“We know how to bring the economy back to life,” Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said. “What we don’t know is how to bring people back to life.” French Philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, on the other hand, rhetorically asks if “the wish to protect the health of the elderly justifies endangering the future of the youth.” (Le Point.fr) Lockdown and save lives or re-open the economy and save livelihoods? Between these two positions, which aren’t necessarily conflicting one may say, the debate is raging in the world. And Mauritius is no exception, particularly as we near the end of our second lockdown.

There are no easy answers but a decision about rolling up the shutters would depend on why we rolled them down in the first place. Every lockdown has had the ultimate aim to buy time and get health systems ready to deal with cases of the virus as soon as they are detected. Underlying this is the need for community-wide random testing and contact tracing to break the chain of infection. 

So, the questions we should be asking ourselves here are whether we are now sufficiently equipped for extensive and aggressive testing, if the donated test kits are reliable and whether our health system is capable of handling the carnage that may ensue once people who have been locked indoors for six weeks are set free. Sadly, with the very limited number of questions allowed (and filtered) before the daily televised monologue, with no possibility of live follow-up questions, we won’t have answers to these critical questions. 

“Substantially more amounts of money can arguably be saved just by the state rationalising its notoriously extravagant spending than can be earned through sending us to the gallows by prematurely lifting the lock-down for purely economic reasons.” 

But the decision to reopen the economy in a country like ours is not only about public health. It’s also about our heavy dependence on trade with the outside world. Our biggest export sector – tourism – will not restart tomorrow just because we open our borders and our hotels and airlines start flying again. As it happens, our national airline, Air Mauritius, has just gone into voluntary administration – a harbinger of the economic catastrophe we are hurtling towards. Ending the lockdown will not change that. Nor will it change the mood of people around the world who have been hurt, bereaved, traumatised, seen their income drop or disappear altogether and left jobless, with no visibility as to when there will be a return to a semblance of normality.  Grieving people are not in the mood to go on holiday. People whose income has taken a hard hit do not have any spare cash to spend on discretionary luxury travel to an expensive long-haul destination. 

The woes besetting travel and tourism will also hit our other major economic pillars, be it textile export, manufacturing, offshore business activities, BPO, construction and property development. Admittedly, there are some workers who will go back to work normally after the lockdown – or almost – but how many of these have not already adjusted to the new Work From Home (WFH) culture and will be encouraged to continue?

The palliative to our economic conundrum then is not to be found in rolling up the shutters prematurely and having to deal with the dire consequences of a possible second wave of infections. Already, even before the coronavirus pandemic, we were faced with a marked slowdown of economic output growth of only 3% in 2019. That will naturally worsen and our budget deficit and public debt – both already at unsustainable levels – are set to balloon to dizzying heights. So, now, more than ever is the time for the government to cut its suit according to its cloth and pursue a long-overdue radical transformation of an extravagant, wasteful and bloated public sector. 

Ministers and MPs must lead by example and take pay cuts of at least 50% and have their unjustifiable multitudinous allowances eliminated altogether. The voluntary10% cut of their basic pay is an unfunny joke. Senior civil servants also have to accept what is happening in the private sector – salary cuts. The plethora of parastatals, many of which only exist to provide jobs for the boys, have to be rationalised and consolidated and the coller lafis let go of. Pensions of past presidents and parliamentarians have to be scaled down drastically and made taxable. Duty-free cars, passage benefits and other disguised ways of overpaying public servants must cease, as must overprice free sumptuous meals for sitting (literally!) parliamentarians. The state must make use of the services of State Law Office lawyers, not overpaid lousy parasitic lawyers whose main qualification lies in being party cronies. And, no disrespect, but some trade unionists living in cuckoo land have to keep their mouths shut until we can afford to ask them for their opinion again.

The country does not have the wherewithal to continue fattening up politicians and their agents. Substantially more amounts of money can arguably be saved just by the state rationalising its notoriously extravagant spending than can be earned through sending us to the gallows by prematurely lifting the lockdown for purely economic reasons. Without these transformative reforms of the public sector, in addition to a monumental economic crisis, we risk finding ourselves in an uncontrollable social crash-dive. Those in the productive private sector who are taking deep salary cuts to save their businesses and jobs and those in the informal sector who are struggling to even put food on the table will not take lightly to seeing their tax rupees paying for fat salaries and free riding allowances. The landing may well be very hard indeed.