It’s a beautiful story really. Worth relating to the children of this nation before they go to sleep every night. The plot is simple. Simplistic in fact: A singing priest and a choir boy decide to throw their fate together to reach that ideal they had been craving for years: power. So the representative of the Creole community, Jocelyn Grégoire – who rose to fame by pitching his community against the others while continuously denying being involved in politics – and the representative of the Muslim community – who has made of his religion his stock-in-trade– get together and find grounds in common. They look at each other and the spell is broken. Hallelujah!

So the choir boy cheers as the singing priest spits out his usual deep, drab, unpalatable rhetoric: the national cake is big enough for everyone. The only problem is that the ‘majority’ community is eating the share of the ‘minority’ community. He therefore asked his ‘fans’ to be “rasis (racist), kominalis (communal) and noubanis (untranslatable)” to be able to fight for the ‘vulnerable groups’.

What is abject about this type of thinking is not only that it is divisive and inflammatory. It is also based on a narrow understanding of what is going on in the country. Not everyone who benefits from cronyism, nepotism and the largesse of the state belongs to one community and not everyone who is excluded belongs to another. There is a circle of lucky people – whose luck is not accidental – who revolve around power and benefit fully from the advantages dished out to them by their cronies. They belong to all communities and all political parties. Many of these are School Certificate dropouts and failed lawyers who have never been able to plead – let alone win – a single case in their lives and who found their way to boards of parastatals and other state organs where they made their abode for life. They jet around the world, benefit from junketeering and draw an indecent salary they could never have dreamed of if they relied on their qualifications and output. And they wield a great deal of power which they were never  taught how to use! Ask our orchestra to find out what communities these lucky few belong to.

The rest of every community is made up of people who are working very hard and – not only do they not benefit from any advantages, they also meet all sorts of hurdles in their uphill struggle to make a living – courtesy of some of the incompetent cronies who rose from nothing to still nothing. Again, ask these hardworking compatriots under whose feet the grass is being cut on a regular basis which community they belong to. You will be able to recognise them by the helpless, dejected look on their faces.

So, instead of pitting one community against another, maybe the singing celebrities could benefit by fighting nepotism, cronyism, favouritism and profiteering wherever it occurs and no matter who is involved. To do that, one also needs to start by fighting noubanism. For as long as the nation is divided and the fight between communities continues, none of these ills will be remedied. That is why no right thinking mind of any community should condone the talk of this newly-wed couple. It is, puerile, futile and reeks of the cheapest type of populism. It is morally indefensible!