The nastier-than-thou bidding war between the Ministry of Local Administration and the Municipality of Port Louis is a badge of shame for local governance. The indignation which a simple increase in the trade fee has aroused in the inhabitants of the capital has pushed the minister of local government, Hervé Aimée, and the mayor of Port Louis to jump at each other’s throats, each trying to pass the buck. In the middle of this unbecoming row and the meticulously crafted pseudo-denials which have shrouded the whole episode, a gaping hole has been left for everyone to see.

First, the Port Louis mayor hotfooted her way to the press offering her side of the story: that she had nothing to do with the trade fee increase and Aimée should take all the blame! Yet, the law is clear to anyone who bothers to ask. According to the Local Government Act introduced in 2011 – which came to be known as the Aimée Law – the Municipalities are totally independent and free to decide on the quantum of the trade fee they want to raise. Their role is to decide how they want to raise funds, come up with regulations and then pass them onto the ministry for advice – advice they are totally free to reject, by the way. The only role the ministry has, according to the law, is to gazette those regulations and put them into effect. Does the minister of local government have any legal right to amend the fee or intervene in any way? The answer is no.

So what is the mayor’s contention then? It changes from day to day. First, it was not her idea to have such an increase. A simple look at the Local Government Act reveals that this is an intellectually dishonest argument: if the responsibility for raising funds for the Municipality falls squarely on the mayor of the town, who else can come up with the regulation? Then came the argument of not being agreeable to a uniform trade fee – a legitimate argument to a certain extent: Municipalities should have the option of keeping different rates to encourage businesses to set up shops in towns where there is commercial decline. But if the municipalities and district authorities resent having a uniform trade fee, why did they voluntarily acquiesce to the policy only to then attack and disown it the next day. Municipalities, after all, do have the option to reject any recommendation from the minister of local government. If they chose not to exercise their right in this particular instance, the complaint which followed is either of bad faith or an instance of shirking their responsibility and playing politics!

All these sterile arguments take us away from the real problem the Municipality should be tackling and which it – or the Ministry for that matter – has not been able to tackle: that of ridding the traders of the unfair competition to allow them to make a profit and be happy to pay the trade fee. Ah, but that’s a sacred cow no one wants to meddle with!