The President of the Republic spoke this Wednesday about the history of Portugal and the current reality of the country with South African Portuguese students, taking the opportunity to remember his “brilliant” former student António Costa, who “studied little” .
These references to António Costa were made by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in a session with Portuguese language students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburgin which he participated together with the Prime Minister, after both had visited the Camões – Portuguese Language Center.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa made a first intervention in English, the language he used to make a short summary of the history of Portugal and the current country. But the audience cheered when the President of the Republic referred to his previous activities as a professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon and to the student António Costa, who stood by his side.
“When the Prime Minister was a student, he was my student, at the age of 19. He was already smart, smart and proactive, very active. He studied very little, he was mostly involved in politics,” he stated. the head of state.
Later in the session, the statesman spoke at Wits University, where former South African president and leader of resistance to the “apartheid regime,” Nelson Mandela, studied for the students, defending the statement that “Portugal alone apparently is the small in size”.
“It is the oldest European country, almost 900 years old. But when we talk about the sea that we have under our jurisdiction, it is almost 20 times the known size of our territory. And it will be 40 times in the future , because our continental shelf will be widened. This is yet another very different way of seeing Portugal,” he insisted.
In terms of population, the head of state said, the national territory has 10 million, but there are 12 million Portuguese abroad and they are in every country in the world, “here in South Africa, the third largest community after France and Brazil , then South Africa”.
“On every continent there is at least one country where Portuguese is spoken. We are everywhere. Portuguese is the second most spoken language in the southern hemisphere and second in the digital world, behind English and ahead of Spanish,” he pleaded, saying that this result is due to Brazil. “They love digital,” he noted.
Regarding the country today, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa considered that Portugal is “a pioneer in clean energy”, hosts the Web Summit and has a record number of “startups”, with eight “unicorns”, technology companies with a capital of more than a billion dollars.
“We faced four challenges at once: the end of an empire, the last European; the democratic transition; economic and social change: and integration into the then European Economic Community. In 12 years we did what major European economies did in 50 years he added.
Source: DN
