Adalberto Costa Júnior, president of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), also said that this was a year of "successive battles, the return to political prisons of young activists and intimidation of all kinds".
"Attempts to suppress journalists' right to free expression, to vilify the rights of teachers and students for more dignified conditions and fairer salaries" also occurred, according to Costa Júnior, adding: "It was a year in which family farming continued to be forgotten and support to micro and small companies".
The UNITA leader considered that 2022 was marked by the closest electoral dispute in which "the winners gave in to avoid an unnecessary bloodbath". The post-electoral "bloodbath" was "projected" and pre-announced with the exhibition of "a portentous parade and public exhibition of military forces ready to act, to, among other purposes, silence the democratic forces of society by dozens of other years", stressed Adalberto Costa Júnior.
The president of UNITA, who was speaking at the year-end greetings ceremony in Luanda, referred that with commitment, dedication and courage, "despite the cheating", the party managed to "format, for the first time in 45 years, a parliament that withdrew the qualified majority of the MPLA".
"The regime was built on the culture of hegemony and the times point to the reform of mentalities and the I want everything, I can do everything, I command everything. For Angola, everything is possible by embracing the culture of dialogue and the unavoidable reform of the party State", stressed.
According to the leader of the "maninhos" party, because of an "inclusive vision, announced and explained" inside and outside the country, they obtained "in the name and in the interest of the democratic forces one of the most significant victories after the armed peace".
According to Adalberto Costa Júnior, UNITA and its partners from the United Patriotic Front (FPU) will not give up "demanding" that the President of the Republic be elected directly by the citizens and "not hitchhiking in parliamentary elections".
"We will not abdicate for an electoral administration that is equidistant from competitors, more transparent and credible. The CNE must, in this legislative cycle, be the target of priority reform measures, in order to put an end to institutional coups d'état", he pointed out. "We will not give up formatting, with interested social fringes, a broad effort to hold the municipal elections in 2023", he argued.
In his speech, he criticized the government's proposal to increase the number of municipalities, which should go from 164 to 581, considering that it aims to "change the electoral circles to better blur the urban protest vote, with administrative designs in which it is the ruler who intends to redirect the vote".
UNITA and its partners, he insisted, “will not abdicate from demanding an increase to two digits, achievable, of the General State Budget (OGE) for education and health and from demanding that the President be constitutionally limited in contracting debts without authorization from parliament and award contracts without transparent tendering".
For the president of UNITA, the country moves to 2023 carrying in its baggage the "belief that alternation in Angola" is within reach, provided that "the combination of the broadest efforts of society, eager for change and tired of endemic corruption" is reconfigured , the theft of state assets and resources".
"In 2023, we will have to have a better Angola for everyone. We have to say enough to the violations of individual freedoms and human rights, together, we will have to have created policies capable of reversing the escape route of the cadres, especially of the young people who are leave Angola after the elections", concluded Adalberto Costa Júnior.
