We need not orchestrate a Spanish inquisition to force out confession of social chaos. The list of symptoms is non stop :- matricide, incest compounded with sodomy, fraud allegation and sexual harassment, domestic battering, suicide, murder, kidnapping, divorce, abandoned children, single parent family syndrome, students’ expert pornography and collective rape.

Development cannot be measured only by posh hotels, the range of goods in hypermarkets, modern dual carriage ways but also the interest of the mass, Mauritian conscience, an identity and national pride let alone the way our society structures ‘opportunity and reward’ are distributed, that becomes our social DNA. Any society with a national underclass like ours aspires to a socio/economic structure that harnesses creativity, productivity together with integrity as moral detergent or moral therapy.

Mauritius today is highly dichotomised between two blocks - one is a small clique of high earners, holding much of the agricultural land, textiles, financial services, luxury hotels on beaches and unity in (EPZ) Export Processing Zone. They are further dovetailed as business is family run, into joint enterprises be it banking, assurance, manpower training or the press. The other is a rapidly increasing low income group.

Save the top bourgeois bracket, most families rely on two incomes to maintain a semblance of a middle class standard of living, with access to such mere conveniences as:- radio, TV, computer, e-phone but a significant number of families need two incomes just to pull themselves up above the poverty line, and frustration.

The ever increasing lowest structure of the population does not get access to the newly diversified sectors of the economy. The new emerging forms of work embedding high technology skills are not passing to the prospective job seekers.

The slummites survive on a separate and unequal economy in the informal sector. It’s a second rate system, segregating or pigmying the poor, shattering the link between “effort and reward”. People living in poverty, chronically unemployed or under-employed and socially dysfunctional, represent a vast loss of human potential to the nation, already resource scarce. A quarter of students who fail to complete secondary education, hail from the poverty zone. They are the slums’ unreachables. Could such a nation hope to have a world class work force to get on board the global economy? We cannot afford to waste any of our resources:- our people, their ideas, their education, their skills. These people have missed a seat in the last ‘Titanic lifeboat’.

The marginalised are employed on and off by the underground economy that can only make profit because they pay low wages, and avoid regulations, codes and taxes that bite away huge chunks as corruption and private tuition, from the GNP, weakening welfare benefits. Corruption is both the nemesis number one and the Mozart of the financial world-jobs, contracts, tenders, permits are corruption prone .Who holds the country hostage?

There are some deprived regions on the periphery of towns and coastal areas which due to modernisation, are becoming increasingly marginalised into shanty towns, slums infested. Housing crises have influenced the “drop out flux” towards areas of exclusion. Some of them survive in rather subhuman condition in the absence of basic infrastructure, lodging, water, recreation, ever haunted by drugs, prostitution, smuggling, child sex tourism, child labour, incest, harbingering Kaya number 2. This gathering “chickungunya”, threatens our social edifice.

Mauritius has proved right through an export based strategy for its economic development incurring inflation and depreciation of the rupee. The workers bear the brunt when the rise in the cost of living is inconsistent with the compensation. Compensation paradigm is an annual feature during budgeting season and government issues austerity.

The government reduced to a mere juridical/politico agency (owning at present barely 35 % of national assets) to ensure stability for local and foreign investors, is pressurised by liberalisation and privatisation imposed by the market economy, to remove the globality of welfare benefits—a redistributive system introduced in the 60’s by the Labour Party as an alternative to nationalisation, to rebalance the skewed economy based on slave structure. But considerable public funds are spent on posh cars for summit prestige, for delegations abroad and expensive festivals to boost up government image as the promising panacea.

The dilemma as to the budgeting drill is to formulate a workable theory to strike a balance between redeeming a sinking economy and serving an impoverished population. Economic revival at home can only come about with attention to labour management and human capital reconfiguration – key requirement for a dynamic, fast changing and increasingly “intelligent” society.

However, competitiveness and productivity should not be solely based on the output of workers and trade unions. The management, the technology, the design and the marketing are all equally answerable. What’s the aim of development? Evidently, it’s to get a better standard of living for all.

Political decolonisation awaits economic de-feudalisation. The hidden economic apartheid needs to be de-oligopolised. Corruption cleaning and fair distribution could help reduce economic terrorism and avert social disequilibrium.

<B>Younous PEERBOCCUS</B>