Government and Lisbon City Council. Before consulting the caprice, consult the wallet
In Portugal, there is enormous folly with regard to the use of public money. We recently learned that the cost of the stage that the Pope will use at World Youth Day Lisbon 2023 will cost us a modest amount of 4.2 million euros, plus VAT and a further 1.06 million euros for the indirect roof foundations.
This was when the nightmare of spending compensation of half a million euros to a TAP administrator who happily bounced from public company to public company, until landing in the Government as Secretary of State for the Treasury, had not yet awakened.
Dear readers will ask what is the link between the cost of the Pope’s stage and the current government’s indemnity excesses.
Well, what brings the two cases together is an enormous lack of respect by the institutions (Lisbon City Council and the Government) for the country’s financial situation and the economic and social difficulties that a considerable part of the Portuguese population is experiencing. The CML’s attitude in allocating an amount of almost five million euros to the construction of a stage reveals the same social insensitivity as that practiced, also, in the reception of compensation of half a million euros to directors of public companies.
We don’t really know what goes through the minds of political leaders who seem to live in a world other than that of ordinary mortals who, on a daily basis, face the difficulties of everyday life.
When Lisbon City Council spent almost five million euros on a stage, perhaps it should have thought of the high number of homeless people who are increasingly proliferating throughout the city. It should also reflect on the housing reserves that the capital has, on the investments that need to be made to support the elderly. You should think more about the thousands of people from Lisbon who today live with food shortages and energy poverty.
But not! It follows the same spendthrift rule of the government with the receipt of millionaire indemnities to managers of public companies.
This is not understood in a country without money to increase teachers’ depleted salaries, to repair schools without acceptable operating conditions.
This wasteful and irresponsible attitude cannot be accepted in a country where health care clearly shows signs of abstraction, where doctors emigrate to the private sector because the government does not pay them enough to stay in public hospitals.
There are certainly priorities and institutions should be sensible and balanced in order to define as a priority the support and protection of the weakest and socially most unprotected. Or, quite simply, not to waste public money. A decent stage will cost 300-400 thousand euros. What is the need to spend five million euros even if, anxiously, this stage will receive the Web Summit? A stage that, given its cost, will surely make Pope Francis uncomfortable, known for his humble and frugal posture in life.
In the same way that nothing explains why the administrator of a public company receives half a million euros to transfer suitcases and luggage to another public company, it is also not acceptable that a stage for a Catholic celebration goes cream to all of us, Catholics or not. , almost five million euros.
Everything is difficult for the population to accept. What will the two million poor people without access to the most basic goods say?
It is urgent that there be some common sense and rationality in the use of public money. Otherwise, do not come after the governing parties, PS and PSD, to complain about the increase in populism and the growth of extremist forces that take advantage of this social insensitivity to assert themselves.
journalist