This is a brief call in my capacity of Mauritian citizen in the context of the ongoing pre – budgetary debate.

In your statement to the National Assembly on 30 August last, you rightly reviewed, like a doctor diagnosing a very sick patient, the extreme poor health and weaknesses of the Mauritian economy. You talked of the “daunting task” facing us all and took much…. pain to critically examine the situation and came up with, indeed, quite a detailed prescription.

I would like to urge you most earnestly, to persist on this route but in a much bolder and more resolute manner.

In the forthcoming budget - and by all means, if necessary, in the following ones too - you should boldly take a series of measures that indicate clearly that everyone of us is being asked to accept his share of contribution and sacrifice.

In a varying scale, of course. The poor should certainly be treated with a caring and less painful dosage but the more privileged with a much stronger one. Everybody should be enlisted and told courageously that it will necessitate some time for the prescription to act. And those still manoeuvering to escape the fiscal net should be targeted as a matter of utmost priority and firmness.

Every one should thus have the unmistaken belief of being administered the right medicine, however nauseating it proves to be. And be given the assurance and public demonstration that, in that painful recovery process, nobody is being spared.

A further note: doctors normally do have bedside manners. I would rather say to you, in the present precarious state we are faced with: No bedside manners, please! Not these days! Please let us have an accurate and truthful clinical examination and scan …….and let’s go for the treatment !

J F P R</B>