On the eve of Christmas, as people were gearing up to exchange gifts and spend quality time with their families, a nasty gift from the government was surreptitiously sneaked in. A 19 to 29 per cent increase in the electricity bill was announced like a death sentence, wrapped up in a nice joke: it is the Utility Regulatory Authority, acting independently – as most independent institutions do these days – which all by itself decided in all independence that such an increase was warranted. I hope you found the joke as funny as I did!

But beyond the increase and the spin, what is of greater concern is how the Central Electricity Board (CEB) found itself in a situation where they had to dig deeper in our pockets. How can a company that was holding reserves of Rs7.8 billion in June 2020 be running a Rs5 billion deficit today? The simple answer to this complex question can be summed up in two Creole words: Maja Karo!

As far back as last April, we learnt in parliament that CEB Facilities, a subsidiary set up in 2017 on a whim by Minister Ivan Collendavelloo, had cost us Rs47 million. Its officer in charge was drawing 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 were also having a feast. The ghost company delivered next to nothing and was acting more like a call centre. The most costly call centre in the world, one must think!

Another subsidiary, CEB Fibernet, is an even happier story: its general manager is drawing a salary of $12,000! US Dollars (over Rs500,000)! The little toy where the lucky mister spent some of his time cost the taxpayer more than Rs800 million! CEB Green Energy Ltd came to add another opportunity for cronies to have fun. All in all, Rs1.2 billion were ‘invested’ in the three subsidiaries!

Then the geniuses in government, who think that money can be made out of thin air, dealt the CEB the final blow: they took Rs3 billion and put it in the Consolidated Fund, which  was used to buy medicines, medical equipment, vaccines and whatnot, in dubious emergency procurements without any accountability whatsoever. So, a so-called high powered committee, chaired by the prime minister himself no less, and which took no minutes of meetings, dug into the Consolidated Fund and started showering money on jewellers, hardware merchants, hoteliers and drugstores that had converted into medicine and medical equipment importers overnight. You will recall Pack and Blister, delwil dan zorey, Molnupiravir and the series of heists that took place during lockdown.

So the CEB started hurtling towards bankruptcy! MP Patrick Assirvaden goes further and also warns of a Rs7.3 billion deficit in its pension fund as well! How can one achieve such a disaster in such a short time? And, more importantly, who pays for this criminal mismanagement and theft of public funds? Us of course.

The same story goes for other institutions where there is the smell of money. At the Bank of Mauritius, the government dipped into the reserves and Rs158 billion vanished! Today, we are paying though a higher repo rate, higher inflation and a scarcity of foreign currency. The State Trading Corporation is a similar story: it paid for contracts dished up like sweets to relatives and cronies as we found out through the Kistnen papers as well as for the government unconscionable blunder in the Betamax case. One direct consequence is the excessive and abusive petrol price we are made to pay today to keep the STC afloat. Same went for SBM, Air Mauritius, Mauritius Telecom and the list goes on and on.

Had such squandering mismanagement happened in a private company, not a single manager would have been able to hold on to their job!

But we are not talking about a private company here, are we? We are talking about sycophants, cronies, party apparatchiks and hangers-on, commonly known as chatwas, having a good time at our expense. They empty the tills, squander our money as they please and have the gall to thump their chests about their great management skills. When they get close to the abyss of bankruptcy, we are made to silently fork out. A real lepep admirab we are!