Commander Rui Nabeiro, who would have turned 92 on the 28th of March, left us suddenly before reaching this beautiful age.
I had the honor of taking the floor at the last tribute paid to him, on the 10th, by the Order of Economists.
The Comendador was a citizen of the world who embodied the soul of what we are, in the group he created, with four thousand workers, operating in dozens of world markets.
In the collective imagination, Campo Maior is linked to Comendador, an innovative, humanist and supportive businessman, an example for several generations.
It is important, in the current world scenario, hedonistic and uncertain, to reflect on what it represented, how it made the Group that created from almost nothing grow, in an open universe without borders.
The nature of the objectives he set his shoulders to create what he created, with a vision of the future, interconnected economic purposes of wealth creation with social ones at Grupo Delta.
Working from sunrise to sunset from an early age, suitable for playing, he set a course for the project, incompatible with navigation at the whim of the tide and erratic pragmatism.
With no experience in the military art, he conducted a strategy from Campo Maior, summoning more and more fellow countrymen to combat, extending his influence on the ground by extending his objectives to noble causes.
From city to city he conquered the country, treating his workers with emotional closeness, which is compatible with a leadership based on the legitimacy of authority, consented, desired and accepted.
Years ago, at a lunch I had in Campo Maior, when he returned to the table after a temporary absence, he maintained the wide smile of “those who love life have everything”, justifying that the interruption was due to the fact that he had gone to speak to a worker always assiduous who had entered the service late.
Then, with thousands of workers, I realized that this gesture demonstrated that any one of them was more than a service provider, a person integrated into a common project.
The Alice Nabeiro Educational Center also responded, therefore, to the needs of workers’ children, an objective that, being of the State, it embraced, which large companies omit.
Past business policies were lost, which is why the Delta Group, by consolidating humanist complicities, should serve as an incentive for SMEs, among us the majority.
Nova Delta is now the owner of the largest roasting plant in the country, having diversified its activity into automotive retail, viticulture, real estate and hotels, it is the leader in Iberia in coffee and aims to place the brand in the top ten in the world.
With the determination of someone who knows that the goal is preceded by obstacles, he overcame them, from family dramas to armed conflicts, such as the one that occurred in Angola, at independence, when, in order to carry out a coffee business, he stayed in the territory for months, in a adverse scenario, ending up realizing it among the shrapnel.
For all this, the Commander was an example for the business community and in this new world for politics.
The thing is, the EU, after deindustrializing itself, started to claim reindustrialization as a priority, which is also happening in Portugal.
The Comendador did not need to invoke Santa Bárbara when he thundered because he conceived a strategic sense for the Group that he would end up creating.
This teaching is important since, for reasons of inattention to national designs, the country has decapitated profitable public strategic companies, ceasing to have control over them.
When listening to macroeconomic statistics discussed in debates, I see that the conclusions they draw are different because numbers have no soul and when tortured they respond as we wish.
Unemployment hides, for example, the emigration of the most qualified, housing the absence of it, justice the lack of access by the most disadvantaged.
This does not happen with the Portuguese group of Comendador because, as the poet Sebastião da Gama said, “it is for the dream that we go”.
For all of us, at this time, thank you Commander.