With the economy resenting and worsening already precarious living conditions, the ruling party in Angola for four decades will have to prove that it still manages to win over the people and give hope back to Angolans to win the general elections in 2022.
Speaking to Lusa, the president of the Union of Journalists, Teixeira Cândido, says that the MPLA will have to find solutions and offer more than fighting corruption to convince citizens to reelect the party and its president in 2022.
Although the fight against corruption is unprecedented - there have never been so many leaders, so many state employees facing the courts - says Teixeira Cândido, this process has a little immediate impact on the Angolan citizen "who is permanently accounting for life, having to choose between eating or treating themselves or educating their children ".
"The cost of living is so high that the basic issues are first, second, third and fourth priority," points out the journalist, stressing that the government and President João Lourenço will have to do "a miracle" to get around this situation.
"The biggest challenge is to know what this miracle will be to convince people and reduce the difficulties they face today and improve their living conditions", at a time when oil prices, the main Angolan export product, remain low and this is practically the only way to obtain the necessary currency to buy goods, from food to machines.
Teixeira Cândido defends, therefore, "a radical cut with useless expenses".
"For a country that uses half of the budget to pay public debt, I understand that the fundamental must be the quality of the expenses to give some relief for the State to focus on the structuring and key sectors", he commented.
The official acknowledges that the biggest problem is spending on quality, stressing that the direct and indirect administration of the State continues to spend "rivers of money" on unnecessary acquisitions, such as vehicles "for people who are appointed when they should take advantage of existing ones" or computers that "year after years" appear in the budget of the same unit.
He pointed to the construction of the new headquarters of the National Electoral Commission, a work estimated at around US $ 40 million, as an example of expenditure that is not a priority.
"In view of the fact that the State has recovered several buildings [in the context of the recovery of assets by judicial means] I think there is no need", he stressed, noting that the State has a deficit budget every year and is obliged to go into debt.
Asked about tensions with young people and the unemployment problem, Teixeira Cândido admits that the government is not expected to find solutions in just one year.
"The civil service is full, the state is no longer in a position to continue to employ, most of our entrepreneurs have virtually no capital, banks are unable to help the economy, foreign investment is the dropper because whoever wants to invest in Angola faces several difficulties in terms of infrastructure ", he pointed out, giving as an example the poor state of the roads.
In a pre-election year, and after the private media groups TV Zimbo, newspaper O Pais, Radio Mais, TV Palanca were delivered to asset recovery services and passed to the state sphere, Teixeira Cândido also foresees tensions in the media. .
"It is a pre-campaign period and the main stage will be the media," he said, saying that the public media will be under scrutiny by the opposition and civil society.
Teixeira Cândido defended that the public means "must be at the service of all, but the truth is that he has not treated everyone equally, it has not been like that". "Probably the media will be on the agenda for next year's big debates," he predicts.
