Jacinto Ferreira dos Santos Rocha

Chairman of the Board of Directors Angola National Agency for Mineral Resources

Jacinto Ferreira dos Santos Rocha Chairman of the Board of Directors of Angola’s National Agency for Mineral Resources.

Born in Angola, he graduated in Geology from Gustavus Adolphus College, in the State of Minnesota. In addition to studying geology, he completed a second degree in Political Science at the same institution in the same period. He was considered the best student at Gustavus Adolphus College at the time.

In South Africa he started working as a researcher at the mining policy center, Chairman of the Technical Group that drafted the South African Mining Policy in the post-apartheid period, as well as the respective Mining Code, under the Nelson Mandela government. Worked as Director of Mining Rights at the Ministry of Energy and Mines of South Africa. Vice-President of the Government of Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki.

President (non-executive) of the Board of Directors of the South African Petroleum Agency, a position he accumulated with the functions of Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Energy and Mines of the same country. He was in the hierarchy, the fourth figure in the ministry in that period from 2005 to 2010. Rocha returned to academia in 2007, to take a third degree in law at the main university in the country, UNISA-University of South Africa.

He became a lawyer, completed a master’s in business administration (MBA) from the University of the Cape, a postgraduate degree in Mining Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, and is currently completing a PhD in Law from the University of Pretoria. During the last eight years, he was a consultant to the South African Minister of Transport, in the period 2012-2013 and, soon after, he performed the same functions, for the same period, at the office of the South African Minister of Energy