A new bill was voted in parliament this week. No, it is not the declaration of assets bill. It is not about the right to information nor private television and even less about political party financing.

Those were electoral promises, which were followed by some wild excitement and a lot of empty rhetoric, repeated ad nauseam.

The declaration of assets bill never came. Yet, the urgency of such a bill is indisputable since it would have allowed us to know what our ministers, MPs and high state functionaries owned before they took office and what they had when they left. It should therefore have been the first bill to be presented in parliament as promised. When we asked, the answer of one very knowing minister was that the government has five years to present the bill! In five years, of what relevance will it be? How can one know what ministers had before and what they acquired as a result of their activities in government?

No right to information bill – You must have picked up on the fact that we have stopped even talking about that – let alone private television and other promises on the basis of which we elected the lot sitting in our national assembly today. (Some we did not even elect!). We know by now that the right to information bill will never come and neither will anything that looks like private television or a hint of a law likely to deprive our Honourable Members of the possibility of filling their pockets with underhand financial contributions in all opacity.

But our parliament has been extremely busy passing bills. Some of these bills which were seen as an absolute priority are the now notorious national flag bill and the language-speaking bills (Arabic, Bhojpuri, Chinese, Creole, Sanskrit, etc.). What the National Flag Act basically says is that Mauritians will be arrested and punished if they do not show respect for their national flag! Now you must be breathing a sigh of relief and sleeping much better knowing that your compatriots will no longer tear our national flag to pieces or mistreat it as you saw them doing every time you were on your way to work. And you must be pleased to know that you now have the right to promote the language of your community! Hooray!

This week, another bill was treated as much of a priority as the above bills. It is the anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions (prohibition) bill. After the bill was voted into an Act, you must be feeling even safer as no one can “develop or acquire any antipersonnel mine, cluster munition or explosive bomblet specifically designed to be released from a dispenser affixed to an aircraft”. What a relief! Thank you, Honourable Members! When we walk in the streets tomorrow, we will no longer look up in anticipation of a bomb falling on our heads! Phew!

Well, one thing is for sure: You can’t say that bills are not being debated in parliament and written into laws. The only thing is that some are utterly useless and those which may possibly stand in the way of the government’s propensity for opacity were completely and perhaps intentionally forgotten about! So thanks indeed. For nothing!

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