Amongst many other things which marked my mind during these historic and extraordinary times we are living through because of the invisible killer enemy SARS-Cov2, three stood out: 

(i) after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson contracted the virus, many in his entourage, including his chief medical and scientific advisors, found it apposite to remark and emphasize that the virus does not discriminate amongst its victims 
(ii) the scenes of unconscionable brutality of law enforcement officers gone berserk assaulting poor inhabitants of Cité Vallijee in their homes in a frenzy of wanton violence 
(iii) the upsurge of petty crime during the lockdown

I appreciate that Johnson’s aides wished to be somewhat alarmist, perhaps knowingly and deliberately so, in order to frighten people, who would not otherwise have taken the threat of contamination seriously, to adhere to guidelines of home confinement, personal hygiene and physical distancing. Nonetheless, to declaim that the virus is nondiscriminatory is a truism and a platitude that smacks of an innate sense of class consciousness which underlies British society. It presupposes that a virus, an inanimate agglomeration of molecular genetic strands in a protein coat, is conscious, sentient and cognizant, and, therefore, capable of discriminating between a head of government and a homeless tramp and chooses not to! A case in point locally is the fateful irony of the head honcho of a major conglomerate and a rough sleeper sadly conjoined in destiny, deceasing next to each other within hours in the same intensive care facility in Vacoas.

The trite statement that the virus does not discriminate predicated on one’s station in life, however, hides another stark reality. That reality is that the consequences and experiences of combating the contagion are not felt equally and uniformly across social strata. If you belong to the privileged and affluent middle and upper socioeconomic classes in Mauritius, your nuclear household is most likely spending the confinement in spacious and comfortable air-conditioned quarters, equipped with all the creature comforts that a modern materialistic and consumerist society provides. Being deprived of your freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want, at will, in your car is but a minor nuisance and annoyance. You know that this is a temporary inconvenience and that there will soon to be a return to the good old days. If truth be told, you may even be thoroughly enjoying the fact of being paid to stay at home and spending quality time with your loved ones in your intimate cocoon. To occupy your days, the family is all hands on deck, gaily sharing house chores since the maids are furloughed, binging on Netflix series, connecting on broadband with friends and relatives worldwide via Zoom, Houseparty, Google Meet, Skype, etc.

“The consequences and experiences of combating the contagion are not felt equally and uniformly across social strata.”

Contrast this with an extended multigenerational family of 12 members or more in a cité, euphemistically rebranded ‘résidence’, or in a slum in Vallée Pitot, cloistered in an exiguous dwelling, which may often be no more than a metal shack of 100 square feet where they have to sleep, cook, eat and do other things that people do at home and where the children of school-going age have to try to study. All this in the depth of summer when the temperature outside is in the mid 30’s. However much we may love spending time with our close ones, nerves are bound to be frayed when we are compelled to be housebound in crowded propinquity to each other. So, what is more natural than wanting to step outside one’s dwelling for some fresh air and mespace? That’s why the images of law enforcers savagely beating up men in front of their elderly parents and children in disadvantaged regions were so shocking and distressing. Another collateral consequence of socially disadvantaged people being cooped up daylong for weeks on end is an increase in domestic abuse and violence and even murders amongst next of kin.

Turning now to the increase in petty crime, it is a telling sign of the times that some people are so desperate that they are risking their lives and that of others by resorting to stealing all sorts of things in the dead of the night. Anything goes, rabbits, goats, sheep, cattle, fruit, vegetables, building materials, you name it. And all this is happening under a strict curfew and stay at home order. Recently, a young man was beaten to death when he was caught stealing chillies at 4 am by the owner of the plantation. Earlier, a banana grower was murdered by thieves he surprised stealing his produce. Whilst one should not condone theft, burglaries and muggings, whatever the circumstances and motivations, one can surmise that the petty criminals committing them are most likely doing so out of sudden need, necessity and deprivation. If you were a daily wage earner or informal sector worker, the likelihood is that you were living from hand to mouth. Therefore, the lockdown completely annihilated your precarious livelihood. One shudders to think of the tsunami of criminality and potential social unrest which might engulf us when the lockdown is eventually lifted!

