Angolan President recognises negative impact of Covid-19

 The President of the Republic, João Lourenço, Tuesday admitted that hopes of restructuring the national economy "will not come true in the near future" because of the constraints posed by the Covid-19.

PRESIDENT JOÃO LOURENÇO ADDRESSES 75 UN SESSION BY VIDEOCONFERENCe

Speaking at the general debate of the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Angolan head of state said that the pandemic had affected the country's economy, paralysing vital services.

According to Joao Lourenço, Covid-19 disarticulated the production chain, affected the prices of the main export products and triggered rather high levels of unemployment, a worrying social situation.

"Our hopes of starting to obtain positive results after the effort to restructure the national economy, carried out in a context in which we had to apply difficult measures and with a rather harsh impact on the lives of the populations, will not be fulfilled soon", he expressed.

According to the Angolan President, the resources available to finance the productive sector of the Angolan economy, within the logic of its recovery, had to be diverted, given the current context, to meet the needs of biosafety and other urgent epidemiological needs.

"In this context we were obliged to create centres very quickly to house people in institutional quarantine throughout the country, to equip national hospitals with essential equipment for medical emergencies linked to Covid-19," he said.

He also said that the authorities had to set up hospital centres with capacity to deal with a possible outbreak of the pandemic and other related structures in Angola.

This global health problem, Lourenço said, had paralysed the whole dynamic that had been forecast in terms of a recovery of the world economy, which after the economic crisis, which began in 2008, was showing encouraging signs of recovery, particularly in developing countries, such as Angola.

The Head of State also highlighted the solidarity support of other countries, international organisations, companies and national and foreign non-governmental organisations, as well as individual citizens who helped to mitigate the impact of the pandemic in Angola.

"This human virtue, which has always been useful at such critical moments as this, helps a lot, although it is not always enough to mitigate the problems we face, as a result of situations as complex as the ones we face today," he stressed.

In this regard, the Angolan statesman praised the G20 initiative, which showed great sensitivity to the need for collective action to alleviate the debt of developing countries, in order to alleviate the burden of responsibility on that group of countries.