A bid for a fairer banker

Our economic commentators love to speak of Mauritius as a sophisticated international financial hub, yet our domestic credit architecture remains trapped in a colonial paradigm of risk aversion and rent-seeking. For decades, the local banking duopoly has enjoyed the comfort of outsized interest rate spreads—frequently hovering around five per cent—extracting rent from productive enterprises while offering peanuts to everyday depositors.

When the Bank of Mauritius adjusts its policy instruments, the transmission mechanism is invariably lopsided. A hike in the repo rate to protect the under-siege Mauritian Rupee transforms instantly into steeper borrowing costs for local small and medium enterprises. Yet, the corresponding yield for savers crawls upward at a glacial pace. The system is structurally wired to socialise the risks of currency depreciation while privatising the margins.

To break this gridlock, we must reject the simplistic binary of laissez-faire complacency versus blunt regulatory caps. Forcing a rigid drop in the interest spread to an arbitrary two per cent would simply trigger an immediate credit freeze by hyper-conservative risk committees, leaving local businesses entirely starved of capital. Conversely, relying solely on heavy corporate taxation treats the symptom rather than the systemic disease.

What the Mauritian economy requires is a surgical recalibration: a tiered 25 per cent corporate tax rate intertwined with a compressed 3.5 per cent spread framework, underpinned by an elevated policy rate to guard our battered currency.

By tying a lower tax threshold exclusively to productive domestic lending, we reverse the incentives for hoarding. If our financial institutions choose to park their excess liquidity in zero-risk government papers, they should face a punitive 35 per cent fiscal penalty. If they choose to absorb the risk of local entrepreneurship, agriculture, and green industrialisation, they deserve a tax shield.

A compressed 3.5 per cent spread within a higher repo environment ensures that depositors are finally rewarded for holding the Rupee, stemming the tide of capital flight. Simultaneously, it forces lenders out of their rentier comfort zone. We do not need a banking sector that merely manages safety metrics; we need a financial engine that fuels real-economy wealth creation. It is time our fiscal policy treats banking not as a protected guild, but as a public utility for national development.

Pain at the Pump: It’s about affordability, stupid!

We have been collectively gaslit by a simple arithmetic trick. Every time the State Trading Corporation tweaks its pricing committee dials, or local politicians squabble over the raw retail price of a litre of fuel, a predictable chorus of outrage echoes across Mauritius. The public demands lower pump prices, completely mistaking a symptom for the terminal disease.

Let us shatter the foundational myth of modern consumer outrage: fuel affordability does not depend on the price level alone.

To obsess over the raw cost of a litre of petrol is to completely misunderstand how wealth, structural productivity, and economic sovereignty operate. A nominally cheap commodity in a low-productivity, stagnant-wage economy is exponentially more punitive than a heavily taxed, hyper-expensive commodity in a highly productive society. The 'pain' you feel when the pump clicks shut is not a reflection of global oil benchmarks or localised supply chain duties; it is a direct diagnostic test of your country's actual purchasing power.

To see this systemic reality clearly, consider the metrics tracking what percentage of a monthly gross salary is swallowed by a standard 50-litre tank of petrol across different global regimes:

Consider the stark economic paradox of Norway. At an exchange-converted rate of Rs 108.35 per litre, Oslo punishes its drivers with aggressive environmental levies, carbon taxes, and zero state retail subsidies. On paper, it is a pricing nightmare. Yet, on the vertical axis of real human life, that 50-litre tank takes a negligible 2.40% slice out of a typical Norwegian's monthly pay. Why? Because high-productivity, high-value economic structures turn nominal pricing monsters into minor budget rounding errors.

Now turn your eyes to India. At roughly Rs 49.30 per litre, petrol there looks astonishingly cheap to an outside observer. It is less than half the price of Norway's fuel. Yet, because the baseline national worker income scales lower down, a single 50-litre fill-up demands a staggering 20.42% of a monthly salary. It is a brutal, regressive tax on basic human mobility.

Mauritius sits uncomfortably in this squeezing middle tier. At Rs 77.70 per litre, a full tank exacts a sharp 8.93% toll on the average monthly gross salary.

This pressure is further compounded by a weakening Mauritian rupee, which structurally erodes national purchasing power on the global market. Because oil is priced internationally in US dollars, a depreciating domestic currency forces Mauritius to spend more local capital just to import the same volume of crude oil. Consequently, even when global oil benchmarks remain steady, the structural degradation of the exchange rate creates an inescapable undercurrent of domestic inflation, punishing the everyday consumer at the pump long before wages can catch up.

The political response to this has always been predictably shallow: demand a temporary reduction in levies or beg for an artificial price freeze. But hiding market realities behind state subsidies is merely a shell game played with taxpayer money. When a government artificially depresses the price of fuel because its population cannot afford it, it is openly admitting that its economic model cannot generate competitive, resilient wages. It is treating a structural income problem with a temporary fiscal sedative.

Furthermore, this reliance on personal vehicles is a self-inflicted wound born from public transport inefficiencies. Because our mass transit infrastructure remains fractured and incapable of providing affortable, comfortable and reliable door-to-door solutions, everyday workers are structurally forced into car ownership, leaving them completely vulnerable to global energy fluctuations.

