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Road rage

17 avril 2013, 15:57

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lexpress.mu | Toute l'actualité de l'île Maurice en temps réel.

If nostalgia were a company, its stock would be sky high. The fondness with which many Mauritians remember the days preceding this age of unbridled avarice – the days when the property bubble was just a glimmer in the eyes of rapacious promoters, doors were left unlocked at night and hope was a sentiment rather than a synonym for naivety – is proportional to their despair of our current development model. It’s not hard to see why.

 

Take the ubiquitous use of exclusive to describe most new projects. Gone is any pretence of trying to be inclusive or even of acting vaguely for the greater good. It’s all about us against them, the elite versus the great unwashed. Even new road projects are discriminatory.

 

Although they’re being built with public money, the overwhelming majority of which comes from the pockets of the masses in the form of direct and indirect taxes, the authorities want motorists to pay to use them.

 

And who will this decision penalize the most? That’s right, the people who can’t afford to fork out the Rs50 or so for the toll fee. But corporations must be fed, now mustn’t they? It’s not enough to just pay them to do a job anymore, we have to finance their upkeep too. Who cares if the Road Development Authority (RDA) is expected to receive Rs778 million from road users this year alone (up from Rs756 million in 2012) via the compulsory “contribution” included in the price of petroleum products?

 

Who’s going to waste any sleep over allegations of bribery made against the RDA in the allocation of contracts? Who even knows what’s become of the Independent Commission against Corruption’s (ICAC) investigation into the purchase of plane tickets for the Director General of the RDA’s trip to the 2010 World Cup? Who’s bothered if AJMC-Colas won 14 out of 26 tenders issued under the Additional Stimulus Package?

 

Nobody in a position to do something about it, that’s who. We’ve gone far beyond the point where the authorities aren’t doing their jobs; we’ve reached the stage where they’re actively undermining the public interest. Common decency dictates that in these economically challenging times, wastage of public funds should be treated with even more severity than usual. But the complete opposite is happening; the politically well-connected and their cronies are gorging themselves on public resources like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And in the absence of any semblance of probity, one is reduced to hoping that they feast their way to an infarction. Sadder still though is the fact that our whole development model is being built upon decisions predicated upon greed and personal gain. Foundations don’t get much shakier than that.

 

But that’s alright; it’s all alright. Because we’ve been programmed to perceive society through the lenses of communalism, every single issue is reduced to this lowest common denominator. Now, if you’ll just excuse me, I’m off to buy some shares in an up and coming company that goes by the name of nostalgia.