Everyone is agreed that Covid-19 is an economic disaster for Mauritius. How could it not be? Ever since it was created by empire, Mauritius has always looked outwards to sell its sugar, garments, get its tourists dollars in financial services (and for a brief period, it was even contemplating to get its citizens). So when Covid-19 forces the world to close up, Mauritius as an annex to outside economies, suffers. This annus horribilis will take its toll on jobs in tourism until people feel comfortable travelling again, construction which has relied on generous infrastructure spending from the government to keep the sector growing since 2017 and it will push already troubled enterprises in export manufacturing and SMEs over the edge.

But calculating how heavy this toll will be in terms of job demands, frankly speaking, will need a more honest method of counting those jobs. This is no time to be playing with numbers. For years now, Statistics Mauritius – on whose job numbers everyone relies – has had a very peculiar way of deciding who is employed and who is not. They simply ask you whether you have been paid for one hour of work in a week. If the answer is yes, you are counted within the proud ranks of the employed. Just don’t ask what kind of job is it that requires only one hour of work a week. Even with this ultra-generous definition of employment, Statistics Mauritius says that at the end of 2019, unemployment stood at 6.4 per cent (one can only imagine the real number).

However, the numbers released for the last quarter of 2019 go even further. They break down the number of the employed even further by average number of hours worked a week. And so we discover that out of the 557,200 people officially counted in the ranks of the employed, 5.9 per cent of them said that they worked an average of 0 hours a week. That’s right. Zero. That raises the question, if Statistics Mauritius’ own definition of employment is being paid for one hour of work each week, then how come people who say they are working zero hours are being counted as employed? Should they not instead, according to Statistics Mauritius’ own rules (loose as they are) be counted as unemployed? There is a problem there, however; 5.9 per cent of 557,200 is 33,432. If we take Statistics Mauritius’ definition, literally those 33,432 will have to be added to the 37,900 that it counts as unemployed, nearly doubling the official unemployed numbers. And all this without violating Statistics Mauritius’ rules an inch.

So what is going on here? Is this an oversight? Or is the object of the whole exercise to make the numbers look as good as possible damn their own definitions. With a pandemic that’s ravaging the economy, that to ultimately calculate just what it has cost Mauritius, it’s time for clarity and brutal honesty, not playing number games.