Roshni Mooneeram Letters to my country: 1 On political decay and renewal We experience political decay when political systems fail to adjust to circumstances that are changing. There was a time when we were all poor, had relatively low levels of education, were not used to receiving gifts (on the eve of elections or at any other times), and were too overjoyed by independence to ask ourselves what dependence we were creating for ourselves and our children. Being human beings who are, by nature, rule following, abiding by social norms, we have settled into voting patterns. We go even further in our conservatism. We often give those voting patterns a particular value and meaning that they do not have. We have accepted as folklore the fact that our guilty participation in electoral bribes mean there are no fair and free elections. There was a time when the MMM represented a breath of fresh air as opposed to a reactionary Labour Party. But today, all the four main political parties have become ideologically homogeneous. They have all worked with one another over the past 5 years in a musical chair that means there hasn’t been and there is no real opposition. There are no ideas left to fight for. This is why PRB talks in pettiness of lunch bills he has paid for a fellow politician and NCR, who has himself barely ever been on the job market, stoops even lower to question the professional competence of Professor Ameenah Gurib-Fakim. The deliberative debates will deteriorate in the remaining days of the campaign. What we have seen of the electoral programmes are a series of short-term fixes – the removal of a sanction on speeding by the very same Government that proposed it in the first place, salary increases which are governed by competition between the two coalitions rather than a clear long term vision, bribes to the socio-cultural groups, targeted offers to particular ethnic groups - all of which eventually only serve to further corrupt the system. Politicians hang on to power in ways that are incomprehensible to the citizen. Take NCR who has little to present as a ‘bilan’ beyond a string of scandals after 10 years and is yet forcing his way to change the constitution, not to ensure further rights for all citizens, but to ensure he will hold the country in his hands. Politics has become the most powerful instrument through which a handful of mercenary ‘leaders’ protect their own interests and those of their families, the Jugnauths being another case in point. Voting patterns emerge to meet one set of conditions, but their failure to adapt entails political decay. Take those who will blindly vote for Labour even if this means a descent into a one-man dictatorship and their main argument of allegiance. Sure there was a time when the Labour party helped out groups of people who were discriminated against under the colonial regime itself played out in clear ethnic terms. That was 50 years ago. What are we loyal to today? To answer this question we would also need to know who is financing the traditional parties. We have invested so much nostalgic emotion into norms of voting that we cannot even see where the safeguard or our self-interests and rights lie, and we thereby shoot ourselves in the foot. Voting patterns based on blind faith (whether based on ethnic lines or on the cult following of leaders who once were) are resistant to change, hence the political decay we see today. You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time With our changing economic and social environments, the disjunction between the traditional parties and the present needs are being acutely felt. The cracks in the system have got more obvious every month this year. There are so many times you can make empty promises to the same people. The problem is that this political situation will continue to worsen over time, unless a third political force knocks the system off its dysfunctional and institutionalised trajectory. And maybe it needs to worsen to a point of collapse before we are ready for change. Of course, old power structures cannot be knocked down without serious thought as to what would replace them. New possibilities are opening up. What we have witnessed recently, and which some have short-sightedly dismissed as the mushrooming of new political parties, constitutes an unprecedented political capital for Mauritius. The mobilization of social groups and new personalities into the political system is allowing individuals to pool their interests and to approach politics in novel ways. This will, in the longer run, have a spill over effect on how we view and do politics in Mauritius. I disagree with Emanuel Blackburn’s commentary on the ‘failure’ of the emerging parties to rally (Le Mauricien, 29.11.14). A last minute, ill thought-through, desperate patchwork of political ideologies (this rings a bell?) is not what Mauritius wants or deserves as an alternative. A serious mainstream force, and not a sectarian one, will emerge in its own logic and timing, in unison with the preparedness of the people for change and with their participation in a model that does not yet exist. We should be, and I believe, we are, in fact, in full creation mode. The 2014 elections will be followed by a period of political instability if not crisis as those 3 or 4 families who have held on to political power for almost half a century, backed by their stakeholders, also a few families, who have everything to gain from a status quo, writhe to preserve a centre that can no longer hold. As things fall apart, at the following elections (let’s say, generously, in 2 years), the future will open up to the possibility of a new contract between, on one hand, a new generation of politicians and, on the other, a voting population sufficiently matured to be able to discern its own interests.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 08:11:12 +0000
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