<B>By Hannah MAUDARBOCUS</B>

Have you ever been frustrated at having to wait for very very long hours at a public hospital and not even having the right to complain for fear of being seen as impatient? Have you ever been waiting for a document from authorities and actually been provided same only 24 hours after the actual agreed time? Again you sure must have gone for your driving test and been traumatized by the formalities you have to go through, not mentioning half of your day you wasted when with proper planning it could have taken roughly an hour? Just to share a personal experience ? a typical example of how authorities in Mauritius function ? obtaining a stamp duty on some documents actually took me a whole day more than it should have because the photocopy machine in the government office was out of order!!! (for the sake of politeness we will refrain from mentioning department names!) Unfortunately, all of us have at one time or another been victim of such situations and have each our own story to tell where nurturing of Red Tape, excessively unreactive (not to say nonreactive) officers and unnecessary hierarchical formalities.

Great visionaries, some decades back, have pictured Mauritius as a promising vibrant economy, the link between East and West by virtue of its strategic position and an investment hub where proper regulations and effective, flexible and investment friendly environment would prevail. We are a little far from that picture, though we could have been as brilliantly performing an economy as Singapore. It is just a part of the process to take cognizance of the underlying problems but without proper action it just rests as an unfulfilled dream of great thinkers, who once thought they had the power to change our economy but got entangled in this very web of what I define as a ?culture problem?. So where exactly lays the problem? We cannot put all the blame on the government bodies because even our private sector shows the very same deadly symptoms. Over 243 150 tourists visited Mauritius this past 150 days only, and this figure keeps on increasing year by year and is it actually still tolerable to have hotel bookings closed at 4.00 p.m. (Mauritian time: 3.30 p.m.)? Meaning that anytime after 3.30 p.m. you can not book a hotel. Can we still afford putting such restrictions on our economic development? Are we not wasting so much potential resources of our human capital because they are have not been trained to be hard working enough?

I personally think that the whole culture should change and be axed towards providing world class services in main sectors of the economy which are the most promising: financial services (given new prospects with BPOs), tourism and local manufacturing industries. Mauritius is already able to exploit from low cost conditions (unflatteringly because of poor currency value) but should now be able to be recognized for quality of labour provided as well. It does not depend wholly on how much we get our population educated as a lazy population is like an attractive girl with no brains- in the end you just have enough of it, and too quickly... What is therefore feared most is that potential investment is deviated from Mauritius because of lack of professional services and inappropriate business friendly framework and plain incompetence. The culture towards work should take another dimension so as to make Mauritius become a must-stop destination be it for holiday seekers or business people. Of course this can only be possible given proper motivation from government in different forms and measures namely decent pay packets and proper minimum compensation for overtime work done.

We can only hope for the best in the upcoming budget of the government in the coming days. Only time will tell whether visionaries of today have rightly thought that Mauritius can unlock its potential to become a world leading service provider and emerge as a powerful economy. Investing our efforts on lost causes and fighting for the survival of particular industries which are collapsing are a waste of time, energy and money when same could be done to reinforce other sectors of the economy which have the ability to sustain the economy.