Luanda - The President of the Republic, João Lourenço, is travelling Wednesday to Angola’s northern province of Zaire to closely learn about the political, economic and social situation in the region.
President João Lourenço will chair a meeting with the provincial government of Zaire, during which he will get in touch with the detailed report on the socio-economic life of the province, to be presented by the governor, Adriano Mendes de Carvalho.
The meeting will be attended by ministers who will respond to the sectoral concerns that are presented by the local government, and then President João Lourenço will visit the construction works of the provincial hospital.
Launched in 2014, the construction works of the Zaire Provincial Hospital, an imposing three-story building, resumed in June 2022, after having been stopped for long time, and are expected to be completed next year.
The hospital will be a differentiated health unit, with a capacity for 290 beds and will include intensive care services for adults, paediatrics and neonatal, haemodialysis, rehabilitation, imaging, operating rooms, among others.
The infrastructure is located on the outskirts of the city of Mbanza Congo. It has an area of 27,000 square meters and budgeted at about USD 87 million and 850 thousand. The company VAMED is responsible for completing the work.
About Zaire province
Inhabited since the Paleolithic period, the province of Zaire, flat and bathed by rivers that make it especially fertile and facilitate communication, was already making history before the arrival of the first Europeans, at the end of the fifteenth century.
The then Kingdom of Kongo, founded in 1390 and which would be an independent state until 1857, was ruled by the Menekongo dynasty, and its capital, M'banza-Congo, was the largest and most organized city in subequatorial Africa.
When, in 1482, the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão arrived on the Angolan coast and landed at the mouth of the Zaire River, Nzinga a Nkuwu reigned, who received the foreigners in M'banza-Congo, as friends, even converting to Christianity, taking the name of Afonso I.
With lands and a climate favorable to the cultivation of tropical products and animal husbandry, waters rich in fish, quality wood and beautiful and surprising scenery waiting to delight visitors, Zaire depends, above all, on the exploitation of oil, the main resource of the region.
With the election of the historic center of the city of M'banza-Congo as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, the province now has a new pole of attraction that can boost tourism in the region.
Zaire is one of the ten provinces of Angola with international borders (Democratic Republic of the Congo). It extends over 40,130 km2, inhabited by about 500 thousand inhabitants.
It is subdivided into six municipalities: M'banza Congo, Cuimba, Noqui, Nzeto, Soyo and Tomboco. The capital of the province is M'banza-Congo which was once the capital of the powerful Kingdom of Congo.ART/DOJ
