Africa-Press – Angola. THIS TUESDAY, April 5th, President João Lourenço presided over a mass rally (rally) in the city of Ondjiva, which marked the beginning of the pre-campaign of the party of which he is leader, the MPLA.
His impromptu speech:
From Cabinda to Cunene, One People!
One Nation!
Long live the MPLA!
Long live Dr. Antonio Agostinho Neto!
Live the peace!
Long live the Architect of Peace, President José Eduardo dos Santos!
Dear Comrades,
people of Cunene,
Angolan people
The Angolan people are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Peace. This feast is the feast of the 4th of April; It’s the People’s Party. It is the feast of the Angolan people who, 20 years ago, stopped feeling the horrors of war and began to benefit from the benefits of Peace.
Those politicians who are truly committed to Peace have joined this People’s party. They canceled all their internal and external agendas so that they could, together with their people, celebrate together this great good, which I don’t know if it is the second greatest after Independence or if we are going to put them on the same level, on an equal footing.
Serious politicians, who value Peace, joined the commemorations of the 4th of April, joined the People, froze all the agendas they had to pass the right signal that Peace must be defended, Peace comes first , any other schedules are secondary; primary is the defense of Peace.
The country, during these 20 years, has done a lot of good for the people. The main infrastructure, destroyed by the war, was, to a large extent, rebuilt. But the country did not limit itself to rebuilding what was destroyed. The successive Executives, who have existed over these twenty years, have also built important infrastructures in practically all areas to make life easier for citizens, to allow our economy to flow and, in this way, to solve the People’s problems, as I said The Doctor. Antonio Agostinho Neto. And this work of recovering destroyed infrastructure, this work of building new infrastructure, was only possible because we knew how to keep the Peace. All of us, politicians and beyond. The People, above all, were the main sentinel of Peace, not allowing any adventurer to spoil,
In these 20 years we have managed to connect the country of Cabinda to Cunene, making people’s mobility a reality, no longer having to travel exclusively by plane. Today, we use all types of transport to move from Cabinda to Cunene. So it couldn’t be better than that. Which means that 20 years have passed, but another 200 years have passed, another 400 years… We must continue to preserve this Peace, because only in peace can we continue to develop our country and fulfill our dreams.
dear comrades,
Comrade First Provincial Secretary of the Party, comrade Geraldina Didalelwa, said here that, in this square, the then candidate João Lourenço, spoke to the populations in 2017. Almost five years later, we also returned here to campaign. We have been here on other occasions, especially as Head of State, to help solve the problems of the People in this part of the territory.
A five-year term ends. It was a difficult mandate. It was a term in which we had great challenges to face. Fortunately, we found energies. When I say we found it, I’m not saying I found it. We did not find! I am speaking in the plural and very well. All of us together, rulers and ruled, had to find wisdom, to find the best solutions to overcome these same challenges. There were big challenges. Not to say that of the five years, at least in two of them the country was almost at a standstill. I am referring to the worst moment we are experiencing here in Angola with the COVID 19 pandemic, with periods of confinement when people could not leave their homes. They couldn’t go to work. People were almost stopped. Therefore, We worked around the clock, but we never stopped working. This is the only way to understand that important projects that started, or were being carried out in this two-year period of COVID-19, are today being inaugurated and placed at the service of the populations. I am referring to the important investments we have made in the social area. With a lot of sacrifice, at this time of COVID, we did not stop building hospitals, equipping them properly; we have not stopped building schools, equipping them, making sure that there are no longer children studying under trees and sitting on a can of powdered milk, acting as seats, acting as desks. We did a lot, despite Covid 19.
But it was also in this period of almost five years that we made a radical change in terms of the management of public affairs. I am not saying that today there are no managers who work with the treasury. I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I made that statement. We have to assume that there are still managers who mess with the treasury. But not as brazenly, as fearlessly as it was in the past, because today they know they can do it, but if they are caught, there will be no impunity. The great evil of the past was not just corruption, theft… sometimes, when we use the expression corruption, it turns out to be a beautiful word. As the act itself is not pretty, we have to call things by their true name. Corruption is theft!
