Dear Minister,

There are times when silence is indeed golden; when one thinks first of the implications of what one is going to say and decides not to say it. Keeping quiet in such situations reveals one’s humility, self-awareness and wisdom.

It is clear that you missed such an opportunity this week. What is not clear is whether, as one of the very few intelligent men in your government – and I am not referring to your phoney put-on accent here – you really realise what a faux-pas that was.

Did you turn your tongue seven times in your mouth as you must have been taught to do before proclaiming our coming out of France’s scarlet red list as “a major victory”? Did you realise how childish, pompous and harmful that must have sounded to the outside world?

A victory pre-supposes a contest between opponents for a particular gain. At the end of the contest, there is a winner and a loser and the balance of power is reassessed. What battle did we exactly fight against France and what weapons did we use? Going there with our begging bowl asking for charity as we are on our knees? And if we won, who was the enemy defeated? France, on whom we rely for the very survival of one of our most important economic pillars – tourism, representing 32% of our visitors if you include Reunion? The same France that we desperately go running to even for our emergency oxygen these days, thanks to the abysmal depth of incompetence we have sunk to? Have you been so contaminated by the MSM virus that leadership for you has been reduced to chest thumping at every occasion, including when we got off the FAFT list?

What a missed opportunity to seriously reflect on the reasons why we got on those lists in the first place. Why did we get on the FAFT grey list and the EU black list for the first time in our history? What kind of governance leads countries and organisations to take such drastic measures against them? Why were we placed on France’s scarlet list? Blaming journalists is unbecoming of you and is an insult to the foreign diplomats stationed here who are reporting what is going on to their countries on a daily basis. Do you think they spend their time reading newspapers and listening to radios and base their reports thereon? What would the point of them being here be? Or maybe you think that they are so stupid that they swallow all the lies, untruths, half-truths and doctored figures peddled by your colleague Japatpul hook, line and sinker.

You need to do some deep soul-searching, Minister. I had a lot of respect for your ideas when you were on the other side of the barrier. I saw in you a man of principle. That was before you struck a Faustian pact with the MSM for a bit of transient power and started smirking smugly and contentedly when your leader attacked journalists, derided them and refused to be held accountable for the depths we have been plumbing. That was before you gave your implicit assent to the IBA bill, before you condoned all the wrongdoings of this government from the tainted procurement contracts to the Kistnen affair.

You may have got to a position you did not even dream of. I simply wonder if you ever wonder what you have lost in return; how much you paid for that. If you did, you wouldn’t make it worse by saying what you said.

I want to leave you with a reminder that power, no matter how inebriating it is, is ephemeral. There is a life after power. Until you are forced to realise that, please be considerate and understand one thing: I don’t know about you but the rest of us need to keep a good relationship with other friendly countries, particularly the one you have just declared victory in an imaginary battle with.

If you didn’t have the humility to say ‘thank you’, you could have helped by at least keeping quiet!