Our very own Marie Antoinette has struck again! “I don’t give a sh*t about them,” Minister Mentor Anerood Jugnauth said about the school cleaners who are on a hunger strike right now fighting for a more reasonable salary than their current Rs1,500 per month. He might as well have run his fingers through his pretty hair and said qu'ils mangent de la brioche (“let them eat cake), like the French princess supposedly did when she heard that the peasants were starving. One thousand, five hundred rupees. Let us stop for a moment and think about that. What can a person buy for Rs1,500?

Is Rs1,500 enough to feed a family for a month, if you happen to be a widow which at least one of the cleaners are? If you only buy oil, white flour and the worst rice on the market, not looking too closely at the meat and the fresh vegetables, then perhaps. But is that living or surviving? Is it worthy of a country that calls itself a welfare state?

Let us not forget that we, the taxpayers, are forking out nearly one million rupees every month to pay Anerood Antoinette. We would suggest that he spends some of that public money on empathy lessons but revulsion against human misery is not something that can be taught. It can only be felt – or not, we must assume, in his case. “If they decide to kill themselves, why should we go and meet them?” was his response to the hunger strike. What kind of minister, what kind of person, would talk that way about a group of mothers wanting a better life for their children, even if he didn’t agree with them? Not even Marie Antoinette would have gone that far.  

We had a close encounter with Jugnauth’s Marie Antoinettesque side when he withdrew his own money from the Bramer Bank with the explanation that when a ship is sinking, he prefers to save his own skin. He was our prime minister then, at a time when hundreds of Mauritians worried about their jobs and lifesavings. Marie Antoinette had her servants build a utopian farm village in her garden, hiring actresses to pose as happy farmers while the real peasants were starving outside the palace. Anerood Jugnauth wanted to build a Heritage City with a dancing fountain, while the population dreamed about basics like round-the-clock access to running water.

It’s ridiculous that some Mauritians earn Rs1,500 while other pocket millions. Even if we ignore the human aspect of it, our income inequality situation is precarious since it risks putting a spoke in the wheel of further development. According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest fiscal monitor report released this month, income inequality risks eroding social cohesion and triggers political polarisation which can ultimately lead to lower economic growth. Even if Anerood Antoinette and his team don’t give a sh*t about severely underpaid mothers, perhaps they can show some concern about Mauritius as a whole.