Member of the National Parliament MP Cesar Valente urged the government to honor the memory of all the fallen heroes of the resistance; not just one.
MP Valente raised the issue in relation to the statue of Nicolao Lobato, commissioned to be built by the government to honor his memory while the statues of fellow heroes Mau Lear, Nino Conis Santana, Mauhudu and other fallen heroes have not been built.
He says a monument to the five heroes should be built at the Lafatik roundabout in Comoro, in Dili.
“We always talk about the five heroes but people don’t really know who they are. We only know Nicolao Lobato,” said MP Valente at the National Parliament.
He says the Lafatik site at the roundabout in Comoro is the most strategic place to build the statues of the fallen heroes.
“I made a proposal in 2011, asking the Lafatik roundabout to be demolished and to place Nicolao Lobato’s statue there because it would be what people see first coming out of the Nicolao Lobato International Airport,” he said.
Meanwhile FRETILIN Bench MP Inacio Moreira criticized the Nicolao Lobato statue because the face of the statue did not look like the original face of the hero.
“The job of Parliamentary Majority Alliance and the Fifth Constitutional Government was to build the statue but is finding it difficult to finish,” MP Moreira said.
According to the MP the mistake happened because those who made the statue did not study the face of Nicolao Lobato properly before making the statue.
“They did a bad job and it is a waste of money,” added MP Moreira.
In the meantime the General Director of the National Development Agency (ADN) Samuel Marçal acknowledged the process of building the Nicolao Lobato statue has been slow but that it is about to be completed.
“We had to look not only at the face but also all the other technical aspects,” he said.
The statue was commissioned to a company in Jogya, in Indonesia, but the job had to be revised because the face did not resemble the face of hero Nicolao Lobato.
The statue will stand at approximately 12 meters high.
