Yellow Card to the Mozambican State: What Leads a Government to Abandon the Noble Function of Healing and Teaching?

This week's Yellow Card rises with the force of a collective cry, directed at the Mozambican state, at a time when the country is going through one of its most unsettling crises in its two fundamental pillars: health and education. This is not just a nurses' strike or a silent teachers' work stoppage. It is something deeper, more structural, more disturbing. It is a state that seems to have chosen silence as its response, indifference as its method, and the normalization of collapse as its strategy.

The nurses' strike, which is dragging on dangerously in a critical sector, is not a corporate whim. The class's list of demands speaks of basic working conditions, payment for accumulated overtime, fair professional classification, adequate supply of medicines and hospital equipment, career review, and institutional respect. From now on, we need to understand that these are not luxury demands, but minimum requirements so that those who care for life can do so with dignity, and to consider such demands unfair is nonsense. When a government allows a strike of this nature to last so long, it is sending an unequivocal message: public health can wait because we have more important agendas.

But who loses out? It's the mothers who arrive at maternity wards and find reduced services, making childbirth no longer a certainty. It's the elderly who wait for appointments that never come, and death seems more certain. It's the children who lack medication and whose growth is put at risk. Meanwhile, the official discourse insists on painting a picture of normality, as if the hospitals weren't exhausted, as if the shortage of professionals and resources were just a passing noise. The silence of the authorities is not neutral; it's a political choice by those who know that their relatives will be treated in luxury clinics or, if necessary, abroad at the expense of the same state that is witnessing the collapse of the national health system.

Meanwhile, education, as the foundation for training tomorrow's professionals, is also heading towards a discreet but devastating collapse. The glaring silent strike by teachers in the National Education System, as well as the rampant exodus of the best professionals from this sector, reveals not only a demoralized class, tired of unfulfilled promises. For almost a decade they have been demanding overtime pay, salary adjustments, minimum working conditions, and curricular stability. In return, they receive disdain, minimization, and sometimes insinuations of ingratitude.

What can be expected from an education system where teachers enter the classroom unmotivated, feeling ignored by the very state that should be protecting them? Poor education is not just the absence of content; it is the erosion of the teacher's moral authority, the instability of the curriculum that changes according to external pressures, and the lack of consistent investment. When programs are abruptly reformulated, often aligned with the demands of international partners, without adequate preparation, the result is pedagogical confusion and generations educated in uncertainty.

While public services deteriorate, the business of private clinics, private hospitals, health insurance companies, and private schools and universities grows remarkably. The middle class, perceiving the deterioration of the public system, begins to abandon the state system. Those who can afford it pay. Those who cannot, resign themselves. What should be a right becomes a commodity.

It is legitimate to question: are we witnessing a silent process of pushing healthcare and education into the private sector? By allowing public services to weaken, the State creates fertile ground for the expansion of the private sector. This is not about demonizing private investment, which has its role in a mixed economy. The issue is different: when basic services cease to be universally accessible and become dependent on the ability to pay, inequality ceases to be a side effect and becomes an indirect public policy.

In a poor country with enormous regional and social inequalities, the progressive privatization of such sensitive sectors can have profound consequences. An elitist healthcare system means that the probability of surviving an illness will depend on income. An elitist education system means that the quality of education will be linked to the family's economic power. This solidifies social classes, reduces mobility, and fuels frustration. Poorly educated young people, without prospects, become vulnerable to radical rhetoric. Social instability ceases to be an abstract risk.

There is also an international backdrop that cannot be ignored. For decades, Mozambique relied on strategic partnerships with Nordic countries that directly supported the state budget, with a special focus on health and education. These partnerships have been dwindling, partly due to crises of confidence, partly due to changes in global priorities. At the same time, donors and international financial institutions have insisted on reducing the so-called "bloated state," rationalizing public spending, and ensuring fiscal sustainability.

The question that arises is unsettling: to what extent is the compression of investment in social sectors not aligned with external demands for fiscal consolidation? When spending is cut or frozen in areas such as health and education, the impact on the quality of services is immediate. If the state shrinks, someone else takes its place. And that someone, almost always, is the market.

But health and education are not just lines in a budget. They are fundamental rights. They are long-term investments. A government that considers them "unproductive" because they don't generate direct profit is making a strategic mistake. A nation's productivity is also measured by the quality of its human capital. A country that does not invest seriously in the education and well-being of its population is mortgaging its future.

The current stance reveals something deeper: a disconnect between the official narrative and lived reality. While reports speak of reforms and progress, wards lack gloves and syringes, classrooms lack books and motivation. The insistence on pretending that everything is under control can be more dangerous than admitting difficulties. Because denial prevents correction.

The growth of health insurance companies is another telling indicator. Each new contract signed by a middle-class family represents a vote of no confidence in the public system. Each student who migrates to a private university is a sign that state higher education is no longer seen as a guarantee of quality. The state seems to be watching this exodus with worrying passivity.

This yellow card is not a gratuitous attack. It is a warning. The continuation of this trajectory could produce a fragmented country: a minority with access to excellent services and a majority dependent on a precarious state minimum. This not only exacerbates poverty but also erodes national cohesion.

In a context of economic challenges, it is understandable that the government faces constraints. But leadership is measured precisely by the ability to protect the most vulnerable sectors in times of crisis. Allowing strikes in critical areas to continue without a robust solution conveys the idea that people's lives and futures can be negotiated or postponed.

Curriculum instability in education, often presented as modernization, can mask external pressures to align teaching with global models of efficiency. However, reforms imposed without dialogue and without adequate investment generate more confusion than progress. Education is not reformed solely through decrees; it is reformed with motivated teachers, decent infrastructure, and a strategic vision.

What do we ultimately want for these sectors? A minimal regulatory state that transfers responsibilities to the market and limits itself to offering residual services to the poorest? Or a state committed to universality and quality? The answer to this question will define the country in the coming decades.

To the Government of Mozambique, this yellow card is given: not for the existence of difficulties, but for the way it has managed them. For its indifference to the nurses' demands, which represent the dignity of those who save lives. For its negligence in the face of the demotivation of teachers, who shape future generations. For its silence that sounds like consent in the face of the growing elitism of essential services.

There is still time to reverse course. We must engage in serious dialogue with professional groups, prioritize social investment even in a context of austerity, rebuild international partnerships based on transparency and trust, and above all, recognize that health and education are not disposable expenses, but fundamental to sovereignty.

If the state washes its hands of the matter, as if shirking responsibility, it will be condemning the poorest to forced mediocrity and dependence on minimal services. And a country that accepts this as normal is losing something more than hospitals and schools; it is losing its very idea of ​​nationhood.