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Mozambique: Cavaco Silva Addresses Parliament
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
25 March 2008
Posted to the web 25 March 2008
Maputo
Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva on Tuesday told the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, that the purpose of his three day state visit is "to help identify the sectors in which both countries can draw most advantage from their complementarities, and get Portuguese and Mozambicans to discuss ways to strengthen their bilateral cooperation, and their joint action internationally in defence of the interests that we share".
Addressing a special session of the Assembly, Cavaco Silva claimed that "the current internal context of Portugal and of Mozambique, as well as the stage of development of our bilateral political relationship could not be more favourable to deepening our cooperation".
He praised Mozambique for its preparedness "to respond to the challenges it has to face in the globalised world we live in", as shows by its strong economic growth over the past decade.
Cavaco Silva claimed that in the European Union Portugal has always raised African concerns, and thus regards itself as a "privileged interlocutor of Africa in Europe". He regarded last December's Europe-Africa summit in Lisbon as "the corollary of intensive political and diplomatic effort that Portugal thought was indispensable in order to promote greater approximation between the two continents".
He thought that the adoption of a "Joint Strategy" in Lisbon, "for the first time drawn up in effective partnership", was "an unquestionable qualitative change in the relationship between our continents and a solid basis for our future cooperation".
He failed to mention that the Lisbon summit was overshadowed by the dispute over the presence of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Despite the European Union ban on Mugabe setting foot on EU soil, the Portuguese authorities went ahead and invited him, thus precipitating a boycott by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Cavaco Silva had no doubt that "Europe and Africa need each other, and deepening their strategic partnership will increasingly be an indispensable vector for promoting a more just and stable international order".
He also laid a strong stress on promoting the Portuguese language - indeed Cavaco Silva's next appointment was at a symposium organised by Portuguese and Mozambican academic institutions with the grandiose title: "Portuguese: Global Language".
He claimed that Portugal and Mozambique have "a shared responsibility to defend and promote the Portuguese language in the international sphere". He boasted that Portuguese is now "the common legacy of eight sovereign states, and of more than 220 million people spread across four continents".
The figure looks less impressive when one realizes that the vast majority of these 220 million people are Brazilians, and that four of the eight countries (East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe) have between them a population of less than four million.
And although Mozambique uses Portuguese as its official language, the majority of Mozambicans speak little or no Portuguese. The 1997 census found that only 6.5 per cent of Mozambicans gave Portuguese as their mother tongue. Of the population aged five and above, only 4.8 million said they could speak Portuguese, The other 7.46 million could not.
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The full figures from the 2007 census are not yet available. Certainly the expansion in education over the past decade will have increased the number of Portuguese speakers, but it is doubtful whether Mozambique can be described as "Lusophone" in anything other than the official sense.
Cavaco Silva did acknowledge that "the status of Portuguese goes alongside the dignity of the other languages in which Mozambique expresses itself". Nonetheless, he said he believed that promoting the Portuguese language was "a vital strategic interest for all of us", and the Portuguese authorities would regard it as one of their priorities when they took over the presidency of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) in the second half of this year.
"The challenge I am launching as from now is that we should reflect, together, on the path to follow so that we increasingly affirm our language in the international context, making it a trump faced with the challenges that the globalised world brings us, challenges that we must all respond to", declared Cavaco Silva.
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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