Abusive electricity and petroleum prices over the last five years brought a lot of money to the government till. Especially as the VAT rate was kept at 15% during a period oil prices went through the roof and their subsequent collapse was not passed on to us. Rs4.7 billion was mysteriously lost at the STC which doesn't have any oil price risk to hedge.
Record amounts of debt was borrowed -- including Rs9 billion from the World Bank -- while government did not build schools on a scale we saw between 2000 and 2005.
And Ramgoolam did not solve our recurring water problems: he was too busy making speeches while waiting for robust growth rates which never arrived.
24 comments:
All this is no not news anymore, the fault lies with the citizens for not showing any protest!
Now this is news: Meilleurs dirigeants africains : le magazine East African attribue la première place à Ramgoolam
Parmi les aveugles, le borgne est roi!
After Midlands Dam, not a rupee has been invested in water.
Ali Michael Mansoor has not provided funds to change leaking water pipes.
Politicians have the following scenario: they do nothing to provide water (according to our experts, the rainfall here is more than enough for our consumption but the problem is there is no investment for water "captage")but instead when drought comes in, they appear on tv everyday threatening the population of sanctions! Poor lepep admirab!
We should ask the tourists (projected 1.5 million yearly) to bring water bottles in their suitcase, as cargo, etc otherwise we shall have to re-process toilet water, urine, etc to enable them to have water.
Pleur pauvre population!
@Kranti
Yep, lax management followed by threats and fines. Have another post coming on this soon.
water problem, what water problem?, the govt is buying buildings in the cybercity.....750 millions i think.....their priority is elsewhere!
@ Kranti:
"After Midlands Dam, not a rupee has been invested in water."
I may not be a fan of Mr Boolauck, but to his credit, we have to put on record the numerous major contracts that have been floated while he was there for renewing (very) old AC (asbestos concrete, same as those which have been dumped 'à l'air libre' alongside the motorway between Phoenix and St Jean roundabouts) main pipelines in the North-East (La Nicolière, Caroline, Ecroignard, Flacq, Bonne Mère, Camp de Masque, Balance John, Mont Ida, Plaines des Papayes, etc). So, he may have been slow in these, but the problem is on the supply side: how to feed these pipes when demand is already rising? It's not the job of the CWA to plan and construct reservoirs: it's the job of its parent ministry, the Ministry of Public Utilities. And who has been heading this Ministry for the past years...? Ayo, scapegoat searching pas la solution: inn lerr (dépi bien longtemps) pou mett professionel dans bann place ki demann technical competence!
I heard Mr Boolauck on the radio yesterday for about 5 minutes. He mentioned that we need Rs12 billion to fix the leaking pipes but that government had budgeted something like Rs320 million/year for 2 years...
Reform inn marse vu zot!!!!
Yeah, I heard the last 10 minutes or so of his interview on Radio Plus: as usual, he speaks of what he has gathered as experience at CWA, but still proves that he was not the right man at the right place by attempting to answer questions from the public (the inapropriateness of digging into Mare aux Vacoas in a bid to increase its storage capacity - well done, but too technical a thing to keep relying on general statements, capturing all waters from rivers - how do you sustain aquatic life and maintain acquifers then?, stainless steel pipes of Singapore - yeah, so what? DI pipes also perform very well and will last for very long if they are laid according to stringent workmanship and comply technical specifications, and the uselessness of Navin going for Singapore's water experts because local expertise is better - dear sir, experts like yourself need to be backed by all sorts ethno-casteist lobbies before you happen to land at such a strategic post like you held some months ago, and some (uncomfortable?) silences in reply to his future actions)
Meanwhile, our very dear Dr Rashid was busy congratulating himself yesterday.
Well, we've got many more dry days before something comes from them.
And by the way, I happen to be overtaken by his cohort of escorts every morning and this morning too I noticed that his car (BR 22) is shining clean...? I find it really hard to imagine a civil servant going to the pains of getting a micro-fibre mitt for carefully dry-wiping the huge surface area of that saloon car every day...
dire moi un coup, ki nous pou faire si la pluie pas tomber la?
mo penser nous bizin commence acheter nous personal water desalination unit!!!
