<B>Raj Jugernauth

Despite what is being said, this government will find it more and more difficult to sustain the welfare state in the years to come. The financial burden this government placed on itself through its electoral promises and the coming sugar price reduction seem not to have awakened any haunting fear in the midst of our ministers. There are, fortunately, some exceptions. Ministers Sithanen and Arvin Boolell are among these few.

In fact, most of our ministers do not seem to realise that Mauritius wrote its economic miracle through a simple formula. Innovations and ideas were the backbones and men who had those innovative ideas were given the means to achieve them. Mauritius then walked from a harsh economic situation to the status of a prosperous nation.

But the present cabinet seems to be poor of innovative ideas and men having these types of ideas are quickly put to silence for fear that they may overshadow some of these nababs and protégés who are sitting in most of our ministries today.

Even when innovative ideas are thrown or come from situations, ministries are very slow to react or to recognise the benefits that the country can take out of these new ideas.

The minister of Health, Satish Faugoo, may go down in history as one of the least performing ministers of Health the country has had since independence. His executives are very busy cutting the budget in all departments and the cardiac centre of Pamplemousses may be a victim of this budget reduction frenzy.

In the past, this centre used to carry out 200 cardiac operations per year. It is now carrying out 500 per year with the same materials, the same equipment and in the same building, which Renat Akchurin qualified as ?hangar?. The plot of land that the government intended to buy to extend and further develop the cardiac centre might go to the Apollo hospital of India.

Is Satish Faugoo that deaf that he can?t hear what that eminent cardiology professor, R.A said during his last visit to Mauritius? Is the minister that blind that he can?t see the writings on the walls? The cardiac centre is a centre of excellence as far as its surgeons, doctors and nursing staff are concerned. But the building is most inappropriate for high-tech medicine.

Why should we go to extremes to facilitate the investment of Apollo hospitals in high-tech medicine for a foreign clientele in Mauritius? Why should we not allow our cardiac centre to do the same thing? This innovative policy of medical tourism is earning India and Sri Lanka huge amounts of foreign patients being treated in these countries through their medical insurance policies.

Why not Mauritius? In fact, the cardiac centre will be paid by the humanitarian organisation Terre des Hommes to carry paediatric cardiac surgery on three children from neighbouring Indian Ocean islands in June. Why should we not give to this centre all the equipment and an appropriate building for high-tech medicine so that it can carry out such type of cardiac operations on foreign patients on a large scale?

When the next general elections will be knocking on the door, the cardiac centre might find itself with more than 800 patients per year waiting for surgery. Its building, equipment and personnel will not be in a position to answer this high demand if no development plan is today devised for this centre.

Unfortunately, people in the ministry of Health are not looking in this direction. Backbiting seems to be the order of the day there. The minister himself seems to be as weak as a permanently chikungunya-stricken patient. He seems lost in a sick fog and has forgotten that five years are not a long span of time.

The constituency of Pamplemousses-Triolet may not be a safe haven for a mediocre minister, especially when a high percentage of cardiac patients comes from a specific quarter of the nation.