Rama Sithanen?s appointment of Ali Mansoor as the new Financial Secretary to the Treasury is to be welcome by everyone worried over our precarious financial situation. An economy that has encouraged dependency from many sections of the population and that insists on spending far more than it can afford needs the expertise and objective assessment that sometimes only an expatriate or an outsider can provide.

Sithanen is however guilty of over egging the pudding in trying to sell his university friend as the best possible candidate for the job; and journalists ought to know better than accepting at face value everything that politicians tell them and should therefore stop getting carried away by Sithanen?s grandiloquent and hyperbolical description of his friend. In the context of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a ?senior? economist is by and large an economist with over ten years service in those institutions and is a rank attained by virtually all economists at the IMF; and a ?lead? economist at the World Bank can be merely someone in charge of a particular dossier. That is it. Moreover, a senior economist at the IMF has no managerial, supervisory, or leadership responsibilities, and is but one member of a team led by a mission chief, generally at the Division Chief level or higher. But the inappropriate emphasis on the words ?senior? and ?lead? by newspapers gives the impression that the new Financial Secretary to the Treasury is the godson of Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes!

There is no doubt that Ali Mansoor is eminently qualified to instil some discipline in the Treasury and is at the very least as competent as all previous incumbents. But to make him out as by far the best qualified and most senior economist that this island has produced is simply wrong and flies in the face of the truth. The minister of Finance should perhaps get out a little bit more and socialise with people outside his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances.

There are at least three other Mauritian economists at the World Bank and the IMF who hold positions far senior to Ali Mansoor and who have discharged responsibilities and conducted missions at a far higher level. Vinod Busjeet is one and has been a long standing senior member of staff at the World Bank. However, there is another Mauritian who is even more senior and has been a Division Chief at the IMF since 1996 and is only one rank below Assistant Director level. During his IMF career, he has had responsibility for many countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, including India. As Chief of the Asian division between 1995 and 1998, he was responsible for all training provided by the IMF Institute to all member countries in Asia and the Pacific, and was responsible for training courses in economic and financial programming in China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, amongst others. During the economic crisis in India in the early nineties, he was the Desk Economist for the IMF in the work on a macroeconomic and structural adjustment programme for India, a programme that Mr Manmohan Singh has acknowledged as the springboard for India?s current economic success. The third Mauritian, recently promoted to Division Chief level, has extensive experience in heading missions to African countries.

Silent agreement

When Sithanen was recently at the IMF annual meeting in Washington, he could have asked the managing Director, Rodrigo de Rato, for the names of eminent Mauritian economists and it is highly unlikely that Ali Mansoor?s name would have been mentioned. Alternatively, Rama Sithanen only had to look at an article in August 2003 in le Mauricien (as I did for the purpose of this paper) to understand that not all Mauritians like to brag about their real or imagined achievements or to kowtow to here today, gone tomorrow (and taken the family silver with them!) politicians, and all for the sake of personal advancement.

Nevertheless, the appointment of Ali Mansoor is a step in the right direction for a minister of Finance who has stood still since the elections. Sithanen is supposed to be in charge of the country?s finances and has so far implemented a few tepid measures that will at best have a ripple effect on the economy; but no more than the satisfying effect of the bubble rising up your back following a fart whilst swimming in the sea. It would appear that he has adopted the concept of silent agreement rather too literally and his silence, when confronted with the continuing waste and extravagant expenses by all government departments, indicates a lack of confidence in his own ability to redress the economy. Will he ever have the courage and strong personality of Chancellor Gordon Brown in turning down prime minister Tony Blair?s populist demands for more public expenditure? Here is an example of what a true grand argentier does in the context of a Westminsterian style democracy when faced with an overbearing and demanding prime minister : Tony Blair wants a private plane for the use of the British prime minister and asks Gordon Brown to provide the money to purchase it; Gordon Brown tells him there is no money available and if he really wants a plane badly, he can buy one from the existing annual budgetary allowance for the Prime Minister?s Office. In other words, cut your expenses and buy your plane if you can save sufficient funds! Somehow, I cannot see Sithanen standing up to Ramgoolam in this manner.

