The prescription is valid. The pharmacist says the medicine has run out. A private pharmacy down the road, the patient is told, might have it.
Mozambique’s health minister says that scene is real. He also suggests the medicine may be sitting on the public shelf all along. The allegation has put medicine theft in Mozambique under fresh scrutiny.
O País reported on Monday that Ussene Isse made the admission in Zambézia province. He also confirmed that more than 50 health workers have been expelled over medicine theft in Mozambique, illegal charges and poor service.
Officials are now investigating what he called an “internal phenomenon of a negative response, when stock exists.”
The headline figure is not new. Isse has given a different count almost every time he has spoken about medicine theft in Mozambique.
In December, Lusa reported, he told MPs that 65 colleagues had been expelled and more than 48 dismissed over two years. That came from 458 disciplinary cases.
In March he gave a new split. Of 453 accused officials, 60 were expelled, 48 dismissed, 42 demoted and 68 fined. In September, at a health council in Beira, the figure became at least 54 expelled in 2025 alone.
None of those tallies, as far as AfricanQuarters could find, names a hospital. None separates theft from illegal fees. The closest split came in November, when Isse said about 20 workers had been expelled that year for stealing medicines.
So the public cannot yet judge how much of the crackdown is actually targeting the theft of medicines, rather than other forms of misconduct.
The best-documented case did not start on a ward. It started in a warehouse.
In January, the health authorities said almost a million units of antimalarial drugs had been taken from the Central Medical Stores in Maputo province. They were worth 42 million meticais, about US$657,000.
The stores’ director general said CCTV showed the stock leaving in stages on 13 and 19 November. Only 5,100 units, or 0.6 per cent, had been recovered.
Six people were detained. One was a warehouse worker, two were security staff and three were buyers. Some of the drugs turned up in Chimoio, on their way to buyers in Malawi.
That case points to Malawi. Other cases of medicine theft in Mozambique point to the pharmacy next door.
In Niassa province, six health workers were detained in the districts of Muembe and Mandimba. Muembe administrator Cássimo Abudo said they sold stolen medicines to private pharmacies. Antimalarials, he said, are the most stolen item in the district.
The regulator’s figures on medicine theft in Mozambique lean the same way. Cassiano João, spokesman for the medicines regulator ANARME, told Lusa in May that inspectors checked 133 pharmacies, clinics and supermarkets in the first quarter.
They seized 101,600 medicines diverted from the public system. Those products, João said, were being sold through pharmacies and other authorised resellers.
Eleven people were involved, including one health professional suspected of diverting stock. At least two were detained, and criminal cases are open.
Put together, the evidence shows stolen public stock reaching licensed counters. It does not yet show a hospital pharmacist and a private owner working together to turn patients away. That claim rests on the minister’s word and an open inquiry.
Isse rejects claims of widespread medicine shortages, though he concedes that theft from the public supply chain can undermine availability.
In December he told MPs, “There is no shortage of medicines in the country.” The APSUSM health workers’ union, which began a strike in January, has long argued that patients sometimes have to buy medicines themselves.
Both claims can be true at once if the stock exists and someone is steering patients away. That is exactly what Isse says he is investigating.
Then there is the legal side. Punishment for medicine theft in Mozambique has so far looked mostly administrative. Expulsion is a workplace penalty. It is not a conviction.
AfricanQuarters found no public record linking the expelled workers to criminal charges. The only conviction located is a 10-month sentence for a pharmacist in Sofala in January. The Central Medical Stores case has produced arrests but no reported verdict.
On Isse’s own March figures, ANARME carried out 1,650 inspections between 2022 and 2025. Nineteen people were detained. In the same speech, he counted 60 expelled officials.
Technology is the government’s answer. On 14 September, Lusa reported, Mozambique received medicines fitted with a tracking system backed by the World Bank. Isse called it one of the biggest reforms in the sector.
A tracking system may slow medicine theft in Mozambique. It cannot show who told a patient to look elsewhere.
Sacking a storekeeper produces a statistic. Bringing the buyers and any complicit pharmacy owners before a court would send a stronger message. Until then, the public may know how many health workers have been expelled, but not who profits from the missing medicines. And patients may continue to pay for drugs that should have been available through the public system.
