverty issues. 70% of Angola’s population are said to live on $2 a day.

Isabel dos Santos has already promised action. She will split the business up into three different divisions: operations, logistics and concessions to foreign oil companies.

At her inauguration, the new Sonangol chief executive promised to introduce more openness and lower production costs.

“Our objective is to increase the revenue, efficiency and transparency of the company. We want to implement governance rules similar to the international standards.”

But the way Isabel dos Santos was parachuted into the most senior position is surely at odds with international governance standards. Questions have already been raised by some Western banks about whether they will be able to do business with Sonangol.

Angola, once decimated by civil war, has progressed under President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. It had one of the world’s fastest growing economies between 2000 and 2010, but then commodity prices plunged in 2014.

To add to its woes, Angola has been hit by a raft of drilling failures in the deep water pre-salt locations that were meant to prove up sister finds to those huge discoveries in the Santos basin off Brazil.

Efforts to negotiate cash help from the International Monetary Fund have been met with demands for more transparency from the country, still Africa’s second most prolific oil producer after Nigeria.

Angola and Sonangol both need some new ideas — but is Isabel dos Santos the person to provide them?

(This article first appeared in the comment section of the 10 June, 2016 issue of Upstream newspaper.)

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Angola’s president keeps it in the family