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year that the Angolan government continued blocking the expansion of the
transmission signal of Angola’s catholic
broadcaster, which continues to broadcast only to Luanda and surroundings.
By way of an ultimatum, this desire
was manifested in Luanda by the Archbishop of Lubango, D. Gabriel Bilingue,
who currently chairs the destinies of
the Episcopal Conference of Angola
and São Tomé (CEAST). Speaking at the
opening of the 2nd General Assembly of
CEAST, D. Bilingual said “I do not know,
but I very much hope that this is the last
year that our Rádio Ecclésia continues
to back-pedal here in Luanda without
it being possible to be heard throughout the whole of the national territory.
I consider this a continuing violation of
the rights of citizenship of our countrymen.” It was not the first time that
in this struggle the Catholic hierarchy
applies pressure directly on the government, but this time the more forceful
tone of the demand by the President of
CEAST was more noticeable.
Being always very difficult to confirm by independent sources, credible
official information in Angola in 2012
continued to obey a political control
that typically advises government officials not to open too much the doors
to the offices where any statistics is
produced, especially when it may be
less “sympathetic” to the image of the
Government.

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Luanda reflects well the inability of
government to find the most appropri-



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ate solutions to meet the serious challenges posed by urbanisation, resulting
from population flows that every day
discharge across its boundaries from
the interior of the country.
There is increasingly less effective
capacity to absorb this growing and
frightening demographic pressure, regardless of how much more public investment that is made in the capital,
how many more plans are drafted, how
many more law enforcement agents are
recruited, how many more campaigns
on civic education or to salvage moral
values are conducted. At a frantic pace,
Luanda is fast catching up with the
most problematic cities in the world.
What we will have (and we already have it) is a perfect urban chaos,
manifesting particularly in the gigantic
traffic jams that every day threaten to
paralyse the city and in the growing
belts of social misery with all its derivatives and consequences, of which crime
is obviously the more threatening and
destructive.

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