I hope Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth makes the most of the royal welcome extended to him by Indian Prime Minister and BJP Leader Narendra Modi and enjoys the wide smiles of his hosts. We hate to rain on his parade but he returns to a country where the smiles have long faded. And it’s not just because the price hikes have reached unmanageable proportions.

The population has been bracing itself for price hikes every day. Some are announced like a death sentence as in the case of the increase in the price of gas and petrol, which will have a direct effect on all the other commodities. Others we discover as a nasty surprise every time we step into the supermarket. A mixture of genuine price increases on the world market combined with real profiteering due to a criminal laissez faire of the authorities has resulted in our trolleys and wallets becoming lighter and lighter at every shopping trip.

But it is not just the price hikes that have wiped off the few smiles left. It is also and perhaps primarily the attitude displayed by a government facing two of the biggest challenges in recent history: Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. You would have thought that a package of measures would have been taken by now to allow the country to surf these two waves without drowning. The least one would have expected is halting some of the useless and money-guzzling projects and activities that bring little in terms of revenue and job creation and use the money towards some form of food security. Many parts of Continental Africa have reduced their dependence on Ukrainian and Russian wheat and a whole industry is being developed around making flour out of cassava and plantain and their bakeries are replete with bread and cake made of these. Here, we are obsessively carrying on with a tramway project that is draining our foreign currency and offering few employment opportunities to our youth while defacing our streets, without little visible improvement in traffic fluidity. And the population is left to face exorbitant food imports or hunger and malnutrition. Some ministers, who are supposed to act as captains and steer us out to safety, are acting more like mercenaries more interested in giving out contracts to cronies and filling their pockets through any means available to them than doing something to justify their undeserved salaries and leave us something to remember them for other than scandals.

Take electricity, for example. There are persistent rumours that our bills will soon increase too. That need not be the case. Except that the Central Electricity Board is being managed more to please the cronies than the consumers. On Tuesday, we found out in parliament that CEB Facilities, a subsidiary set up in 2017 on a whim by a minister, has cost us Rs47 million. Its officer in charge draws a Rs70,000 salary in addition to his Rs200,000 salary as general manager of the CEB plus about Rs50,000 in fringe benefits. Its board members are also having a feast and the subsidiary, called by Labour MP Patrick Assirvaden “a ghost company” is delivering next to nothing. It must be amongst the most costly call centres in the world!

As if that wasn’t enough, another subsidiary, CEB Fibernet, is an even happier story: its general manager draws a salary of $12,000! US Dollars (over Rs500,000)! The little toy where the lucky mister spends some of his time cost the taxpayer more than Rs800 million! All in all, Rs1.2 billion were ‘invested’ in the three subsidiaries! And don’t think that the hard times we are facing will result in putting an end to such blatant waste. No, Sir! They squander money and at the slightest hitch, we fork out!

So please don’t be surprised, Prime Minister, if the smiles are not as warm here as in Gujrat. They have every reason to smile to you there. We have every reason not to. Each to his own!