<B>About Mugabian style of government</B>

Fire is made in such a way that playing with a little match can ultimately create a big fire and huge casualty. Those who hold the match will swear that they did not intend to create such dramatic mess. They will argue that they just wanted to light a little controlled fire: that they did not intend to create any harm.

With a good lawyer at his side, the match cracker will perhaps be condemned for ?involuntary arson?.

When the guy with the little moustache in Zimbabwe took the match box out of his pocket to light the little fire, he just wanted to play with to justify the unjustifiable. He too was a nice guy who wanted to unite his country behind his leadership. Nobody thought that he would have ended as the arsonist he is today... Inflation was then at 12%.

Historical circumstances have fortunately dropped Mauritius right in the middle of the Indian Ocean preserving the little stone of any physical contacts with the neighboring violent, blood-thirst African continent. The diversity of our original population has largely softened the darker sides of our heads.

But there is in the air this sort of potential for violence which like the Damoclès sword is suspended over our heads. Somebody may be tempted for whatever reasons to cut the rope.

At the beginning of his demoniac way of governing, the little mustached man timidly fingered those white boucs emissaires which he finally built in some sort of integral monsters sucking the blood of poor black people.

The blood sucking white community then started to be physically aggressed. Some were arrested, some were beaten, some were savagely killed. Many people asked the President to put the match back in the box and the box back in his pocket but he had thrown it away to the poor illiterate mass. Having done so, he had to justify the fire and put it on the head of the farmers. Agriculture dropped to its lowest. Then he started beating the blacks who began to be accused of being traitors; crushing down their homes. Poor Morgan Tsangvirai was jailed and beaten just because he was the leader of the opposition.

Today in this country everybody seems to have forgotten the following points : l 45.6% of arable land owned by 6 000 white farmers (better call them ?white? than ?commercial?) which was made arable by their own efforts when they came there.

Ask our fellow nationals who went there in the late sixties to start the sugar industry in Rhodesia if these lands were arable !

● Noboby seems to understand how Mr. Mugabe became the comrade BOB we know today.

● Everybody seems to have forgotten the existence of the little match box.

Honestly speaking, I am only trying to make fellow country man realize that there are in Mauritius a few politicians who are dangerously playing with the same little match box in their pockets. Refrigerators are now known as ?frigidaires? because these had been the best on the market for long. White bashing will be known as Mugabism because Mugabe has been and still is the best at this dangerous game.

<B>Jean-Pierre LENOIR</B>