An acronym is a word that is made from the first letters of two or more words and can be a very useful mnemonic tool for students revising for their exams. It must however encapsulate the full significance of the subject matter in question as otherwise it would be a pointless exercise that would result in giving irrelevant and completely distorted answers to what was asked. For example, it would be preposterous to use GREEN as an acronym in an essay on the environment if you intend to praise the virtues of Garbage, Rats, Effluence, Exogenous bacteria, and Nitrate levels in drinking water.

Last Friday, Rama Sithanen concluded his budget with an acronym that displayed a severe case of wishful thinking and which bears no relationship to the realities in Paradise Island. He called it AMIGO in pursuit of his apparent dream to build an AMIGO Mauritius that is Attractive, Modern, Inclusive, Green and Open.I have no problems at all with the first one: Mauritius is indeed Paradise on earth and the sheer beauty of its landscape, the golden yellow fine sands, the cloud capped mountains, and the perfect blend of colours in its people and in all that Nature has bestowed on this land makes it one of the most attractive places on earth. But then we all knew that and Sithanen's purple prose at the end of his speech was merely stating the obvious.

Before I go any further, let me make it perfectly clear that the budget was a political tour de force that managed to spike the guns of an opposition desperate to exploit any weaknesses in the government programme for the remaining two years of its mandate. It seems to have satisfied the expectations of large segments of the population, and the sight of prominent trade unionists toasting the health of the Finance Minister made a pleasant change from listening to dinosaurs droning on and on about their droits acquis, which are nothing more than the anachronistic relics from the perpetual pursuit of votes by all our politicians. Berenger, that arch defender of freedom of expression, became so disorientated with the apparent success of the budget proposals that he could not resist another bout of the demagogy that is now second nature to him, and in the week devoted to debates on the budget chose to ask a question about something that was topical twenty years ago. Apparently the future of Paradise Island depends on whether a few copies of a banned book, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, were on sale in this democratic, secular country that boasts of a free education system which presumably has helped its citizens to make informed, personal choices about their reading material…

Sithanen gave an impressive account of the progress of our economy since 2005. GDP has grown from 2% to the current 6% and this upward trend is apparently set to continue; an unemployment rate that has been increasing for the last 15 years has fallen from a peak of 9.6% in 2005 to 8.5% today, and will hopefully fall further when Tianli becomes fully operational. Foreign Direct Investment has increased enormously over the last three years, and will total Rs 15 billions during this financial year; total private investment as a percentage of GDP has increased by over 33% since 2005 and will reach its highest ever level this year; the savings rate has increased from 17% to 20% of GDP over the last three years, despite the much maligned tax on interest on savings; the balance of payments has moved out of the red and posted a surplus of over Rs 13 billions last year; the manufacturing sector has recovered from a negative 5.5% growth in 2005 to a 3.5 percent growth last year. Tourism maintains its preeminent role in our economy and there was a 15% growth in arrivals in 2007; IRS, Tianli, and highlands will ensure that the growth in the construction industry will continue its upward trend in the coming years; the number of establishments in the BPO sector has doubled since 2005, and the prospects for the new emerging sectors like sea food, medical tourism, etc look very promising.

Sithanen then immersed himself in newspeak, making use of an ambiguous language replete with euphemisms in order to mislead and manipulate the public. In particular, he talked about per capita income which had apparently increased from $5000 in 2005 to a fantastic $7000 this year; in Mauritian terms, this is roughly equivalent to a gross annual income of Rs 200,000. That figure is what each citizen would receive if the yearly income generated by the country from its productive activities were divided equally among everyone. This is patently absurd, as the majority of people earn much less than Rs 16,000 per month, and a scandalous number of people exist on wages of Rs9,000 or less per month, a figure decreed as the poverty level by the CSO. Per capita income is a crude figure, designed to distort and hide the real level of poverty in the country. By that definition, all Zimbabweans must be millionaires as one loaf of bread costs over 1 million Zimbabwean dollar…

That is the problem with our experts; they have a morbid obsession with figures and as long as the techniques of econometrics are rigidly applied and the right figures are churned out following the analysis of data, then all is well in the best of all possible worlds. Hardly any allowance is made for the real misery suffered by a large number of our citizens as a result of the extreme poverty that many live in. It is this cold, calculated, mechanical outlook on life that has now resulted in the poor being subdivided into those who suffer from 'absolute poverty' and the majority of the poor who are, well, just poor. The 7157 families (how did they reach such an exact figure?) will benefit from Rs385 millions in the budget whilst the remaining 20,000 officially considered as just poor will get nothing. And yet Sithanen announced proudly that while growing income and wealth isabsolutely necessary, social development and solidarity must follow at the same pace.Fine words, but where is the scope for that with measures that hardly touch the living conditions of the vast majority of the poor?

