There is an insidious and very dangerous campaign going on right now. The result is that anyone who dares criticise any member of the current government is automatically tagged as antipatriotic and taken to task, at times by well-meaning people caught up in the web of propaganda.

Dare mention the incompetence of the minister of sports or his arrogance and you are pinpointed as criticising the athletes and therefore the country and you become persona non grata. Try breathing a word about the state of the George V stadium – aptly re-baptised ‘George Sank’ by our creative compatriots after a Rs94 million renovation – and you are accused of directly destroying the patriotic momentum generated by the Indian Ocean Island Games. Don’t even dare suggest that had the stadium been maintained and checked before the game – as common sense and good management would dictate – our athletes would have played in a stadium that they are used to and would have had a leg up on the Reunion team. Don’t talk about the torch left behind through sheer incompetence, or the ticket saga. Erase from your memory the sight of families out to watch the Games and cheer on our teams who instead were subjected to pornographic scenes in a town now known as ‘Quatre Porn’. And don’t you dare breathe a word about the cacophony created by a public holiday announced from the stands of a stadium at the eleventh hour on a Friday evening. Like a royal decree, the order was given and immediately executed, no ifs, no buts. And, naturally, don’t talk about the cost of that to an economy where the trade deficit has gone up from Rs14.23 billion in 2014 to Rs26.9 billion in 2019 and a public debt soaring from Rs240.6 billion to Rs318 billion in the same period. You would otherwise be classified as a prophet of doom and gloom.

How the hell did we get to this situation? The first cause is the outrageous politicisation of the Games. They really became first a family and then a political party affair. From the torch relay to the allocation of tickets, we were almost led to believe that those who were competing were the politicians not the athletes.

“Who would dare accuse a government with no sense of humour, specialising in trumped up charges and personal vendetta, of having anything to do with the comedian’s arrest?”

This crafty and deceptive campaign was promoted by a national broadcaster that has reached yet new lows. It was helped by a substantial number of trolls and roder boutes working their fingers to the bone on different blogs. And some well-meaning people joined in as they are so indoctrinated that they can no longer tell the difference between the performance of our athletes encouraged by an exemplary country and a political class totally out of its depth. So much so in fact that they found out far too late that a torch relay involves taking a torch to Rodrigues and not just ministers and cronies. They also discovered rather late that it rains in Curepipe so good drains might have been a good idea. And the sight of empty stadiums finally taught them that tickets had to be sold to the public rather than hogged and shared between cronies.

While we were proudly collecting the medals and subconsciously attributing the credit to the politicians, in Algeria, President Abdelkader Bensalah was similarly trying to take advantage of the popular momentum towards the national football team heading home with the African Cup, in the hope of reducing the pressure put on him every Friday by the Hirak (the protest movement). His campaign was however not as successful as here. “The Algerian people have been an example to the world with these peaceful demonstrations in the recent months… We wanted to give them [our emphasis] this African Cup,” said footballer Adlene Guedioura, clearly marking the difference between the people and the politicians trying to hog a victory that had nothing to do with them.

In this atmosphere of manipulation and fear of expressing one’s opinion without being tagged as antipatriotic, I am not surprised that the reaction to our compatriot Shameem Korimbocus’s arrest in Dubai on no charge whatsoever has been so timid and restricted to the usual ‘anti-patriots’. Who would dare accuse a government with no sense of humour, specialising in trumped up charges and personal vendetta, of having anything to do with the comedian’s arrest? Who would dare remind anyone of the last episode where Korimbocus was ‘given a lesson’ and at the behest of whom? Who dares call them out for their callousness now that a family man has lost his job and his right to reside in a country he had made home for the last 10 years? Let’s instead wait for the government to give us our opinion and then we will express it!

A hell of a mess we are in.

For more views and in-depth analysis of current issues, Weekly magazine (Price: Rs 25) or subscribe to Weekly for Rs110 a month. (Free delivery to your doorstep). Email us on: weekly@lexpress.mu