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Portuguese Prime Minister Highlights Political Will of Mozambique and Portugal to Strengthen Cooperation

Portuguese Prime Minister Highlights Political Will of Mozambique and Portugal to Strengthen Cooperation

The Portuguese Prime Minister, António Costa, made last Friday, September 2nd, a positive assessment of the two-day official visit to Maputo and the V Luso-Moçambican Summit, highlighting the “great harmony and political will” of the two countries to strengthen cooperation.

“I think that this summit was frankly positive in all areas. From a political point of view, there is in fact great harmony and political will to strengthen cooperation between the two governments,” said António Costa, speaking to journalists to sum up his official visit to Mozambique, which ended last Friday.

And he considered that “from the political point of view, from the economic point of view, from the military and security point of view, [it] was clearly positive”.

At the end of a meeting with the Portuguese community at the Portuguese School of Mozambique in Maputo, the head of the Portuguese government noted that the economic and investment forum between Portugal and Mozambique, “had a large participation by Portuguese companies” and noted that the two countries had signed a set of new financial instruments to support investment by Portuguese companies here in Mozambique and also in the PALOP countries as a whole.

The Mozambican government also “gave a very strong message of desire that Portuguese companies come to Mozambique, invest in Mozambique, help Mozambique,” said the Portuguese prime minister.

“We have a new set of cooperation areas to develop and, above all, a common will, as I have not seen for a long time, of the Mozambican authorities, of the Portuguese authorities to work together to help develop Mozambique and also to strengthen the traditional friendship between our people and our countries,” he said.

In this assessment, António Costa also referred to “the international and security dimension, not only in bilateral cooperation from a military point of view”, but also because Portugal is part of the European Union and Mozambique is a member of SADC [Southern African Development Community], and together they can “unite these forces, for example, to face the challenge of terrorism in Cabo Delgado”.

“We lead the European Union mission here in Mozambique and we are together with the Mozambican authorities, with its SADC partners, with Rwanda, to provide an effective response to the terrorist threat in Cabo Delgado,” he said.

In his speech moments before, the Prime Minister left a “special word” for the Portuguese who are in Cabo Delgado.

“We have to continue mobilised, the international community, to support Mozambique in the fight against terrorism,” which is a “global threat,” he said.

In his speech, he also noted that “the best representatives of Portugal are each and every one of the Portuguese who live and work in Mozambique”.

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Pointing to the “continuous effort” that must be made to improve “the quality of consular services”, Costa stated that a “dream I would like to see come true” is to be able to have “a mobile phone consulate” and “permanent contact with the Portuguese authorities” using these devices.

And he specified that the aim is not to close consulates, but to give the opportunity to “do directly”, via mobile phones, that which does not need to be done in the consulate in person, “in order to reserve the consulate for that which it is effectively not possible to do remotely”.

Earlier, the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs, João Gomes Cravinho, noted that the Portuguese in Mozambique are 40,000 and constitute a community that “has given and continues to give so much to the country.

He added that 18 protocols were signed between the two countries during the 5th Luso-Moçambican Summit, agreements that “mark new stages in this relationship”.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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