“Decent shelter bestows dignity, security and opportunity to the underprivileged...”

Now, contrast this precariousness and despair with a public servant who has quasi absolute security of tenure and the guarantee to have the totality of his wage or salary paid at the end of every month, lockdown or no lockdown, and a generous pension when he retires to boot. Or, with an employee in the formal sector whose wage, up to a reasonable limit, is subsidised by government during lockdown. The empty supermarket shelves we saw even before the lockdown was imposed, signalling hoarding and stockpiling by those with the means to do so, and the snarling queues when grocery stores reopened after a sudden decreed closure, bear testimony to the fact that Covid-19 does indirectly discriminate. It has laid bare the ugly facets of unfettered laisser-faire capitalism and its inevitable resultant, namely an ever widening income and wealth inequality, with its toxic social and societal consequences, and the insidious fallacy of trickle down economics in the face of ultraliberal policymaking. I’m not advocating a nanny welfare state as a panacea to the plight of the poor left behind by so-called ‘development’, as measured by the cold clinical, but increasingly questionable, metric of GDP growth. I still believe in the biblical wisdom of “Aide-toi, et, le ciel t’aidera’’, although I’d personally substitute “l’État” for “le ciel”. Nevertheless, we cannot claim to be a just, civilised, compassionate and humane society when there are still large swathes of our communities living in permanent precariousness and abject poverty. The least we can do, for a start, is to provide decent social housing to the multitude who cannot afford putting a foot on even the lowest rung of the property ladder, completely priced out as they are on account of skyrocketing speculative property prices. Decent shelter bestows dignity, security and opportunity to the underprivileged as it affords an environment where their children can at least study and break out of the vicious cycle of perpetual poverty.

In this regard, one cannot help but question the Prime Minister’s priorities. For reasons which defy reason, save arguably to massage his ego and woo voters, he burdened the nation with extravagant and wasteful massive pork barrel projects, which now hang like albatrosses around our necks. I have in mind the Côte d’Or sports complex to the tune of Rs 5 billion now standing idle, the tramway rail system costing at least Rs 20 billion, if not more, and which is manifestly underutilised and unviable, the inexplicable Safe City camera surveillance system costing Rs 19 billion which is completely unnecessary and, to boot, has proved to be inefficacious to deter, detect and track criminals, as we’ve seen during the confinement. That’s a total of nearly Rs 45 billion of borrowed money misspent on ill conceived and futile self-aggrandising prestige projects! Imagine how handy this vast amount of money would have been to build social housing and the multiplier effect of such large scale utilitarian and socially responsible investment in construction. Government has large tracts of vacant land it could use to build decent social housing for the poor. Reckoning, say, Rs 2,000,000 to build a comfortable 100 sq.m. house, the average size of a middle class family home in Germany, Rs 45 billion would build 22,500 units! And, they would not be the black holes Côte d’Or, the tramway and Safe City are. In fact, such social housing itself would render our country a safer place as it would relieve the poor of their heaviest financial burden.

A sure sign of an increasingly unequal, fractured and compartmentalised society is the proliferation of fortified, guarded and gated residential estates, many of them behind electrified fences, a sight unseen in Mauritius not so long ago, in which the affluent are incarcerated whilst the poor roam freely outside. These fortified prisons for the rich are a manifestation of what Nigerian Nobelist Wole Soyinka called ‘the architecture of fear’. And why do the affluent classes need to seek safety in these fortresses? His compatriot, the economist Sam Aluko famously gave the answer back in 1999. And what did he say? He said “The poor cannot sleep, because they are hungry, and the rich cannot sleep, because the poor are awake and hungry”. 

Is this the kind of society we want to live in?