João Martins, who was speaking this Monday in Luanda at a press conference, told journalists that this "is another element that has been inflated to try to discredit the electoral process", responding to criticism from opposition parties, in particular the UNITA.
The MPLA leader stressed that "anywhere in the world it is difficult" to remove the dead from the lists and indicated that the current lists resulted from the crossing of the database of the Ministry of Territory Administration, which has 9.3 million voters and the Ministry of Justice database that had more than 11 million, including 2.6 million citizens who had already been removed for being presumed dead.
"But is this going to be some kind of fraud? No, the system has a series of guaranteed elements", he stressed, giving the example of Portugal which, until the 1990s, had a database of voters larger than that of national citizens because had not removed the dead.
"It was an element that was discrediting democracy in Portugal", which forced the authorities to carry out a marathon to purge the deceased from the database, he said.
"But did that jeopardize or make the elections in Portugal fraudulent?", he asked, answering that a false problem is being raised.
For João Martins, these are arguments used to discredit and tarnish the process.
"(That's why) we continue to say that anyone who wants to be in power has to know how to deal with state institutions because the permanent discrediting of these institutions gives these individuals a negative note", he said in an implicit allusion to UNITA leader Adalberto da Costa Júnior.
"They are not fit to be power. How do they want to be power if they are constantly discrediting the institutions of the State that one day will lead if they win the elections", shot the MPLA official, adding that the "electoral political advantage is conquered by the work, with the transmission of a correct message".