As I said, the problem in the past was not just there being theft, there was corruption. More serious than that was impunity. Nobody did anything [against corruption], which ended up encouraging others to do the same. In this mandate we have taken an important step in the fight against corruption. It is clear that we cannot yet be satisfied with what we have achieved.
We’ve already recovered a lot of resources, but it’s not enough. We need to recover more, but above all, we need to create mechanisms and create a mentality in our public servants that the right path is not that of corruption. How many Cafu dams could we build with the money already recovered from corruption and those not recovered? How many dams? The dam that we inaugurated yesterday cost 137 million dollars. There are people who, alone, stole five, six times more than that. So how many Cafus could you make? We need to make four, five Cafus here, in Cunene. So they were already done with the money stolen by one person – one person! – I could make four, five Cafus.
Is it good or not good to fight corruption?
So fighting corruption is good, and it’s not only good, it’s necessary. It is absolutely necessary. Now who fights corruption is not JLo. It’s all of us. We have to keep in mind that the police against corruption are all of us. Each of us is a policeman called by the Nation, summoned by the Nation, to fight corruption. If we think that this is so, then we can be happy and say that the fight against corruption is won.
dear comrades,
In this same short space of time, and with COVID in the middle, this Executive, supported by the MPLA, managed to do something that was necessary, which is to create a good business environment so that private investors, national and foreign, can freely exercise their activity, producing goods, producing services, earning money, getting rich – because getting rich is not a crime, what is a crime is stealing – and, above all, providing employment. And we have managed – we have not finished the work, this is an ongoing work – but we are pleased to say here to the people of Cunene and to the Angolan people that we have managed, by the way, with some difficulties, we have managed to create this good business environment. We have managed to remove the State from doing business. The State does not do business, the State creates the conditions for private individuals to do business.
We have managed, with the help of all of you, to create this good business environment, already recognized internationally, not only by the international creditor organizations, the IMF and the World Bank, but also by the organizations that have the responsibility of classifying the economies, the state of the world’s economies, whether the economies are doing well or not doing well, whether they are doing well or not doing well, whether they are likely to grow economically or not. These agencies have that responsibility and are no one’s friends. When they say that economy A or economy B is doing well, it is not because they are friends with this country, it is not because they have been corrupted, because they do not accept being corrupted. They are impartial, they are serious, they do their job and they announce the results.
In the context of this task of creating a good business environment, we are also achieving something that was already necessary and actually starting – because it is something that was talked about a lot, but not done – to take important steps in the diversification of our economy. Our economy begins to diversify. Our economy’s dependence on oil revenues is starting to gradually decrease. A few days ago it was announced that our economy grew by 0.7 percent last year. But this growth was mainly due to the growth of that part of the economy that has nothing to do with oil, gas or Sonangol. This is part of the non-oil economy: agriculture, fisheries, what little tourism we have, the extractive industry, today we also have the manufacturing industry, ornamental stones. This economy,
So, comrades, we are on the right track. All this, which I have just told you, means that the Executive, supported by the MPLA, has good policies to defend the economy and, consequently, to defend the citizen.
I don’t want to talk about details, but, in essence, I ended up giving you the state of our country and everything that has been done well for the benefit of our great country, Angola.
Dear comrades, the fact that we are at the end of this mandate means that we are on the verge of being accountable to the People, because after all, the People are sovereign. We, as good students, who believe that we have prepared ourselves sufficiently for this exam, are calm. We will face the exam, the jury, which is the sovereign People, in the certainty that this jury will give us a good grade, a positive grade.
We all know that when an exam approaches, there are those students who get very upset, very restless, because they haven’t prepared. So they’re afraid of the jury, they know they’re going to fail. Throughout the year, when they should be studying, they did ugly things, practiced acts of banditry and other things and the teacher won’t ask anything about banditry. This item does not exist!