A cote vender ca? BAI- Courts? leaking pipes la mo coire par expres ca...., coumnet li appeler ca, ministre la....VPM, ministre business development du BAI?
@ Anonymous of January 18, 2011 6:48 PM:
"ki nous pou faire si la pluie pas tomber la"
Bein, nou pas pou mort de soif. Ena la-pli pé tomber, tiginn-tiginn ek localisé, mais li suffisant pou capave collecter dans récipients and may sustain your basic needs (drinking, cooking and bathing - no car-washing of course!!) for longer than you can think - just remember that Rodrigues is blessed with far less rainfall than Dodoland, but still the inhabitants can live quite decently. How? Rainwater harvesting. Almost all roofs on the island are connected to some kind of container (plastic, fibre-reinforced, or even concrete) of high capacity (usually more than 1 cubic metre / 1,000 litres) and any drizzle (or even dew if you live in humid regions) slowly but surely keeps water flowing into that reservoir. Once a week, you pour about one teaspoon full of sodium hypochlorite (also known as "eau de javel") into your reservoir for disinfecting the rainwater. And if you still want more disinfection for drinking, you may fill glass / transparent PET bottles and lay them in the sum for some hours - UV will kill those germs that may have imaginarily survived chlorination.
Simple, eh?
If you want to water your flowers and lawns, may I propose that you connect your grey water (from the kitchen sink, lavabo, bath-tub, ross-lavé / washing machine but NOT toilet) outlets to grease-trap and a small underground tank from which you can pump out for watering? And you may even add sophistication (and independance from CWA) by using this water to flush your toilets, which are among the most thirsty appliances in your house!
For the time being, I would suggest massive subsidies to encourage people to purchase potable water tanks - imagine returning home in the evening and longing desperately in the traffic for a bath after a long / hard day at work, but not being able to do that because the water has been cut minutes before you reached home. Add to that household chores such as dish-washing that remained pending because of water cuts, etc..... And that happens daily to all workers. Imagine their frustration.
Privatising the water company is not the solution - all partnerships ended in massive corruption and downgrade in service levels (regular quality checks tend to become haphazard and erratic / inconsistent when the private company steps in) together with unjustified increases in prices wherever this has been applied. In all cases, people tended to prefer resorting to surface water collection, resulting in public health crises...
So, we desperately need to cut down our water footprint. If we are not ready to adapt to this régime we'll have to brace for social turmoil...
Hey all Mauritians who are not influential(!) persons, politicians and the like, let us prepare to face the end of the world resulting from drought inasmuch as those in authority and power - Beebeejaun and others - are not doing ANYTHING save waiting for the Almighty to send water.
Lepep admirab is not getting any information of what they are doing except water cuts, more water cuts, further water cuts! The only thing that will remain to be cut is our heads after no water cuts!
Eh vous autre li bien grave ca , la pluie pas p tomber meme, ministre BAI et Ramgoolam finne surement finnit acheter zot ticket pou sauver.....b nous ki nous pou faire?
degoutant ca, si mo bien comprends la, meme dans ca drought la la pou ki nou recevoir u litre water un autre litre p perdi dans pipe cwa!
pays pouri ca, jusqua touriste p mort dans l'hotel et ca aussi dans so propre chambre. ile maurice p vinne maudit, un jour nous tou pou paye lincompetence banne autorite et politiciens.
Akagugo, your post "ki nous pou faire si la pluie pas tomber la" deserves wider audience. Is it not the sort of practical insight and solution that seems so elusive to our policymakers? You should seriously consider having it (and other common-sensical ideas) published in Le Mauricien's forum page or somewhere else.
@ Samad Ramoly
Thank you, Sir. I only had the intention of sharing some practical advice gathered from my personal notes and subsequent observation and discussions with people during my trips here and there. But I would never have thought it was worth to be published in a newspaper. I thought that the local CRPEM and IEM (Council of registered professional engineers of Mauritius and the Institution of Engineers of Mauritius) should have been making a lot more of this kind of articles since very long, instead of contenting themselves of an annual banquet and similar (wasteful and self-congratulatory) social gatherings.
