The repeated family budgetary rape by unjustified price hike in overall consumption, corollary of misgovernment and wastage, has a bearing particularly on the lesser legal and economic being. Owing to constant income erosion, families dependent on low-skilled breadwinners called “unemployed” euphemistically, miss the integrative cycle of post-industrial Mauritius, much vaunted as a happy society, a new age. They are left to perpetuate the excluded, the malcontent, weakest springs of national solidarity and social fabric.

The informal sector requires long hours of labour to be put in, with little returns and without nets. When husband, wife and children, all drudge beyond odd hours to eke out a living, there is little social surplus to grow up on to generate inter-generational mobility and social engineering.

In such a milieu, children are denied the urbanized elite education as credential to success, short of quality time, money, parental guidance and social capital. Such an intra social dichotomy goes contrary to the spirit of free education, free bus fare student based and Equal Opportunity Act ready since 2004.

Most people operating in the informal sector are denied collaterals and sureties to obtain an initial capital. Should some, by dint of hard work and saving, set up a micro enterprise, no government sponsored schemes are forthcoming because of excessive bureaucracy and lobbying.

The young and old, male and female, are often, in such milieu, dragged into deviance, out of lack of choice, as passive agents, and get entangled in gambling, drug, porno, prostitution, alcoholism, affecting household dynamics. The “social dropouts” are victimized for crimes they have been forced into by forces of history and rhetoric of power politics. At top executive level, what ought to be a model is overrun by snobbery, nepotism, corruption, demagogy. The government governs less, but militates more for the next election bout, busy solidifying its power base on all fronts eliminating or neutralizing opposition.

Among the vulnerable upon whose integration depends national equilibrium, social stability and good governance, are the jobless, divorced women without adequate education, skill or training, widows with many children, the disabled, those from broken homes, drug addicts or children whose parents are habi-tual criminals, addicted to prison life. They cut across all segments of our falling or failed society save white collar criminals.

<B>Clandestinity </B>

Some of female-headed households and other females living in dire straits have recourse to the oldest profession in clandestine economy and practise abortion. The children are weaned away from regular school life on an on and off basis, to fend in the child labour market under guise of apprenticeship. The unequal fabric and the malfunctioning economy further reflect the unbalanced ratio of youngsters infesting and haunting correctional centres. All hailed from dysfunctional homes and CPE foetuses aborted from over elitist educational system.

The excluded are among the squatters conscious of their illegal act. Unable to afford ever rising rents when forced by retrenchment, and squeezed by budgetary tsunami, squatting became the last straw, which is by itself disruptive. Constant price hike compels the low income consumers to reduce expenses on basic items be it quality or quantity. This life of acute austerity corrodes physical health, peace of mind and underscores performance at school and swells our hospitals and dispensaries.

The absence of proper space and privacy in ghettoes and a premature exposure to sex spree, among children and adolescents, breed promiscuity while crowded cohabitation and multi habitation incites incest and fornication. The deviants may revert to deviant business if income and survival are pressing hard. Values linked to family and solidarity force the unemployed to have a stake in drug and sex business, to stave off starvation, and fund school children and welfare for non earning older parents, disentitled for homes. The children of the slums indulge in antisocial activities short of social capital but those of upper echelon do so because of revulsion from excess.

Already Mauritius undergoes societal breakdown and economic drought despite the panacea promised by the oncoming government. Was this just a lure for power ? With recurrent price hike, many types of “equality” are eroded. Neither markets nor businesses’ ethics routinely prioritise “equality and fairness” about profit and quality service. Rich in all out trappings of democracy, rights are offered grudgingly as concessions. The miscued economy is never de-skewed democra-tically to relieve the 90 % of the population on heavy indebtedness through hire purchases and mortgage loans.

Mauritius’ transition to a modern democracy has been held back by the country’s old institutions based on slavery/tied labour/feudalism and dysfunctional wrangling political parties and a flawed electoral system that never commensurate with the number of votes cast. Democracy ends at the voting booth, for votes stand for votes personal gain with access to the wealth of the nation, rather than ideology centred, a mission to improve the fate of the nation.

Hormone of development</B>