If we want to carry this into politics, it’s the same thing. It’s the same. Our opponents are in the group of cheats that have not studied.
Instead of worrying about designing a good governance program, worrying about disseminating the content of this same program so that voters know and defend it, what they are doing is all wrong.
The only national program they have is to mobilize some young radicals from the cities, give them half a dozen pennies to go buy a beer, maybe something more dope than that, to commit acts of vandalism. This is the governance program that, unfortunately, our opposition has.
So, who wants to capture the people’s vote destroys the people’s goods? Whose goods are public goods? Who’s the owner? It’s the people. The People own the public goods. So, the people need buses to get around and the one who says I’m going to be a government destroys this public good of the people? Do you think this is from someone smart? And what is the opposite of smart?
⁃ DONKEY [answers the population].
It wasn’t me who said it.
They want to fight our great MPLA. They’ve been trying for years. They train and train more, and when they arrive on game day, they lose the game. In their minds, to defeat the MPLA is to destroy the MPLA. But how to destroy the MPLA? Destroy the MPLA infrastructure, burn the MPLA headquarters, the furniture, break the walls. Do they think they will end the MPLA like this? Do you really think that this great MPLA is going to end just because the four walls of a local committee have broken down? Are they going to end up like this with the MPLA? They don’t know that the MPLA are not walls. The MPLA is the people!
The comrades of the party organization correct me. I am human and I also make mistakes. I don’t know exactly how many millions there are at the moment, but no less than 3 million. If they stop splitting party committees and decide to physically eliminate MPLA militants, do you think it is possible to kill 3 million people? It’s not possible. Then they should understand that violence gets them nowhere. They can break one or two committees today, tomorrow we’ll build four.
They destroyed the Talatona Party committee on 10 January this year, vandalized the Sanza Pombo Party committee more recently. In place of those two, today we inaugurated one that is ten times bigger than those two combined. So if they think the right way is to destroy the MPLA committees, then they can destroy a hundred more! We’ll build a thousand more. But when we say that they can destroy another hundred, we mean that the MPLA will not retaliate. We will not pay for the same coin. We are not like them. Our genesis is different from theirs. But this should not be interpreted as a sign of weakness. It is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of civility, of education, of respect not only for the life of the other, but also of respect for the other’s patrimony.
We will not destroy other people’s heritage. But let’s also not say: hit the left cheek, let’s give the right cheek. No! What they are doing deserves an answer. What anwser? The best slap we can give them is to defeat them in the elections. But defeat them copiously. Their defeat cannot be small. It has to be a big defeat that will take years to recover.
Here, the province of Cunene has already taught us that the people of Cunene do not play. History says that these people are a warrior people, they are a fighting people, a fighter in the broadest sense of the word. The people of Cunene are those who enter the ring with the will to beat their opponent but are never satisfied with simply winning. The people of Cunene, when they enter the ring, it is to win, not only to win but to KO the opponent.
Therefore, there are several ways to win in the ring, but nothing better than winning by KO, taking the opponent to the mat; this is what the people of Cunene know how to do. I brought the eighteen First Secretaries of the provinces to the people of Cunene to teach them how to KO.
All this work that we carried out during the term, all the accomplishments that we did for the Angolan people, must be interpreted as a humble request that we are making to the Angolan people to help us give this KO. And we believe that the Angolan people will not turn their backs on us. On voting day, he’ll hold our arm so we can KO our opponents.
They are fragile, they are showing obvious signs that they are fragile.
When someone resorts to low blows, it’s because they’re fragile. This mobilization of young radicals for vandalism is a low blow. The opposition is so fragile that they even make a simple installation commission, which is not recognized, a political party, and that acts as such, in disrespect for the State.
