Téte António, who visited the headquarters of the Portuguese-speaking community this Thursday, where he had a meeting with the executive secretary, Zacarias da Costa, and with the permanent representatives of the member states to the CPLP, said that this was also an opportunity for talk about an issue that remained pending at the summit of heads of state and government, in July in Luanda, which was which country would assume the presidency of the organization after Angola, in 2023.
"As we know, São Tomé e Princípe has accepted this responsibility, and it is always an honor for all of us to assume the responsibility of presiding over the designs of our organization in 2023," said the head of diplomacy.
Teta António also told the journalists, at a press conference, that the CPLP presidency "will devote greater importance to the [executive] secretariat".
"An instrument and a body that watches over us all. Therefore, we also have to watch over it, from the point of view of working conditions, from the point of view of its organization and from the point of view of its representativeness of the Member States" , he stated.
The Foreign Affairs minister of São Tomé and Príncipe defended in statements to Lusa that there should be "a clear definition" of who would assume the presidency of the Community (CPLP) in 2023, after Guinea-Bissau withdraws.
"In these situations of definition of presidencies, we have to be careful when dealing with them. We are talking about the sensitivity of the States. São Tomé and Príncipe is in the process of concluding the presidential transition. It is very close to doing it (...) because the The inauguration concludes this process of a President who is already elected, but there is a President in office. And it is necessary in a democracy to safeguard these two entities", stressed the minister.
São Tomé and Príncipe and Guinea-Bissau were the two CPLP member states that, at the summit of Heads of State and Government, which took place in July, in Luanda, expressed their willingness to assume the presidency of the organization after Angola, which now has the rotating community presidency and until 2023.
At the informal meeting of the CPLP Council of Ministers, which took place in New York, on 24 September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Guinea-Bissau withdrew its proposal to assume the presidency and proposed that it be São Tomé and Prince and do it.
The executive secretary of the organization, Zacarias da Costa, told Lusa, by telephone, that the Guinean President, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, “left a clear message, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Suzi Barbosa, that they would do well. eyes that São Tomé would assume the presidency and then, then, it would be Guinea-Bissau”.
Following this decision, according to the head of Sao Tome's diplomacy, "there must be a statement by the President [elected from Sao Tome and Principe], just as there must also be a statement by someone who adopted a different position" he initially took it, he argued, in an allusion to Guinea-Bissau.
Edite Tenjua recalled that the executive secretary of the CPLP, Zacarias da Costa, "was waiting for the formalization of what was manifested in the Council of Ministers in New York" by Guinea-Bissau.
The minister guaranteed, however, that her country's position remains the same as it took at the Luanda summit, that is, that there is a willingness to assume the presidency, but that it has to wait for an endorsement from the new elected President. from the country, Carlos Vila Nova, who takes office on 2 October.
This Thursday, asked whether the President-elect of São Tomé had already expressed the country's interest in assuming the presidency of the CPLP, even before his inauguration, since that was why he was waiting to formalize the interest expressed in the At the summit by the still acting Head of State, Evaristo de Carvalho, the Minister of Foreign Affairs said: "I announced a decision, I speak of the Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, therefore we speak on behalf of this country, we speak of this country, and I believe that the details of how we arrived at this consensus do not matter."
"What matters" in the opinion of the head of Angolan diplomacy "is the willingness" to express that "we all assume responsibilities when the time comes."
Angola assumed the acting Presidency of the CPLP at the XIII Conference of Heads of State and Government, held on July 17, 2021, in Luanda.