Recently, Sithanen outlined the five areas that would need the special attention of Ali Mansoor. One of the obvious priorities is the encouragement of local and international investment in order to promote growth (or grot, as unfortunately Sithanen likes to pronounce it) and create jobs. I am afraid his performance so far in the investment field leaves a lot to be desired. The Chairman of Malaysian company MTrans Holdings, David Chew, recently visited Mauritius and offered to finance and build the Mauritius Monorail project at no cost whatsoever to the Treasury. The monorail system is safe, comfortable, environmentally friendly, would cost an average of Rs 30 per trip, and we would not have to spend one cent on its planning, design, building, and maintenance. Too good to be true?

Apparently Sithanen thinks so, and he did not even afford David Chew the courtesy of a meeting to discuss a project that could significantly reduce the traffic chaos in our capital city. Perhaps the usual Mauritian way is better : a succession of reports by so called consultants that costs a fortune followed by the borrowing of vast amounts of money that must perforce include hefty commissions to the parasites lounging in chauffeur driven limousines paid entirely out of our pockets.

Sithanen talks about fiscal consolidation and I am pleased that he has at last woken up to the fact that the price of petrol has to reflect the fluctuations on the world oil market, something that Pravind Jugnauth and Bérenger shamefully failed to do. It is such a pity that, on political and tactical grounds, the necessary increases are being drip fed to a population that has for far too long basked in the largesse of politicians whose overriding priority has always been the chance to ride in the ministerial limousine.

It would have been far better if Sithanen had gone on national television and given a considered expose of the terrible financial situation of this country and explained the reasons for the inevitable sharp increases in petrol prices, People are not stupid and they do understand that you cannot pay one rupee for something that costs two rupees.

But fiscal consolidation cannot be merely the increase in commodity prices to reflect the world market. How do we increase revenue and attempt to extricate us from the debt cycle that is in danger of strangling every aspect of our economy? An overhaul of the taxation system is urgently required. It cannot be right that someone who lives in a modest urban house has to pay local taxes whilst the owners of large mansions in villages pay nothing. It is wrong, it is immoral, and politicians who claim to servi nou pei whilst defending such dishonesty are doing the exact opposite. No other country in the world allows its richer citizens the obscene prodigality of duty free cars and no one knows how many billions of rupees have been wasted in this manner.

The taxpayer provides something called ?passage benefits? to its civil servants, another unique phenomenon in the world. We give everyone 13 months pay for 12 months work, irrespective of the differential level of performance; we have a ?sick? allowance of a set number of days which you can take whether you are sick or not; 16 days have been declared public holidays for a variety of reasons to keep every God happy, which means that people remain inactive for more than four months every year when week ends off are included. 13 months pay for less than 8 months work without including sick and local leave? This is indeed Paradise Island and some neanderthal trade unionists are asking for even more days off if public holidays happen to fall on a sunday!

It is no use asking the population to tighten its belt whilst politicians and their friends continue to lead a lavish lifestyle at our expense. There is absolutely no need for so many ?missions? that politicians and senior civil servants indulge in and, in any case, most of these are taken merely to exploit the extravagant per diem allocation.

Will the minister in charge of our finances decree a moratorium on 90 % of these missions and thereby save the country hundreds of millions of rupees?

?Thinking out of the box?

Every new employee finds that his conditions of employment do not entitle him to any sick or local leave in his first year.

Politicians have been elected by us only six months ago because they promised to servi nou pei ? and yet most of them have already taken holidays that clearly they are not entitled to. If Sithanen is really serious about fiscal consolidation, shouldn?t he follow normal practice and adjust their pay accordingly? He might, but only after pigs have learnt to fly and elephants have practised to perfection some Saturday Night Fever disco dance moves!

Someone should tell Sithanen to stop using that particularly irritating expression, ?thinking out of the box?; he has flogged it to death recently and he needs perhaps now to show more imagination and versatility in his linguistic skills. In any event, he must be aware that some ministers are stupid enough to give a literal meaning to that inane expression and are probably at this very moment scouring the world for an appropriate box to think out of!

Hyperbole and fashionable expressions that rapidly go stale through overuse are no substitute for a proper economic framework to take this country forward. What we need is a minister of Finance with the clarity of vision and the will power and courage to implement the measures that this country desperately needs and which all previous ministers of finance have singularly failed to do. In other words, a grand argentier who is not the prisoner of private, social, cultural, or religious vested interests and who has only the national interest at heart.

R.A.J.