Sithanen went on to say that we have appraised the plight of those families without a decent dwelling so we can tailor our response to their specific needs and affordability. How has he done that since 2005? By initiating the building of not one single house since 2005! However, better late than never. For 2008, he has allocated Rs 170 million towards infrastructure for the construction of 774 Firinga houses on 10 sites across the island for very low income families. Each house will cost the equivalent of what we pay our president tax free every month; or a third of what we pay a French engineer every month to locate the numerous burst pipes that result in us losing over 40% of our water supply, a task that he does not seem to be very successful at accomplishing. Just imagine: The Rs 5 millions we spend on Indira Sidaya for doing a non job every year at UNESCO would have been sufficient to build 25 houses every year… Why do our politicians find it so difficult to allocate money for the building of cheap houses for our homeless? And yet they have no problems at all in finding hundreds of millions of rupees to finance schemes born out of self indulgence and cupidity…Could it be simply because these unfortunate people have no fixed abode and therefore unlikely to be on the electoral register? One can only hope that the houses Sithanen plans to build for middle income working couples who are first time home owners are not snaffled by the staff employed to administer them, as happened recently with houses in choice locations…

The modern part of Amigo refers primarily to infrastructure; I am afraid our fetish like obsession with the motor car means that any road building scheme will simply attract more vehicles on our streets. If people want proof of that, they only need to look at the M25 orbital motorway around London which was intended to reduce the traffic congestion but which rapidly turned the new motorway into a never ending traffic jam. No politician wants to address the real problem with our roads: we have far too many vehicles for the same kilometers of road as we did in the seventies when we only had around 40,000 vehicles. The price of vehicles has been kept artificially low for electoral purposes by the obscenity known as duty free cars, by keeping petrol prices low, again for electoral purposes, by giving so many polluting old monsters waiting for an accident to happen certificates of roadworthiness, and by having a minister for the environment who has never once mentioned the detrimental effects of so much noxious emission by so many vehicles on our health. He is also apparently deaf as he can never hear the screeching noises made by tiny motorbikes…

Green? How can he pretend to be concerned over the environment when he does not even mention the one thing that could reduce our dependence on expensive, imported petrol: ethanol? Perhaps he ought to go on a mission to Brazil and see for himself how the humble sugar cane has made that vast country almost entirely reliant on home produced ethanol for powering all its vehicles since the 1970s. In Paradise Island, we produce ethanol, but we are so stupid that we export all of it to Europe!

The plans to build an open Mauritius are good and will continue the reform process started in 2006. There are still too many administrative hurdles that frustrate the aspirations of entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens alike. Rules that make no sense at all are still rigidly enforced by civil servants scared to use their initiative. Let me give one example that will be familiar to many people who emigrated many years ago and want to return home. Provided you satisfy all other requirements, a foreign government will give you a naturalization certificate before offering you a passport; once you have obtained the new passport, the naturalization certificate becomes redundant and you will never be asked again for it by the country giving you the new passport. It becomes an insignificant piece of paper as the new passport is the real proof of your naturalization and your new identity. Not our passport office in Port Louis. Oh no! Our man with the fetish for stamps has to see your naturalization certificate before he will allow your children a Mauritian passport; you can show him your Mauritian passport, your birth certificate, your identity card, your bank statements, your driving licence, your new 'foreign' passport, bring even the local shopkeeper to confirm that you are who you say you are - it won't matter. Mr Stamp fetishist won't stamp your form until you show him that naturalization certificate that no one else in the universe is interested in. If you tell him you have lost it, he will ask you to get a photocopy. As there is no department for photocopying such a stupid, useless piece of paper, what can you do? You then have to go through the time consuming rigmarole of seeking permission from the Prime minister's office for special dispensation, etc. Isn't there someone in the Passport office who can surely see how ludicrous this antiquated rule is? If some Bangla Deshis can stay in Paradise Island without permission but with political backing, why do people born and brought up as Mauritians have to go through such idiotic loops in order to have their children registered as Mauritians?

The Budget is a real masterstroke by Sithanen. All the indicators are good. However, the people who needed the most help have been neglected; as usual the poor have been left behind. The middle classes are happy with the amount of subsidies thrown at them and the PRB report will allow the government to extract a lot of political mileage at the expense of the opposition. However, the rich will become richer and the gap between rich and poor will get wider. Sithanen has been a real amigo to the rich and the middle classes, the people most likely to vote in the elections.

But eh amigo! Solo trozos para el pobre? Only the crumbs for the poor? Let us hope that Le Touessrok has not completely wiped away childhood memories of the smell and taste of gato piman.

R.A.J.
Email: servipei@yahoo.com