Trying to be clever is no substitute for governance. Still less, when the government is not a terribly clever one. Just take the president’s Sobrinho-supplied credit card. First, she implied it was not true and challenged the media to authenticate the documents they had published (it’s the police that does that, by the way) and to do so within 24 hours (no such legal requirement exists). While the president was painting the whole thing as a fantasy cooked up by a hostile media, out comes Collendavelloo and says that leaking a bank document threatens our financial sector! Why would our financial sector be threatened if the documents were fake? The minister mentor went one further and admitted that Fakim had used the card but she had paid back the money she spent. And the prime minister, Pravind Jugnauth, charged the Bank of Mauritius to look into how the documents from Barclays were leaked. So you see, it’s not the government protecting a president caught with her hand in the cookie jar and looking to make history for being the first president in independent Mauritius facing corruption charges. Actually, so the ML talking-point goes, by sticking up for the president, we are sticking up for the financial sector, of which banking secrecy is an integral element.

And who can blame the ML for this desperate gambit? Fakim’s exit would only weaken the party further and hasten its descent into irrelevance. And Collendavelloo cannot simply show Fakim out the door: it was his good friend Sobrinho who gave her the card. Tomorrow, the same argument could be used to show him the door too. So what to do? Try to be clever.

This has now backfired. The government, indecisive as usual, has only itself to blame. After initially defending her (Anerood Jugnauth foremost amongst them) it has now decided that she must go. (Why did they change their mind? Was it principle or pressure? And were all those who defended her, (Anerood Jugnauth, Collendavelloo and Rutnah) wrong?) But their initial defence seems to have convinced Gurib-Fakim that she is innocent after all, and she refuses to leave using the same arguments that the government used to defend her earlier. So now unless she changes her mind, the government faces the prospect of an opposition boycott of the 50^th independence anniversary and a long drawn-out impeachment process. That’s left everyone in a tight spot.

Gurib-Fakim’s intransigence only highlights how deep this tendency of trying to be clever characterises this government: it was the first to designate an official spokesman. Managing headlines would be as important as managing the country. We saw the same flip-flopping when it came to Soodhun: he had to go after Jugnauth failed to turn it into a question of preserving communal peace (just as Collendavelloo tried to spin the current crisis as a crusade to save the financial sector). And isn’t Jugnauth currently engaged in another bit of ridiculous spin, attempting to paint himself as a lone swan surrounded by a clutch of ugly ducklings? It’s all his ministers, not him. It’s ludicrous of course, and everything bad the ministers do reflects on him for the same reason that he can take credit for everything good: collective responsibility and common sense. After all, who appointed those ministers?

But cleverness can only take you so far. This is not a PR agency; it’s a government. At some point, you actually have to govern.

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