By the way, check out what Dr Virendra Proag is saying here and here: This guy has been hittin hard on all sensitive issues since ages, but as if preaching in the desert because he likes articulating his opinions around plain common sense and facts like: doubling irrgation water to the northern plains over the past 25 years has neither doubled yields nor productivity in a sunset industry, on the contrary harvests tend to remain fairly constant and no major decrease is seen even after notable droughts, as figures from the MSIRI suggest, therefore no investment in irrigation is necessary for the northern plains at all.
Dommage...
@ Kranti:
"are not doing ANYTHING save waiting for the Almighty to send water."
ANYTHING, including this (as you may call it) investment. The exception is the rule when it comes to religion in Dodoland!!
Leaking pipes: why didn't the govt treat this a priority .....why spend money on free transport when no one had asked for it(ok someone introduced it to win elections through populist means).....why spend money on celebrating how the french won and lost a battle in 1810.....why spend money sending ramgoolam here and there....why build a conference centre in pailles.....hello the list goes on...people responsible for our infrastrure and basic needs have failed in their duties......
Vous autres! Our Water Minister is the most incompetent Minister we have had in this position. As from this Monday, more "coupures drastiques" as if up to now they hane not been "drastiques"! In one week, they will announce more "coupures encore plus drastiques" up to when there will be no "coupures", not coz we would have obtained water (rain, desalination, cloud bombing) but coz we would not have water at all.
Lepep admirab, just wait: as soon we get raon water, watch the fate of desalination - it will go to the drawers to wait for a fresh drought! Ah ces incompetents, couyonneres, brigands jouant aves la population admirable!
silence silence silence our water minsiter is a 'sage', so says our PM. Please forgive him, he's old and cannot work under pressure, let it be , let it be, let it be
The VPM, I am told, has helped NR win the votes of the Muslim Community, remember SSB also said this on radio when he was helping NR become PM a second time - he said NR needs the precious votes of the Muslim Community. Well, so the VPM is a huge asset to NR, not to mention how he gets the BAI chairman to help the Ptr with much needed funds come election time. The VPM is a failure just as NR but its all we have. I think we should take a photo of him holding a leadking pipe, and ask him to say 'sage' with a c.
VPM is doing for Labour what he had done for decades for MMM...
The water Minister, as someone called him here, is somewhat of a joke.He is there only as a No2 symbol for a certain community(this is Navin Ramgoolam's formula , not mine)and it seems to me he might be just good at being a medical Doctor, managing public utilities and our road and transport system etc is not hsi cup of tea. This looks like a simple thought but this is all there is to it really.
I think he should be appointed Haji minister.
Seen on the front page of www.defimedia.info :
"Tête-à-tête Ramgoolam-de l’Estrac cet après-midi
Mardi, 2 août. Alors que la situation politique est toujours confuse après la démission en bloc des ministres MSM, un invité surprise s’est pointé au bureau du Premier ministre cet après-midi. Il s’agit de Jean-Claude de l’Estrac. Le président du conseil d’administration de La Sentinelle a rencontré Navin Ramgoolam au bâtiment du Trésor.
Jean-Claude de l’Estrac est arrivé au bureau du Premier ministre à 13 h 45. A sa sortie du bâtiment du Trésor, deux heures plus tard, il a été interrogé par des journalistes. Tout en confirmant qu’il a eu une rencontre avec le chef du gouvernement, il n’a pas voulu révéler la teneur de leur conversation. Toutefois, il précise qu’ils n’ont pas parlé politique."
More junk ahead...?
Political chessmaster pe konsider tu so bann opsyons.
Lepep has kept the toxic trickle-down economics policies of Ramgoolam. It's no wonder then they are running out of money and are raising the already disconnected petroleum prices, want to increase water prices and are thinking of selling the CWA. Come on guys we need to speak out.
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