One of the tropes that the opposition – as well as the media – has fallen for is to dismiss the government as a ‘weak’ one. The opposition relishes in painting the prime minister, Pravind Jugnauth, as a helmsman that cannot manage to steer the ship straight or put some order into his own house. One reason why this view has managed to gain such wide currency is that it’s not one that the government itself would necessarily disown. The Sun Trust is happy to portray the image that the prime minister wants to do well, but unfortunately is surrounded by a gaggle of ugly ducklings: everything good is due to the prime minister, but everything bad is someone else’s fault. 

The trouble is that there is precious little evidence to show that this government construes itself as one that is ‘weak’. Let us take the most common argument used: Pravind Jugnauth is surrounded by so many scandal-ridden parliamentarians that he just cannot chuck them out of parliament. His inability to do so is taken as evidence of a ‘weak’ PMO afraid of another by-election. For starters, the expectation that a prime minister can just chuck people willy-nilly out of the national assembly itself is slightly ridiculous. Under a westministerian system, the prime minister is just a primes inter pares within parliament. And parliamentarians represent their constituencies and are not constitutionally beholden to their parties. So the demand that Pravind Jugnauth force parliamentarians to leave their parliamentary seats is an unrealistic standard to begin with. 

But more importantly, having his scandal-ridden comrades ditch their ministries and continue to hang around parliament has nothing to do with ‘weakness’; it’s the MSM’s stock-in-trade. Remember when Raj Dayal was forced to quit as environment minister in 2016? He was kept on in parliament and at that time the government was at the height of its power: it comfortably enjoyed a 3/4ths majority in parliament and was led by Anerood Jugnauth. And then that same year, Pravind Jugnauth, after his conviction by the intermediate court in the medpoint case, also quit his ICT ministry but refused to leave parliament. That too was when the government was at the height of its power and nobody was accusing it of ‘weakness’. So if they continue this practice now, it’s nothing new, and certainly does not betray a sense that the government is conscious of its own weakness. 

Another sign of how this trope is out of place is that the government is not acting as if it’s weak. A weak prime minister implies vacillation and indecision. This is certainly not the case: they have infiltrated the ESC, they are working on a bill to censor websites, they amended the ICTA to throw social media users that ‘annoy’ them in jail for 10 years, they have given out radio licences to create a ‘loyalist media’, they are proposing a party financing system that will allow them to financially crush their political rivals and have presented an electoral reform bill that concedes nothing to the opposition. This is not the way a ‘weak’ government acts; on the contrary, these are the actions of a government that clearly knows what it wants and is out on a power grab. By continuing to paint the government as weak, all the opposition is accomplishing is making everybody else underestimate just how determined the current government is to control every lever of power within the state and just how ruthlessly they are going about trying to accomplish precisely that. It’s time we realised that things are not the way they are in the country because the government is ‘weak’ and ineffectual, but perhaps the government desires it this way. 

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