Two Nobels Were Not Mistaken About Mauritius

Kot zot pu kav vo nu bann dirizan sa!

Camille Moutoo at a SELEX dinner

Certainly not James Meade who submitted his famous 1960 facts-based report a few months after visiting Mauritius. Incidentally he landed here exactly eight years before 12.3.68 and about ten days after a pretty little thing called Carol had spent five days checking us out. Start to read the clear report and it won't take you long to appreciate – if you'd been led to believe otherwise – how bad a hand we had been dealt five decades ago. You might even then be able to connect the dots and understand that he and his team were proved wrong by a group of exceptional men and women who saw far and loved this land of ours like nobody did since.

Likewise Vidia – the V in V.S. Naipaul – made some really sharp observations about Mauritius. The kind of insights that would make the day of any policy wonk whether it was in 1973 or forty-five years later. Don't like it too much that he called us an Overcrowded Barracoon? Well, we had one of the highest population densities in the world back then – we still do sitting at no. 007 – and you've surely not forgotten what are the two things Malcolm said we grow here. As a matter of fact it would be far too generous a compliment if someone used these two words to describe us today. Given how much we've regressed.

And then there is Stiglitz who found that everything was going on swimmingly in our island. His 2011 visit occurred a few years after a toxic bean-counter had done extensive damage to our economy and to the lives of thousands with his flat tax and reverse Midas touch. The massive irony of course is that Joe was part of the successful economic team of Bill Clinton who had reversed the harmful tax cuts of a bunch of Voodoo economists led by one Ronald Reagan and the first Bush President – this had caused US debt to balloon from $1tn to $4tn in twelve short years.

The least he could have done was to share his experience and recommend that we make an economic about turn. After all the Sithanen toohrooh had grown to Rs116bn by the end of 2010. A huge amount roughly equal to our GDP for the last six months of 2006 but only one tenth of the level it reached last December. But he didn't preferring to put his foot in his mouth and spraying us with excessive doses of flattery. I don't think this made him gain any new fans among those who had raised at least one eyebrow when he got that prize – which is as old as our independence – from the Swedish central bank.