Luanda – Angolan President, João Lourenço, on Thursday said he is satisfied with the performance of the Media in the country, recognising, however, that there is still a long way to go to achieve the necessary improvement.
Speaking in a joint press conference with public and private media, the Angolan Head of State said he is proud of the performance of the Media in the country.
"I am satisfied. We have a good Media that makes us very proud. Just like other sectors of the country that also haven't reached perfection yet, because it is a long process, but someday we’ll have the Media that the country really deserves," President Lourenço said.
The Media is currently in a transition phase, reminding that for a decade only public press organizations functioned in Angola.
As regards the private television broadcaster TV Zimbo, João Lourenço informed that it is an asset that was recovered in the scope of an ongoing investigation process conducted by the Angolan State.
The president assured that the State will eventually do what it promised and remove this organ from its sphere.
In the meantime, the Angolan president said there are other assets recovered as part of the fight against corruption which for various reasons have not yet been re-privatized.
From the total of 180 countries and territories evaluated by the Paris-based organization for the defence of press freedom, Angola ranked 99th, with 55.17 points. In 2017, it ranked 125th.
After 2017 when João Lourenço took office following the general elections, Angola experienced its greatest leap in the subsequent two years (2018 and 2019) moving up 12 steps.
In more concrete terms, it recorded a growth of 7.5 percent points in its quality of press freedom indicator and closed the year 2020 with 66.1 points.
At the time, the general opinion was almost unanimous in seeing such developments as a sequence of the openness experimented in the early moments of the new era, whose results deserved wide recognition both internally and externally.
Indeed, Angola went from 121st place in 2018 to 109th the following year, before successively occupying the 106th position in 2020 and 103rd in 2021.
At the level of the African Portuguese speaking countries, Angola was the only one to rise in the ranking. Guinea-Bissau lost five places and Mozambique one, while Cabo Verde maintained its position.