They act as if it were a political party. When you go to driving school to take the exam to get your driving license and you fail there, they say: “come back from here in a while, prepare yourself better to take the exam again and we’ll give you the license, which will license to drive a car.” It means you can’t drive any car on the public road until you come back and take a new test.
But what we are seeing is someone walking on the public road, someone who has been discarded, because he is not recognized as such, he does not have a driving license, he does not have a license, he does not have a property title and he is walking on the road. What is done? The police cannot let this car circulate, it can bring misfortune.
So, we are in a democratic state, aren’t they the ones who defend democracy more than we do? They even say they brought Democracy…
They brought democracy…
So you who brought Democracy don’t respect Democracy, you act as if Democracy is anarchy. It is necessary not to confuse democracy with anarchy, despite the fact that everything ends up in vain; they are not the same thing.
So, in August, we’re also going to send the disembodied ones back to driving school, right or not? It is the only way to get them to respect the law, to respect the State. But they don’t go far, they are showing all the signs of so much weakness that I believe the KO won’t be difficult.
Dear comrades, it was I myself who said in Menongue that we cannot be triumphalists, to the point of saying “that’s it!” I advised us to abandon this expression “that’s it!”. There’s nothing! We go to the ring to win, to win well. As good a fighter as you are, you need to prepare. So, we have to prepare properly, we have to work, continue to work, both the MPLA militants who are in the Executive and the militants in general, our friends, our sympathizers, the Angolans in general who believe in our project of governance. We all have to prepare until the last minute, until that day of reflection, when we can consider introspection and say, “Are we ready to fight? Yes, we are.” So, let’s fight to win.
Comrades, in the last two elections – this is not a taboo at all – we were the first to recognize it, because it is only by recognizing that we can correct, when we do not recognize we are not in a position to correct. In the last two elections [2012, 2017], at the polls, our party lost around ten percent in each one. We need to quickly reverse this trend, and it will be in August. There is no time to wait, it has to be now, in August.
We lost ten percent in 2012, ten percent in 2017. This means that we have to gain at least 20 percent, above the results we had in 2017. We have to add another 20 at least, if we can put 25, 30, just like that is that we can say that we recovered.
So, here in Cunene, I only bring a mission to MPLA militants, friends and sympathizers. Our mission is, in August, to recover the 20 percent lost in the last two elections. Do you accept the challenge or not?
The challenge is great, but it is possible, and we believe that this sovereign People will help us to achieve this feat, to regain, to regain, the lost 20 percent and, for that, we don’t need to do much, we have to do what comrade Didalelwa defended: we have to take the leap of the gazelle. It’s a bold leap, that’s really the mission we have to have. Let’s start training to see if we can jump as far as a gazelle. It takes practice, otherwise we will get injured.
We have to prepare. Well, she said it in another sense. She said the women made a leap from the gazelle and are now head to head with the men. This leap of the gazelle to give more dignity to the Angolan woman is an important leap, but we are now going to take, all together, men, women and young people, the leap of the gazelle to have at least 20 percent more, above what we achieved in 2017. We are hopeful that, yes, we will make it, but we will make it not just because we want to win just for the sake of winning, out of vanity, no! We want to win in order to continue, I don’t mean to conclude, but to continue the work, the work is never completed, there are always things to do.
We will win so that we can continue the great work we have been doing, so that in the coming years there will be even more hospitals, more schools, more universities, more PIIM’s that take infrastructure to the municipalities, so that there are more Cafus, so that we can to overcome the drought challenge, not only here in Cunene but in the entire southern part of our country, in Cunene, Huíla, Namibe, Cuando Cubango. Wherever we can mobilize resources to save human and animal lives, let’s do it, let’s not be lazy.
We are not going to sit back, but in order for us to do that, we need to pass and with the maximum grade in the exam next August. Thank you very much people of Cunene.
The mission is given and I will summarize it in two words: beat the opponent by KO, take him to the mat, take the leap of the gazelle to recover the 20 percent lost in the last two elections.
Thank you very much.
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