Public Health in a Coma: The Government Prescribes Lies

Luís Júnior"

The President said: “The hospitals are stocked with medicines.” He said it with the naturalness of someone speaking to a sleeping audience, anesthetized by years of recycled promises. He said it with the confidence of someone who believes that repeating a lie in a solemn tone is enough to transform it into the truth. But on the other side of the teleprompter, reality bleeds. The morning after his triumphalist speech, the Association of United and Solidary Health Professionals of Mozambique (APSUSM), through its president Anselmo Machave, broke the protocol of silence. With courage and data, he denied what many citizens already feel in their bones: public health is in an induced coma due to a State that insists on prescribing lies. This is nothing new for those who depend on the public system. Perhaps a surprise only for those who live surrounded by advisors and move between rehearsed inaugurations and hospitals made up for the official photo. What APSUSM did was an act of courage in a country where disagreeing with the President can be equivalent to signing one's own professional sentence. The union dared to say what thousands of doctors and nurses whisper in the hallways: there are no medicines. And what's more — there is a cynical attempt to mask reality with fabricated speeches by advisors who have never set foot in a health clinic without an entourage. Patients are crowded together, professionals are exhausted, births are carried out using mobile phones, nurses are improvising treatments with what is left. But, according to the head of state, everything is in place. A statement that does not misinform — it dehumanizes. The institutional lie about health is not only immoral. It is lethal. When the State announces normality, while the people agonize in endless lines, it is not a failure of communication — it is a political crime. And worse: it is a pact of silence between those who know and those who pretend not to see. Governments come, promises go. Precariousness remains. Hospitals continue to be waiting rooms for death. Management continues to serve interests that are not those of the people. And speeches like the one by the President are not declarations of leadership — they are diagnoses of decadence. The courage of APSUSM in denying the official discourse should not be seen as an affront, but as a public service. Because someone needed to say it: the country is sick. And what is killing us is not just malaria or cholera — it is political indifference, the normalization of collapse, the State prescribing words when it should urgently need to provide care. The system is designed to fail the poorest. Those who have money flee to private clinics. Those who do not, die slowly, suffocated by protocols and promises. Public health, which should be the pillar of social justice, has become an administrative graveyard. The rhetoric about “national priority” does not withstand an unescorted visit to any district health center. There are questions that will not be silenced, but that remain unanswered: where are the medicines? Where did the millions that health consumes in each budget go? Who profits from the chaos? And why does the President lend himself to such a cruel role as denying evidence that screams from every overcrowded ward? Lying about public health is an act of contempt. It is not just cynicism — it is cruelty disguised as management. And the most perverse thing is that this act costs lives. It costs children buried for lack of penicillin. It costs mothers lost for lack of transfusions. It costs sleepless nights to those who swore to save lives but do not even have the basics to try. This is not alarmism. This is the naked, raw and painful truth. The common citizen, the one who is not greeted with bows in hospitals, lives this truth every day. And if the President really wants to understand the state of the nation, he should step down from the pulpit, abandon his role and enter a hospital in Mecanhelas, Mueda or Marromeu alone. He will not find statistics – he will find corpses waiting for justice. Mozambican public health does not need speeches, it needs reforms. It needs clean management, real policies, smart investment and transparency. It needs a government that looks in the mirror and admits: it failed. And that stops insulting the people's intelligence with polite statements. The country is tired of propaganda pills. Tired of hearing that everything is fine, when everything smells of decay. Tired of knowing that death can come not from lack of treatment, but from too many lies. The President does not owe explanations only to Parliament or to the party. He owes answers to the mothers who bury their children, to the doctors who work with empty hands, to the patients who pray for a medicine that never arrives. And, above all, he owes an apology. For trying to make us swallow, once again, the bitter pill of official lies. Because in the current state of Mozambican public health, it is not just the patient who is in a coma. Government decency is in a coma. The commitment to the truth is in a coma. And if we do not wake up now, we will all die — some in the hospital, others in silence.

2025/12/3