You can bet all the penalty points on your new driving license that 2013 is going to be dominated by politics. Just like last year and the year before that. It’s a luxury we can ill afford. Politics is generally meant to act as a means to an end, a process that helps lubricate the business of running a country. It is no substitute however for the real thing, namely making decisions in the best interests of the majority. In Mauritius, unfortunately, politics has become the alpha and the omega of the governance process over the past few years, to the extent of nullifying the purpose of its existence. To be sure, it’s always been an imperfect art, all the more so because it acts as a trading post for money and power, which are like catnip for humans. For all its shortcomings though, politics still occasionally manages to offer a return on investment, a reminder that those engaged in it haven’t completely forgotten that with privilege, comes duty and with power, responsibility. Such a reminder is long overdue.

Since the last elections, the country has lurched through a string of scandals some of which involved corruption, others, nepotism and others yet, incompetence. Some of them even had all three. The common denominator of these crises though is that those involved in them all have political connections. Now, politics has never been a vestal pursuit and it probably never will, but it’s become appallingly apparent that it’s become an industry unto itself and one that is working against the best interests of the population, to boot.

It’s mutated into something terrifying, a catchall word used to justify every objectionable act and rationalize the ever worsening foibles of those meant to serve us. This dystopia is made even more frightening by the fact that the institutions meant to stand between the people and gross and arbitrary abuses of power by their representatives have become the instruments of repression of those they’re supposed to guard against. Without nary a fight too.

This means that the primary criterion of every decision made by the State – whether it concerns the supply of water and energy, law and order, road infrastructure, even our civil and political rights – is what it brings to the political industry, be it in the form of kickbacks, infl uence or quid pro quos. We may like to tut- tut at the problems some of our regional neighbours are going through, but the frightening truth is that under the thin patina of respectability that Mauritius still enjoys, this country’s soul is being hijacked. And because all of this is happening under the surface, its citizens are finding it very difficult to mobilize against the onslaught. So we stumble from one scandal to the next, increasingly disenchanted by the knowledge that perpetrators are going to get off scot free simply because they have their entries in the political industry.

And still politicians have the gall of using communalist arguments to get their way it’s not enough to plunder the country, they have to destroy it too.

At the end of the day, there is politics, with its habitual horse-trading, back scratching and pork barrels and then there is damn politics that brings countries to their knees for the benefit of a small cabal. Damn politics!
 
 

Nicholas RAINER