Some call it soy, some sort of bad luck following this government everywhere. We call it incompetence, opacity, negligence and a criminal laisser-aller. Whether it is the first wave of Covid-19, the Wakashio tragedy, the Lu Rong Yuan Yu, the vaccination campaign or the second lockdown, the modus operandi is the same. We have been following it with fascinated horror: first ignoring the problem and saying nothing, then denying it, then pretending everything is under control while being deaf to calls of impending danger and chaos, before a kneejerk reaction is taken in utmost opacity.

If anyone was expecting this second wave of Covid-19 to be handled any differently, they were in for a big disappointment. It’s not as if we had learnt something from the first wave. The same dilettantism and inaptitude characteristic of this government prevailed. First we were told that Covid-19 had been detected in a food factory employee through contaminated imported fruit or vegetables. No, actually through the packaging. No, in fact it wasn’t through food packaging at all; it was through some atypical case. Such cases exist only in Mauritius. Nowhere else in the world. What they forgot to tell us is that while we, ordinary people, accepted the obligatory quarantine protocol and paid through the nose for it, some highly privileged people were spending a couple of days and waltzing out of it no questions asked. Others were simply exempted as if they were supernatural human beings incapable of contracting and spreading the virus.

Then those who are supposed to inform us ran for their funk holes leaving the door wide open for rumours and fake news as the virus kept on spreading. Later, parents and children started being hauled off to quarantine hotels, something absolutely not necessary since everyone was going to be locked down. Rumours about a possible lockdown were silenced here and there but the prime minister was missing in action throughout, busy, I take it, with his new vocation – spiritual politics – during which I hope he prayed very hard for a miracle – the only thing likely to save us.

Then we watched the most bewildering, dizzying, jaw dropping, eyeball popping ‘message to the nation’ by a prime minister who really has a knack for making a disaster out of a crisis. After waiting for hours in front of our screens, we were treated to the shortest address ever given by a head of government: three minutes during which we were told there would be a quasi-immediate lockdown until March 25^th. So the nation was left with its numerous questions unanswered and in a complete state of panic, watching an empty screen.

The job of a head of government is to inform the population fully about what is going on, how we got into this recurring situation after bragging for months about our Covid-safe island and strangling our economy in the process, how different services were going to operate, what policies they have pieced together to help us out of this crisis and above all reassure us that we are in good hands.

We were instead left still wondering so many parents and children were placed in quarantine hotels – a traumatising experience that we have to pay for. Why can’t they be given the freedom to quarantine in their own homes? Why were pilgrims allowed to go all the way to Ganga Talao only to be sent back by a police thrown to the wolves? How many cases are really out there? Who do we trust to tell us the truth?

We are also left with a worrisome question: since there is not a single ventilator in our hospitals in working order – thanks to the daylight robbery by those entrusted with our protection, what will happen in severe cases?

It is obvious that decision makers are asleep at the wheel. In fact, they are snoring away while we are inexorably hurtling toward disaster.