In times of crisis, the impossible suddenly seems possible. When former Finance Minister Rama Sithanen tried to freeze hiring in the civil service all those years ago, it was another nail in his political coffin. Today, the government proposes it and few would disagree. What a crisis also does is finally expose the feet of clay of ideas which, until yesterday, seemed respectable. 

Before Covid, the informal sector was lionised as the alternative to shrinking manufacturing jobs. One government even turned it into a policy slogan urging every Mauritian to become an ‘entrepreneur’ and go into business for himself. All successive governments have tolerated the emergence of this vast off-the-books informal sector to compensate for the failure of the formal economy to deliver the jobs. Today, when Covid hit, the government initially refused to give out money to the informal sector, admitting that it had no data on what essentially amounts to close to 35 per cent of the total workforce in the country. That is, before public pressure forced them to give out a pittance. This torpedoes another idea that until recently seemed like common sense. A veritable cottage industry had grown recently urging governments to target pensions – never mind that this was tried in 2004 and found that only 4,000 out of 110,000 were not supposed to get one – to lighten the pension load. Now with Covid forcing the government to admit that it has no data on the incomes of at least 35 per cent of the workforce that is in the informal sector, it shows just how fanciful the idea of targeting state pensions really was all along. 

Before Covid, it was taken for granted within policymaking circles and business that land should be used to deliver the highest returns, by selling it off as luxury real estate. All parliamentary parties did that. Today, the results of this folly is becoming apparent. There is a reason why the government can only fix profit and not prices; with most of the food imported, freight prices, exports set by foreign states and the collapse of the value of the rupee (Rs40 per dollar today when it was Rs35 in 2019) it’s taken for granted that prices will rise through imported inflation (at a time of massive projected unemployment, mind you). The only thing that the government can do is make sure (or rather, hope) that the mercantilists that our developmental model puts us at the mercy of for imported essentials don’t exploit everybody too much. Today, if we say that we spent the last 20 years selling off good arable land for villas rather than growing food for our people, it sounds like a grotesque joke. Only time will tell whether the realisation of the importance of food security being parroted about is actually genuine or simply playing to the gallery. 

Here’s another one. In the run-up to the last election, two of the parliamentary parties promised to undercut the public health system by paying health insurance for civil servants, thereby directing them into the private health system. They played fast and loose with the welfare state looking to grab a few votes. Today, that plan is unpalatable not only because there is little cash to spare to pay for the health insurance of civil servants, but also with the public health system in the front line in combating Covid-19, it would be political suicide to even be seen to be undermining it. So much for that little chestnut. 

A crisis truly lays everything bare. And these are the conversations that need to be had.