According to the National Director of Foreign Trade of Angola, Augusta Fortes, due to the debureaucratization and simplification of the licensing process of imports determined by the decree of state of emergency, SICOEX registered two requests per minute.
"As they comprise 120 requests submitted per hour, if we multiply by the hours, we are talking about 2,880 requests per day and per week we are talking about 20,000 requests," she said this Wednesday in Luanda during a press conference.
Augusta Fortes also noted that the pressure on the Integrated Foreign Trade System, which is assigned to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, was "the only reason for the delays in licensing that have been claimed in recent days.
Because, he justified, "our SICOEX system was not parameterized for such a request".
The non-obligation of a prior licence also contributed to the situation.
"With the de-bureaucratization and simplification based on the decree on the state of emergency, we simplified the processes, because before we had the obligation to evaluate process by process," he argued.
Angola is on Wednesday the fifth day of the second phase of the state of emergency, which runs until 25 April, with the aim of containing the spread of covid-19, which in the country has 19 positive cases, 12 of which are active, two deaths and five recovered.
