Poverty Leash: A Revival of Saccharin and Human Dispersiveness

Paulo Vilanculo "

In a context of economic crisis, social exclusion, and 50 years of independence still marked by structural inequalities, the Mozambican government surprises by implementing tractors and carts as alternatives for human transportation in rural and peripheral areas. Tractors to transport people? Ox-drawn carts or motorcycles with improvised trailers to transport entire families? Where are the investments in urban and rural mobility? Where are the buses, trains, and shared and ecological systems that could restore the dignity of a people so often violated by corruption, mismanagement, and deferred promises? The "poverty leash" reveals itself not only as a metaphor for social humiliation, but as a symptom of a state that insists on moving forward while looking backward.

In the year Mozambique celebrates 50 years of independence, the government chooses to usher in not a new era of dignity and human mobility, but a grotesque return to the past, reintroducing agricultural tractors and carts as public transportation alternatives in rural and peripheral areas. This alleged innovation, disguised as economic pragmatism and sustainable development, reenacts a chapter in history that many would prefer to bury: the times of saccharin and colonial leashes, when people were treated like beasts of burden. In the 21st century, while the world discusses sustainable mobility, technological inclusion, and clean energy public transportation, Mozambique is moving backward, recycling means of transportation typical of the era of slavery and colonial oppression. Replacing chapas and buses with tractors to transport people is not innovation—it is regression. Tractors lack the structure and safety to transport people. They offer no adequate seats, shelter from the sun or rain, or protection against accidents. Transporting people as agricultural cargo is an act of profound dehumanization, reducing citizens to the status of disposable rural objects.

The introduction of "saccharin" agricultural tractors for human transport, as a public policy or improvised solution in Mozambique, raises serious concerns and reveals glaring contradictions regarding the state's vision of people's dignity. Such a measure, far from representing an innovation or an effective solution, revives bitter memories of the colonial era and exposes a governance model that fails to guarantee dignified mobility for the population. The term "saccharin" symbolically refers to a past of exploitation, colonialism, and poverty disguised as progress, and using it in this context implies a direct critique of the illusory, bitter, and degrading nature of the measure. This is not just a matter of logistical ridiculousness. It is an attack on the dignity of the Mozambican people. While other developing countries invest in modern, electric, and accessible transportation systems, the Mozambican government turns to solutions that resemble social punishments rather than development strategies. This is not a mobility plan. It is a portrait of institutional failure, a living example of planned poverty.

Instead of combating poverty with structured public policies, the government normalizes precariousness. The introduction of tractors disguises the failure to build roads, provide buses, and create regional public transportation systems. Poverty is accepted as a destiny, not a challenge to be overcome. It's impossible not to draw parallels with colonial times, when indigenous people were reduced to the labor force, carried in carts, or marched miles to serve the plantations. Today, the same landscape repeats itself, but now with the official seal of "innovative" public policies. The introduction of tractors as a means of human transportation is not a solution—it is a cry of desperation from a government incapable of providing even a minimum of functional infrastructure.

This scenario forces us to question whether we are, in fact, celebrating 50 years of independence or merely marking 50 years of continuous ideological impoverishment. The Mozambican people don't need tractors for showroom flooring; they need serious public policies, with strategic vision and true social inclusion. They need a state that plans cities, roads, schools, and hospitals—not governments that offer the recycled cart of humiliation as a solution to underdevelopment. We have sadly reached a point where poverty has become state policy, not in words, but in practice. Tractors and carts are not bridges to development; they are chains that bind us to misery. The people deserve to ride on wheels, yes, but on wheels of progress, not dragged along in the dust of failed projects with recycled names and dubious intentions.

Looking at what can really be expected from this measure of introducing tractors into the practice of human transportation reminds us of dehumanization and violation of human dignity.Placing human beings in tractor-drawn trailers, often without safety, weather protection, or even minimal comfort, is not transportation; it's institutionalized humiliation. It reduces people to burdens, as in colonial times, when "Indigenous" people were transported like cattle to plantations or mines. On the one hand, it normalizes precariousness as state policy, since the use of tractors as transportation reveals that the state abdicates its obligation to guarantee decent human mobility, opting for improvised, low-cost solutions, naturalizing poverty instead of combating it. This becomes dangerous: the exception becomes the rule. These tractors are not made to transport people. In fact, turning tractors into sheet metal is a symbolic way of saying that certain areas of the country don't deserve progress. Communities already suffering from poverty and exclusion are now forced to accept means of transportation that increase their marginalization compared to other regions that have access to modern buses or functional road systems.

Instead of advancing modern, sustainable, and inclusive transportation solutions, the state has retreated to primitive mobility mechanisms, many of which recall practices from colonial times or authoritarian regimes that used carts and tractors as tools of population control and subjugation. Sustenta ended up being more of a political than an agricultural project—used for electoral projection, promoting local elites, and maintaining party clienteles, while small farmers, its declared target audience, remained in the same conditions of poverty and vulnerability. Thus, Sustenta brought little or nothing structurally new to the poorest Mozambicans, and many today view it as yet another missed opportunity to make agriculture a true driver of development.

What can truly be expected from the introduction of agricultural tractors for human transport is not progress, but rather the theatricalization of institutionalized poverty, a theater of mobility that conceals the structural immobility of the State. This is not a "creative response to scarcity," but evidence of the failure of decades of mismanagement, corruption, and the absence of serious public policies for rural mobility. The introduction of agricultural tractors as a means of human transport, in practice, represents a setback in development and a profound disgrace for Mozambicans, especially for rural populations living on the margins of infrastructure and government attention. The areas where these tractors are introduced are automatically marked as "territories of exclusion"—spaces with no investment value, where everything can be improvised and poorly done, because the population is poor and disorganized. It is a form of economic and logistical apartheid.

Agricultural tractors, used for human transportation, are not progress. They are the tragic staging of a rudderless state., which chooses ridiculous solutions to serious problems. They bring with them the smell of humiliation, the taste of institutionalized misery, and the vision of a people condemned to the leash of poverty, not for lack of resources, but for an absence of political will, ethics, and vision for the future. Mozambique celebrates 50 years of independence, but with solutions that hark back to 500 years of colonialism and exploitation. It is an insult to the country's history, the ideals of the liberation struggle, and the hope of development promised by successive leaders. The people did not fight to ride in motorized carts. Mozambique does not need tractors to pull people. It needs leaders who know where they want to take the country and its people. Because a state that treats its citizens like agricultural cargo does not deserve to call them people, but livestock.

2025/12/3