This Wednesday, the President of the Republic spoke about the history of Portugal and the current reality of the country to Portuguese students from South Africa, in connection with which he remembered his former student António Costa, “brilliant” but “learned little”.
These references to António Coste were made by Marcelo Rebelo de Souza in a class with Portuguese language students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, in which he participated with the Prime Minister after both had visited Camões, the Portuguese Language Centre.
Marcelo Rebelo de Souza made the first speech in English containing a summary of the history of Portugal and the country today. But the audience cheered up when the President of the Republic mentioned his previous work as a professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Lisbon and the student António Costa who was by his side.
“When the prime minister was a student, he was my student at 19. He was already smart, bright and enterprising, very active. He studied very little, most of the time he was involved in politics, ”he said. , head of state.
António Costa even made a gesture to imply that from his point of view, things with him when he was a student were not quite like that. But Marcelo Rebelo de Souza continued: António Costa “scored 17 points out of 20”.
“In Portugal, the maximum is 20, which is very good for those who have not studied anything,” commented the President of the Republic, causing laughter in the hall.
Later, at the same meeting, the President of the Republic tried to convey to the Prime Minister the answer to one of the questions asked by the students, but António Costa rejected it: “I did not study,” he declared, hearing laughter again in the hall.
In his speech at Wits University, where former South African President and leader of the resistance to the “apartheid” Nelson Mandela studied, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa defended the thesis to Portuguese students that “Portugal is only outwardly small.”
“This is the oldest European country, almost 900 years old. But when we talk about the sea, which is under our jurisdiction, it is almost 20 times the known size of our territory. And in the future it will be 40 times, because our continental shelf will be expanded. It’s a completely different view of Portugal,” he said.
In terms of the number of inhabitants, the head of state said, there are 10 million people inside the country, but 12 million Portuguese live 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.
“There is at least one country on every continent where Portuguese is spoken. We belong to the whole clade. Portuguese is the second most spoken language in the southern hemisphere and second in the digital world after English and before Spanish,” he said. , saying that this result is due to Brazil. “They are crazy about digital technology,” he commented.
As for the country of today, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa believes that Portugal “is a pioneer in the field of clean energy”, hosts a web summit and has a record number of “startups” with eight “unicorns”, technology companies with capital in excess of thousands of millions of dollars.
“We had to face four challenges at the same time: the end of the empire, the last European one; democratic transition; economic and social change: and integration into the then European Economic Community. In 12 years, we have done what important European economies have done. 50 years from now,” he added.