Oh! So our prime minister was “misled” by one of his ministers? The minister who was entrusted with just about anything under the sun – or should I say the Sun Trust – from ‘handling’ the British American Investment companies to ‘negotiating’ the most important treaty with India going through deciding on the cabinet minutes – Roshi Bhadain. The important one who moves around the island with bikers and full security detail. In short, the one who was made Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean barely six months after he took office.

And this very minister has been surrounded by advisers whom the prime minister apparently finds ‘incompetent’! What this means is that, for the last two years, you have been digging into your threadbare pockets to pay the salary of both the minister who has ‘misled’ the prime minister and the adviser who has been qualified by the prime minister himself as incompetent. And you are still paying the minister for misleading the prime minister and for recruiting ‘incompetent’ advisers who you are also still paying.

But take heart, now that we have identified the ‘misleader’ and his ‘incompetent’ advisers and paid through the nose an unknown consultant we raised to the level of a demi-god, move along, nothing to see here!

But as Bhadain is made a scapegoat of, we should not lose sight of the fact that 24 ministers sat in at least four cabinet meetings and supported the Heritage City project. They equally agreed to pay humongous sums of money to the unknown consultant. Where is their responsibility in this whole saga? Naturally, some ministers are proud to publicly declare that they have no opinion other than what their leader thinks! Others have no idea any way as they have found themselves running the government without ever having even run a corner shop or created a single job in their lives. How can ministers approve a project and embark on financing it before suddenly realising, only a few months down the line, that they had not apparently thought of basic things like infrastructure, water and electricity? How much more inept can they possibly be?

In a country where the already acute water shortage is getting worse by the day; where hundreds of families still have no decent housing and where not a single brick has been laid to provide them with decent housing; where going to any part of the island is a traffic nightmare, all our energy has actually been directed towards building offices for ministers!

Government has no business turning into a property developer with ministers travelling around the world begging for funds. Government should concentrate on doing government business: passing laws and facilitating projects to attract investment and create proper, sustainable jobs and improve infrastructure. In other words, the government might benefit by tackling what it has promised in its manifesto rather than jumping onto projects which have come as a bolt from the blue. It is time we started getting our priorities right. That might, incidentally, also reduce the amateurism and incompetence which have been seen in each project announced so far.

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