It’s a sad fact of life. The decision-making process is largely predicated on death. No matter how pressing or dangerous a problem is, it only becomes real in the eyes of policy-makers the day it claims one or more lives. Indeed, concerned citizens can denounce issues related to road safety, illegal constructions or food hygiene until they’re blue in the face, only when someone dies are their concerns addressed. This tendency to be reactive rather than proactive may have been acceptable a few decades ago, but the dynamic nature of a globalised world is a lot less forgiving. Unless this mindset undergoes a sea change, we’re going to have to get used to the disastrous consequences of the limited vision and efficiency of those in charge.

Frustratingly, even the Prime minister chose to skew the debate, presenting the situation as a zero-sum game: either we accept the floods as a fact of life or we stop the developing of the country. For someone who initiated Maurice Ile Durable (MID) and has even employed a full-time MID advisor in the person of Sunil Dowarkasing, Navin Ramgoolam seems to have a rather poor grasp of even the most basic tenets of sustainable development. Let it be said, smothering Mauritius in concrete with no consideration for its geological, hydrological and ecological features does not constitute development. In fact, this sort of stopgap solution only serves to create a whole new set of problems that future generations will have to grapple with. The deadly floods were but one manifestation of this madness.

Sustainability and development needn’t be mutually exclusive. For them to have any chance of dovetailing though, we have to realize for once and for all that the decisions we make today all have long-term implications. Current generations are not isolated in time; we’re all links in a chain spanning across the ages. So the question we must ask ourselves is whether we care enough about those coming after us to act as responsible stewards of our island. The same yardstick should be applied to “investment”, a word that has been used just as misleadingly as “development” in recent times. For instance, Sapmer, a French firm, plans to “invest” Rs 8 billion in the seafood hub. Sounds sexy, right?

Well, considering that the bulk of this money is in fact being spent on two more Vietnamese-built purse seiners that’ll get to vacuum up our tuna stocks for years to come, it seems less like an investment than a way for Sapmer to capitalize on the incredibly lax management of our Exclusive Economic Zone. Government by death dictates however that this situation is likely to continue because no one will die as a result of this sellout. The same can be said for our wetlands, public beaches and mountain and river reserves: all silent victims of extremely parochial definitions of development and investment.

When will we realize that governance for life is infinitely more desirable than governance by death?