“The interview with BBC World - business live, provided (Sic) the opportunity to showcase our country to the whole world as a clean and transparent financial services jurisdiction of substance. Whilst walking out of the BBC headquarters, I realised that with hindsight, may be (Sic) I should not have participated in the debate on Radio-Plus last week. The tone I used and the way I expressed myself was (Sic) probably not conducive to the clear message that I wanted to get to the people listening. Cheap politics is certainly not for me! Futile debates at this stage is (Sic) counter-productive to what we will achieve for Mauritius going forward. Lesson learnt - Roshi.”

In these terms, on his Facebook page, our minister of financial services and good governance, Roshi Bhadain, summed up his exactly two-minute and two-second intervention on the BBC. Beaming with satisfaction as he walked down the grand corridors of the BBC, his first thoughts were that he should never have accepted that invitation from Radio Plus journalists. “Cheap politics is certainly not for me”. So now it is the journalists and the other guest, Reza Uteem, who played cheap politics, is it?

I think that all the citizens who listened to the interview on Radio Plus and the Facebookers who commented on it are perfectly aware of who really engaged not only in cheap but also in crudely vulgar politics. In the interview, Bhadain displayed a rare vulgarity, an unprecedented coarseness and a total disregard for the minimum rules of decent behaviour like respecting the people you are talking to and their mothers. From interrupting to bullying through insulting and imputing motives, Bhadain spared neither guest nor hosts.

What is worse is the satisfaction our minister derived from his intervention on the BBC, which made him regret wasting his time with our local radio: In two minutes and two seconds, he managed to convince “the whole world” that we are a clean and transparent country! Gee! Is that all it takes?

While the ‘whole world’ – as I guess everyone must have left everything behind to listen to the Mauritian minister’s two-minute and two-second intervention on the BBC – was being convinced that we are a transparent country, the prime minister in Mauritius was desperately struggling to convince our tiny nation that his minister of financial services had not lied by accusing India of having threatened to issue a termination of contract if Mauritius did not sign the treaty which sounded the death knell on our offshore sector. The poor Indian High Commissioner used all the diplomacy he could muster to deny what the minister had forcefully put forward as a fact.

But then again, lying and getting away with it is something we have grown accustomed to. The prime minister lied in parliament about his adviser not sitting on at least two boards. His minister of housing and lands blatantly lied about his not having paid his hospital bill and about having been a minister when his son received a great gift from the government in the form of state land. The minister of foreign affairs – according to the prime minister himself – lied about the latter agreeing to his suspicious loan. The former minister of environment lied about asking for a bribe when the whole country heard the tape. The PPS – Thierry Henry – lied about being drunk at the wheel when he caused the death of a pedestrian. And now the minister who went to show to the ‘whole world’ that we are a clean, transparent country, lied about the conditions in which the treaty was negotiated and signed.

But that’s just it! The two-minute and two-second bluff was meant to wash away all those lies and make us forget about the death sentence which has just been pronounced on one of our major sectors. See, nobody is talking about the treaty itself anymore! Another similar costly trip – the purpose of which he refuses to tell us – and we might even start thinking that by signing the death sentence, Bhadain has saved our youth from jobs which were too hard for them and that unemployment prospects are good for the country after all! We might even erect a statue in his glory for services rendered to our nation and our youth. 

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