LAM: The Crisis That Comes with a Boarding Pass

Luís Júnior"

LAM ceased to be an airline long ago and became a flying metaphor for national disorder. Today, when we buy a ticket with Mozambique Airlines, we're not guaranteeing a trip, but rather acquiring the right to enter the draw for disorganization: chronic delays, planes that look more like museum pieces, and management that continues to be heavier than the fuselage.

The ironic thing is that everyone feigns surprise at this decades-long turmoil. They talk about "restructuring," "capital injections," and "saving the company," as if this were the first time they'd tried to revive the corpse. The problem is that with each "rescue," the hole gets deeper, the planes older, and the passengers more exhausted.

LAM is a company living in a permanent state of emergency, yet it continues to sell the illusion of being a "flagship." They just don't say what the flag is: incompetence or stubbornness in refusing to accept that aviation doesn't survive on rhetoric and subsidies alone.

And, meanwhile, we remain hostage to a thinly disguised monopoly. There's no serious competition, no reliable alternative. Those who need to travel have to surrender to the game: paying dearly for a cheap service. And, when the flight is canceled, the airline offers excuses that should already be registered as part of the nation's intangible heritage.

LAM is not in crisis. The crisis is LAM itself. And while they insist on treating it as a cyclical problem, rather than a structural one, we will continue to travel on promises alone, with a mandatory stopover in frustration.

2025/12/3