Adalberto Costa Júnior, who was making the reply to João Lourenço's speech on the State of the Nation this Saturday, said that the President's message was long, as usual, but did not reflect the real state of the country.
"Today we followed a speech, as usual long, of some statistic, of a statistic that the country denies. We all just made an update of the real scenarios of the country that we have and the signs that the country showed us do not correspond to this radiography of the past", said this Saturday the leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
For Adalberto Costa Júnior, the President, who was speaking this Saturday at the opening of the 1st legislative session of the V Legislature of the National Assembly of Angola, described "a country without problems due to the amount of well carried out programs".
"We would not be able to have seen that a country that lives in extreme poverty has a substantial part of its population practically outside the parameters of human dignity, a lot of unemployment, an unemployment that involves the overwhelming majority of our youth", he stressed.
"We have a series of cases, provinces where people die of hunger and today, in the intervention of the President of the Republic, none of these aspects, which are a real emergency for the country, were even minimally addressed, we were talking about different countries on this issue", he stressed.
João Lourenço, speaking at the Angolan parliament, gave a retrospective of the achievements of the last five years of governance in the fields of health, education, electricity, infrastructure construction and promised actions to be carried out in the new term.
The President reiterated, in his State of the Nation speech, the commitment to the creation of municipalities, without advancing dates, and announced the construction of 35 assemblies for local authorities and residential complexes in 36 municipalities.
The clarification on this issue was one of the most awaited in João Lourenço's speech, after the chief executive once again took on the commitment to institutionalize local authorities, in case his party won the elections held on August 24th.
"And what Angola wanted to hear was political coherence, municipalities in 2023, we don't have any element that prevents us from carrying out municipalities in 2023, we don't have any national administrator working under the trees", stressed the president of UNITA, in press conference.
Speaking at the parliament's headquarters at the end of the statesman's intervention, Adalberto Costa Júnior considered João Lourenço's arguments about local authorities as "subterfuges".
"Therefore, subterfuges were brought here today to delay the realization of the municipalities that are waiting only for an appointment to approve the only proposal for a law, which was not approved in general and needs to be approved in the specificity", he recalled, stressing that parliament can complete this process by the end of this year.
But, he noted, the President of the Republic "has made it very clear that local authorities are not part of his strategic program for the five-year period", he shot.
Flanked by Abel Chivukuvuku, deputy elected by UNITA under the United Patriotic Front (FPU), and Justino Pinto de Andrade, leader of the Democratic Bloc, elected UNITA deputy also by the FPU, Costa Júnior also presented challenges to the government.
The need for the Government to be accountable was one of the challenges presented by the president of UNITA, especially in relation to the "huge differential" between the price of a barrel of oil and the General State Budget (OGE), both for the end of 20221 and for the entire the year 2022.
"And the market, the price of a barrel, the experts made a calculation and say that 11 billion dollars in surplus that was not justified by a rectifying OGE. However, when the price of a barrel is low, the government is in a hurry to make the corrective OGE so that it can justify public spending, when it is high, it doesn't report and it's a lot of money ", he pointed out.
Adalberto Costa Júnior also regretted the environment of "persecutions, arrests and threats against citizens, after the elections, and even excessive use of force directed, including, to school children".
The President of the Republic, argued, "apparently he does not accompany the real country, (...) and on this whole matter an absolute silence".
"We do not live in a good environment of national political cohesion, of social, institutional cohesion, we started this legislative year with the ruling party to seize power in the National Assembly, to disrespect legislation and internal regulations of the parliament", he concluded.
Abel Chivukuvuku also criticized João Lourenço's speech to the Nation, which he classified as "an administrative speech".
"That's all he did, at no time did he tell the country how Angola is doing and that's why in these terms we can say that the head of state failed", he defended.
The President, he added, "also confessed that at the moment the regime does not yet have a program for the coming years, he explained that we are now going to start drawing up the program for the five-year period, after all there is absolutely no idea".
"Therefore, there is a lack of vision, a lack of political ambition for Angola, a lack of purpose", concluded Abel Chivukuvuku, one of the 90 deputies elected by UNITA for the 2022-2027 legislature.
The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) elected 124 of the 220 deputies that make up the National Assembly, whose first parliamentary year of the five-year period formally began on Saturday.
