In a statement to Lusa after a UNITA press conference on the democratic state in the country 28 years after the first general elections, Navita Ngolo, the second vice-president of the parliamentary group of the "Galo Negro" party, pointed out that "the press should already be more plural, less partisan".
Several private organizations such as Global FM, Palanca TV, TV Zimbo, Radio Mais and O País newspaper were confiscated in August by the National Asset Recovery Service of the Attorney General's Office (PGR) and handed over to the Ministry of Telecommunications, Information Technology and Social Communication.
The media were owned by General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento "Dino" and by Manuel Rabelais, former Minister of Social Communication and were allegedly created with public funds.
"When the state controls the entire press, it does not actually embrace the democratic rule of law. There is always a tendency to control the news space, we continue to see wide spaces to talk about matters of the party that governs Angola [MPLA]," the congresswoman noted, stressing that "TV Zimbo and Palanca brought some balance" to the media panorama.
In relation to confiscation, "if, on the one hand, there has been illegality in the way these organs have been constituted, it is also necessary to have plural organs, which do not depend on the State, so that they can serve the public".
About the case of Edeltrudes Costa, who has been in the media spotlight but has had practically no media coverage in Angola, Ngolo criticized the "unwavering look of the PGR and the holder of executive power himself".
"This is a person directly connected to his office, in normal countries, or the director himself resigned or the President himself resigned because when corruption comes to his office it means that it is also corrupt," Navita Ngolo said, considering that the silence around the case "only denotes that something exists".
In addition to talking about the violation of the pillars of the democratic state, particularly with regard to decentralization, freedom of the press, and institutionalized corruption, the UNITA deputy also praised the governor of Benguela, Rui Falcão, for "having had the courage to denounce the central government's lack of competence in materializing political-administrative decentralization".
