A combination of long-term difficulties eroding the efficiency and performance of export sectors, including tourism coupled with our dependence on an increasingly expensive fossil fuel mean that we have to rethink our development strategy and lifestyle.

Besides judicious adjustments and innovations to keep our textile and tourist heads above water, we need new energy producing schemes but for heaven’s sake let’s not go “nuke-crazy”. The sugar industry will willy-nilly have to become ‘the cane energy industry’ and sweetener will be just a mere byproduct. Parallel to this we must develop an energy-saving mindset and culture. New daring town and country planning leading to locally-centered economies, which encourage the use of bicycles, will also be part of the new landscape. Most importantly food production must top our political agenda and that would probably mean an agrarian reform capable of releasing our creative and productive potentials. Import substitution of a new kind could be envisaged. It will be argued that WTO rules rule this out. This is true if protective administrative measures are taken but if the people of Mauritius freely choose to buy Mauritian it would be undemocratic to stop them.

This new orientation to our economy and culture will not be the oeuvre of bureacrats or technocrats of the old mindset. It requires new thinking and new leadership at all levels to mobilise national human and material resources.

Of course “compradores” will initially be dead against. But world economic and ecological reality will eventually force them to join national efforts. This survival strategy rests on a class alliance, which is all inclusive. This is not to be interpreted as a reneger, an abandonment of class struggle. The struggle against neocolonialism is an expression of class struggle.

There is no doubt that, in the process of rebuilding our motherland, establishing strong links with our immediate neighbours (Indian Ocean Islands, SADC etc.) and adopting environment-friendly policies we will strengthen Morisianism (positive nationalism) and build a new forward-looking culture.

This new culture will have to be based on tolerance, justice, caring and sharing. Above all, it will have to be democratic. We will have to build a democracy, which is not just a system of government but which will become a way of life vibrant at work, at home, everywhere. At the heart of it there must be gender democracy.

The most difficult task at present is to find the leadership which can embody all this. “Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?”