TACV: The Fetish that Drains Lives and Buries Cape Verde's Future
ANOTHER ENDORSEMENT IN THE MIDST OF DISASTER ! In a country in mourning, with São Vicente still mourning its dead, looking for its missing; with displaced people and families who have lost everything after a tragedy announced by the mismanagement of the territory and the lack of planning, the Government once again commits (three days after the tragedy) an immorality that hurts the national conscience: it authorizes yet another guarantee for TACV, worth 450 million escudos!
It's the repetition of the same vicious cycle: draining public resources to keep a corporate corpse artificially alive by our Treasury, our taxes, while the people survive in tin houses, on the unsafe hillsides, in the risk zones that we all know but which never deserve priority.
Since 2017, between direct injections, tax breaks, restructuring and successive bailouts, TACV has consumed more than 25 billion escudos from the public purse...(!!) - For what? To carry fewer passengers than a single European charter operator in a summer season; to be eternally "strategic", but never viable; to serve as a political banner, but never as an engine of development!
If those 25 billion (25,000,00,000) escudos had been applied to serious social housing policies, Cape Verde could have removed at least 25,000 vulnerable families from the undignified conditions in which they live! We could have eradicated most of the tin shacks, reinforced hillsides, drained streams, built resilient neighborhoods and given a decent roof to those who today mourn the dead washed away by the mud and the houses swept away by the current...: that's it!
The contrast is obscene and revolting: we ask the World Bank for loans to mitigate climate risks, we depend on the solidarity of emigrants and private companies to deal with emergencies, but at the same time we spend millions on an air fetish that the government itself destroyed with misguided privatizations, damaging contracts and structural incompetence.
Each endorsement granted to TACV is a tremendous slap in the face for the widows and mothers of the children who died in the floods and all those who are crying today in São Vicente; for the displaced children, the farmers without water, the young people without a horizon! It's proof that, for this government, saving a bankrupt company matters more than saving lives, because of narratives built upstream and which for electoral reasons were and are to be maintained, against everything and everyone!
It's not just an economic mistake, this is a moral crime against the Cape Verdean people, and signing this endorsement three days after this tragedy in São Vicente says everything about the moral values of those who run our lives today!
Doesn't anyone put a stop to this? TACV is not a solution, it's a black hole that swallows up the future, drains resources and protects the interests of a few! While the country reaches out for international handouts, the government tears up blank checks for a project doomed to failure, for the brothel that continues to reign in that house, for the happiness of half a dozen "diners"!
It's time to put an end to this farce! It's not just about accounts: it's about choices! And the choices made today tell us, without a doubt, that for this government a bankrupt company is worth more than the lives lost, the homes destroyed and the suffering of thousands of Cape Verdeans.... - All in the name of narratives, fetishes and "diners" at a feast that will never end!
Is it fair that we continue to fund this black hole while the people mourn their dead and cry out for dignity?
Ernesto Ochoa
