YELLOW CARD FOR THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND THE GOVERNMENT: EDUCATION IN MOZAMBIQUE BETWEEN DISARTICULATION, NEGLECT, AND THE REPRODUCTION OF INEQUALITY

There are moments in a nation's history when silence ceases to be prudence and becomes active complicity. There are times when the repetition of the same mistakes, always accompanied by bureaucratic justifications and reassuring speeches, transforms civic patience into moral surrender. Mozambican education has dangerously reached this point. Not because of an isolated episode, nor a specific administrative error, but because of a long, cumulative, and structural process of disarticulation, improvisation, and political negligence that, over decades, has been silently eroding the country's collective future. It is in this context that a yellow card must be firmly and with a sense of historical responsibility issued to the Ministry of Education and Human Development (MINED) and the Government of Mozambique for the painful management of a sector that should be treated as an absolute strategic priority, but which remains hostage to empty rhetoric and the absence of a concrete, coherent, and verifiable plan for the short, medium, and long term.

Throughout more than fifty years of independence, Mozambique has still not managed to consolidate a stable, predictable education system guided by a national vision of human development. What we observe is a succession of discontinuous reforms, often contradictory to each other, that are not anchored in a state strategy, but in political cycles and reactive responses to immediate crises. Education, instead of being conceived as a structural investment, has been managed as an administrative expedient, vulnerable to improvisation and decisions disconnected from social reality.

One of the clearest indicators of this lack of strategic vision is the chronic curricular instability. Since 1975, the curricula for primary, general secondary, and technical-professional education have been altered numerous times. Reforms occurred in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, with renewed force after 2004, and were revised again in 2015 and adjusted once more in subsequent years. In many cases, these changes occurred without rigorous evaluation of the impacts of previous reforms, without widely disseminated independent studies, and without the effective participation of teachers in the curriculum design process. This instability generates a system that is permanently in transition, where nothing is consolidated and everything seems provisional.

The consequences of this instability are profound and lasting. Teachers are systematically forced to adapt to new programs, new thematic plans, new methodologies, and new evaluation criteria, often without adequate training, sufficient materials, and pedagogical time for assimilation. Many teachers find themselves forced to implement curricula with which they do not fully identify, not because of resistance to change, but because they were not involved in their development and because they simultaneously face profoundly demotivating salary conditions. The chronic precariousness of education professionals' remuneration exacerbates this scenario, creating an environment of professional alienation in which constant adaptation is demanded without offering material dignity or institutional recognition.

The fragility of the education system is also glaringly evident in the poor quality of school infrastructure. In vast areas of the country, especially in rural and peri-urban regions, schools operate without adequate classrooms, with overcrowded classes, without libraries, without laboratories, without regular access to drinking water, and without basic sanitation. In some contexts, children learn sitting on the floor or outdoors, exposed to sun and rain. This situation not only undermines the quality of education but also conveys a powerful symbolic message: public education is not treated as a space of excellence, but as a space for survival.

It is in this context that the recurring use of schools as accommodation centers for victims of floods and other natural disasters becomes particularly revealing. Although solidarity in times of emergency is necessary and humane, the recurrence of this practice reveals a serious structural problem. Schools are cyclically transformed into shelters, interrupting the school calendar and reinforcing the perception that, in state planning, these spaces serve more as emergency infrastructure than as places of excellence for education. This pattern helps explain the continued neglect of the maintenance and enhancement of schools, as if the system already tacitly accepted that education can always wait.

The institutional fragility of the Ministry of Education is further confirmed by scandals that erode the credibility of the education system. The serious spelling errors found in official school textbooks, distributed nationally, are not mere technical lapses; they are symptoms of profound flaws in the processes of scientific review, pedagogical validation, and quality control. When the State itself provides children with teaching materials riddled with basic errors, it compromises not only learning but also the symbolic authority of knowledge.

Even more serious was the case of the premature circulation of ninth-grade exams outside the official system, before they were even administered. This episode, along with other similar scandals that have occurred over the years, exposed the vulnerability of security mechanisms, the ethical fragility of educational management, and the institutional inability to guarantee equal opportunities. Ultimately, these episodes reinforce the perception that the system does not protect merit, but tolerates practices that favor some at the expense of many.

The cruelest and most revealing paradox of this institutional disarray manifested itself in the management of high school and university entrance exams held at the height of the rainy season. While several regions of the country faced severe flooding, cut-off roads, and a transportation crisis exacerbated by road degradation, thousands of candidates were forced to travel to the exam locations. Many came from flooded areas, had to face long distances, real risks to their physical safety, and enormous personal sacrifices to be present. Others, especially poor children and young people, simply could not reach the exam centers and saw their dreams postponed not due to a lack of intellectual capacity, but due to material exclusion.

The decision by the Ministry of Education and the supervisory institutions not to postpone these exams constitutes one of the clearest examples of social insensitivity and detachment from the concrete reality of the country. The contrast becomes even more disturbing when, shortly afterwards, the same Ministry of Education decided to postpone the start of classes throughout the national territory. This is a generalized measure that ignored regional differences, since in many areas conditions had already been restored, schools were ready, and students were able to begin the school year. This inconsistency reveals improvisation, a lack of clear criteria, and profoundly disjointed management.

This set of practices highlights the structurally unequal nature of the Mozambican education system. The children of the political and economic elites, to a large extent, do not study in the country. Those who remain attend private schools with foreign curricula, modern methodologies, and incomparably superior conditions. Meanwhile, the children of the poor are left with a fragile, unstable, and devalued public system, where extraordinary effort is required to achieve even minimal results. Education, which should be an instrument of social emancipation, thus becomes a mechanism for reproducing inequality, preparing global elites and forming local masses destined for subservience.

This yellow card is, therefore, a serious and urgent warning. It is not empty rhetoric or a gratuitous attack, but a call to historical responsibility. To continue treating education as political discourse, as a space for improvisation, and as secondary infrastructure is to kill the country's future slowly and surgically. Without a clear, participatory, and long-term educational plan; without curricular stability; without real appreciation for teachers; without decent infrastructure; and without socially just decisions, Mozambique will continue to compromise entire generations. The yellow card has been issued. Ignoring it will make the red card inevitable, and the consequences will be irreversible.