After the salutary rains of the beginning of the week, humidity is back with a vengeance. Considering the year we’ve just had, it’s only fitting that the country ends 2012 in a hot air embrace. Indeed, the bulk of the past twelve months has been devoted to koz-koze, Mauritius’ very own contribution to the lexicon of politics. Koz-koze is basically the political equivalent of humidity, an inconvenience that has precious little to contribute to the nation’s advancement. In these arid times, what we need is rain, both in the meteorological and political sense. Hopefully, both the government and opposition will have gotten the impulse to koz-koze out of their systems and 2013 will be the year where they rain ideas and actions down on us. Why does this sound so crushingly improbable?

The simplest answer is of course: because they’re motivated solely by their own self-interest. Even electoral reform, a topic dear to many Mauritians, albeit for wildly different reasons, was ultimately nothing more than a back for koz-koze. After an initial sense of exuberance at the prospect of creating a more just system, it quickly became evident that electoral reform was being used by the prime minister and leader of the opposition solely as an excuse to plot their political future together. And although personal and policy differences foiled their designs at the eleventh hour, the message was clear: we care not for you but for ourselves our interests come before those the country.

The lesson to be drawn from this disgracefully cynical episode is that, in their eyes at least, Navin Ramgoolam and Paul Bérenger are bigger than Mauritius. Farfetched? Not nearly as much as it may sound. This phenomenon has been the scourge of countless football clubs, where one or more senior players call the shots and get the whole team to play to their strengths. The trouble is that they’re usually no longer as good as they think are and the team ends up being less than the sum of its parts. That’s when, and I’m loath to say this, you need a strong coach à la Alex Ferguson to either knock them down a few pegs or shift them along as no player should be bigger than the club they play for. In Mauritius however, an idiosyncratic
reading of history means that we keep infl ating the already bulging sense of self-worth of these gentlemen.

As a result, there’s absolutely no incentive for them to perform their duties in a fair and effi cient way. And that’s how a whole country can end up in hock to the caprices of a couple of politicians in the autumn of their lives. This state of affairs manifests itself virtually every time they open their mouths to speak. They are so woefully disconnected from the reality of the majority of their countrymen and women that one is occasionally tempted to wonder whether they actually hear what they are saying or whether they simply like to listen to themselves speak. More often than not, it’s the latter that’s the answer.

Well, their hot air has gotten us as far as it can. Rain’s what we really need and, sadly, they’re incapable of supplying it.

Nicholas RAINER