Ashit Gungah and Etienne Sinatambou are now in the business of giving out certificates of patriotism. So is Betamax. The ministers say that Veekram Bhunjun is ‘anti-patriotic’ for trying to block oil supplies from Mangalore, and Bhunjun says that the government has acted unpatriotically by victimising a Mauritian (his) business. 

The truth is that the Betamax deal was a disaster from the very beginning. The brother-in-law of a Labour minister gets a monopoly to transport petroleum to the country for 15 years, with all sorts of favorable clauses wedged in. The MSM, quite correctly, decries this, but then proceeds to handle the situation in the most cack-handed manner imaginable. Betamax, good or bad, was a signed, legally enforceable contract. The STC, on foreign legal advice, counselled the government to terminate the contract according to the law: pay off Betamax with US$46 million and get the Red Eagle ship and use it to import petroleum for at least another 25 years. Whatever was paid to Betamax would be overshadowed by the savings the STC would eventually make by not having to hire outside ships to bring in petrol. Pinch your nose and accept it as a holdover cost from the disastrous Labour Party tenure.  But that’s not what the government did. They confused their election victory with a mandate to ignore the law and, in their haste, to put a financial squeeze on what remained of the Labour Party, simply scrapped the contract entirely. And now it has an arbitration verdict against it calling for the government to pay Betamax Rs4.7 billion (US$115 million) and no ship.

This stunning miscalculation should come as no surprise, considering that the attorney general, the legal adviser to the government, was a certain Ravi Yerrigadoo, who eventually had to resign for signing a document facilitating Hussein Abdool Rahim to collect his gambling winnings from an offshore gambling website. All this, of course, against the law, and with Roshi Bhadain tom-tomming the scrapping of the contract all over the country. This was the crack team at the helm. And an early indication of how the government’s case was tottering came in November 2016 when the DPP dropped charges against Navin Ramgoolam, Anil Bachoo and three civil servants for alleged irregularities over the Betamax deal. 

But the government could play fast and loose when it came to Betamax because it’s not like the Rs4.7 billion will be paid out of the Sun Trust. This is the crux of the matter. It has nothing to do with patriotism: one side’s appetite for revenge far exceeded its ability, while the other feels entitled to getting paid under a contract drawn up under a different, and much friendlier, government. And both don’t know when to stop. That’s the incredibly cynical game going on here. Patriotism? That’s for the children (read: the party faithful). There are no good sides here. 

And both seem determined to fight till the last drop of everybody else’s blood.