Pedro Sebastião was responding in parliament to concerns about Angolan nationals in Turkey, waiting for a flight home, as expressed André Mendes de Carvalho ‘Miau’ of the oppositio CASA-CE coalition.
According to Sebastião, in Lisbon alone there are more than 4,000 people waiting to return to Angola, and in the city of Porto a further 1,000-plus.
“In Brazil, we have more than 1,500 citizens waiting to return, in the city of Havana we have about 270 passengers, not to mention nearby [here], Kinshasa, or South Africa, in Johannesburg, where there are more than 1,200 passengers,” he said.
Angola’s government has stressed that the authorities are doing everything in their power, through the country’s diplomatic missions abroad, to “ensure, as far as possible, so that these citizens are not abandoned”.
In the case of Turkey nationals in that country are being overseen by the embassy, “which has housed them and is taking care of them,” stressed Sebastião, adding that this does not mean that this is all the government intends to do.
“There are other attitudes, gestures that the government is making in order to minimise the difficulties that these our citizens who are scattered around the world – as Angolans know, they travel a lot, there are people almost everywhere in the world,” he said. “We should give equal treatment to these citizens, who were taken by surprise where they were at the time of the declaration of the state of emergency.”
Parliament earlier unanimously approved the government’s proposal to renew for a further 15 days, from midnight on 11 April until midnight on 25 April, the state of emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The disease has already claimed two lives in Angola, out of a total of 19 positive cases of infection, two of which have seen the patients recover.
The first phase of the state of emergency, which began on 27 March, ends at midnight on 11 April.
Covid-19 has caused 572 deaths in Africa and there are 11,400 cases registered in 52 countries in the continent, while 1,313 people have recovered, according to the latest data.
The new coronavirus, responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, has already infected more than 1.5 million people worldwide, of whom more than 87,000 have died. Of the cases of infection, some 280,000 are considered cured.
After the outbreak broke out in China in December, it spread worldwide, leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic situation.