Twenty things likely to happen this year

6 janvier 2022

6 janvier 2022, 07:04

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07:04

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Touria Prayag

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Twenty things likely to happen this year

lexpress.mu | Toute l'actualité de l'île Maurice en temps réel.

Inflation will rise and life will become even harder. Statistics Mauritius will massage the figures when called for and take its marching orders from there. The supermarkets and food outlets will tell a different story.
The rupee will continue to lose its value to keep the Bank of Mauritius vaults furbished with fiat money, which they can supply to the government to controversially plug gaping deficits. We might also see our sovereign country risk being downgraded.
Poverty will increase exponentially and crime will follow as a result, compounded by the fact that institutions paid to fight criminality have become doormats.
We will be caught in the debt trap: borrow even more to pay the interest due on debt, with a government blithely kicking the can down the road for future generations, some as yet unborn, to shoulder the heavy burden of paying back.
Public funds will continue to be squandered by those in power as well as those who rub them the right way. More Special Purpose Vehicles bearing different names will be created, paving the way for more opacity and even less accountability in the use of public funds.
More grand pork barrel projects will go ahead in spite of our dire economic situation. These serve many sinister purposes, including giving the impression that the country is developing and the ‘koup riban’ ceremonies will give ministers, especially the first amongst them, an opportunity for relentless propaganda. Big projects involve big money! Even if we don’t have it.
The national shame which the MBC is will continue to abuse its enforced monopoly, deform reality and paint an idyllic and rosy picture of life in SuS Island, while heaping praise and adulation on a prime minister, depicted as a demigod.
Key institutions, which are pillars of a democratic state founded on the rule of law and common decency, will remain under the beck and call of a prime minister bent on concentrating all powers in his own hands.
Political appointees heading so-called ‘independent’ institutions will continue to serve the private interests of the ruling party and prime minister instead of acting for the common good and in the interest of the people whose taxes pay their salaries.
There will be even more repression and less tolerance for criticism. More repressive laws will be enacted. The written press may be a casualty in 2022 and dissenting voices will have fewer and fewer forums to be heard.
Covid-19 will soon be a bad memory as the Omicron variant will downgrade it to a banal viral infection that most of us will be able to shake off.
Favouritism, nepotism and jobs for the boys and girls will hit a record level and the resulting chatwa phenomenon will grow, invade and divide families and friends. The country will be even more divided between nou ban, who enjoy undue privileges, and ban la, who will see all manner of hurdles erected to stymie them.
The ruling class will be even more cut off from the harsh realities of the populace.
Narcotics and hallucinogens will continue to cross our notoriously porous borders in large amounts and flood the market and the drug industry will continue to flourish, as we saw even during a total lockdown. Meanwhile, the small neighbourhood dealers will be nabbed and imprisoned while the Mafiosi head honchos, whose identities are known to whomsoever cares to know, will continue to ply their odious business unperturbed.
As incompetence and corruption continue to rule the roost, the general standards in every field will continue to go down.
Racism and communalism will become rampant as political talk will be further polarised and radicalised.
Apathy in a jaded nation, bombarded with scandals competing for short lived headlines in independent media, will reign supreme while chatwas plot whose turn it is to eat.
The mainstream opposition will continue to be plagued by bloated egos and the apparent impossibility to agree on a credible leader to lead the charge against the regime. The proliferation of ‘groupements citoyens’ with political aspirations will fragment an already dispersed opposition even more.
This will consolidate the power of a political party and regime reputedly hoarding a formidable financial war chest and thriving on political patronage and clientelism.
I don’t want to sound unduly alarmist but Lebanon, once hailed as the Paris of the orient, is a glaring current example of how a country can become precipitously bankrupt and destitute through a mix of incompetence, corruption, nepotism, communalism and debt. Its currency has lost 90% of its value in the last two years and today more than 80% of its population live in wretched poverty. May God help us!