If we want true relief at the pump, we must stop looking down at the price ticker on the dispenser. We must look up at the stagnant structures of our productivity, our lack of deep industrial diversification, and our national wage scales. Until our economic engine matches the real value output of high-income nations, any drop in fuel prices is an illusion—and the real pain at the pump will remain a permanent structural fixture.

The Fiction of Free Speech: Sally Rooney, Anti-Terror Laws, and the Western Masquerade

 For decades, the global South has been subjected to a tedious, self-righteous lecture. We have been told, with the unyielding arrogance of a colonial schoolmaster, that the Western world is the ultimate custodian of human rights, the rule of law, and that most sacred of secular sacraments: free speech. The West, so the narrative goes, is an open marketplace of ideas where thought flows unfettered, unlike the darker, authoritarian corners of the map.

It is a beautiful fiction. But like all well-maintained myths, it collapses the moment it is forced to confront its own staggering hypocrisy.

The latest fissure in this moral facade comes not from a political dissident in exile, but from the heart of the Anglo-American literary establishment itself. The decision by Irish novelist Sally Rooney and her publisher,  Faber, to completely withdraw her bestselling novels from sale across the United Kingdom is a watershed moment. It exposes the absolute baselessness of the West’s moral superiority complex.

Rooney did not pull her books because of a sudden fit of artistic temperament. She was effectively forced to do so because her state-sanctioned solidarity with a pro-Palestinian protest group, Palestine Action, means that continuing to sell her books in the UK would make her—and her publisher—guilty of a "serious criminal offence" under Britain’s draconic anti-terror legislation.

Let that sink in. In the United Kingdom, the self-proclaimed birthplace of modern liberalism, a world-renowned author cannot receive royalties because her personal conscience aligns with an organisation that protests against a brutal apartheid regime. The state has weaponised its legal apparatus to ensure that dissent is not merely debated or discouraged, but financially starved and criminally choked. Over 3,700 people have been arrested under these selective laws, some for merely holding signs.

Where are the champions of Voltaire now? Where are the weeping columnists who usually scream "cancel culture" whenever a privileged academic is boycotted by university students? They are remarkably quiet. Because in the West, free speech is a luxury item, selectively rationed. It is fiercely defended when used to mock the marginalised, to insult the religious sensitivities of the global South, or to protect the interests of corporate oligarchies. But the moment free speech threatens the geopolitical architecture of Western empire—the moment it calls out the complicity of the British state in enabling illegal occupations and military campaigns—the velvet glove is stripped away, revealing the iron fist of authoritarian censorship.

This is the rotten core of the Western moral superiority complex. It is built on an structural asymmetry: one rule for the civilised "us", and another for the disposable "them". The West loves the aesthetics of rebellion, provided it remains confined to the safe, sanitised pages of a novel. But when an author like Rooney puts her money where her morality is, the system shifts from patronising tolerance to outright criminalisation.

By pulling her books, Rooney has performed a profound act of literary defiance. She has refused to allow her work to be used as a cultural fig leaf for a society that criminalises basic solidarity. She has exposed the UK market for what it truly is: a gilded cage where you are perfectly free to think whatever you like, as long as you do not dare to act upon it.

The global South has long seen through this masquerade. We know that the West's lectures on liberty are merely instruments of soft power, designed to browbeat developing nations while the metropole maintains a monopoly on violence and narrative control. The Rooney affair has simply brought that truth home to roost in the bookshops of London.

The mask has slipped, and what lies beneath is not a bastion of liberty, but a deeply insecure, hypocritical empire that burns books by ledger and by law.

Le syndrome du retour : pourquoi les Français du bout du monde ne comprennent plus la France

De retour au pays après des années à l’étranger, de nombreux expatriés se heurtent à un mur culturel invisible. Derrière l’amour de leur patrie se cache un ressentiment grandissant face à une mentalité hexagonale jugée rigide, pessimiste et déconnectée des réalités globales.

C'est un phénomène bien connu des sociologues, mais rarement avoué par ceux qui le vivent : le choc culturel inversé. Chaque année, des milliers de Français rentrent au pays après avoir posé leurs valises à New York, Singapour, Sydney ou Berlin. Si les retrouvailles avec la gastronomie et le patrimoine sont chaleureuses, le réveil face au quotidien, lui, est brutal. Pour ces citoyens du monde, les travers de la mentalité française ne sont plus des spécificités culturelles amusantes, mais des freins psychologiques et systémiques insupportables.

Enquête sur les racines d'un divorce mental.

Le culte du « Non » et la culture du grief permanent

À l’étranger, ils ont découvert la culture du résultat et l’optimisme pragmatique. En France, ils retrouvent le sport national : le râle.

Dans l'Hexagone, la réponse par défaut à toute proposition de changement, démarche innovante ou requête inhabituelle est presque systématiquement négative. Ce « Non » initial n'est pas forcément une fin de non-recevoir, mais le coup d'envoi d'une joute verbale ou d'une négociation épuisante. Pour un esprit formé à la can-do attitude anglo-saxonne, où chaque problème appelle une solution immédiate, cette résistance institutionnalisée ressemble à un sabotage quotidien. Le focus permanent sur ce qui dysfonctionne, plutôt que sur ce qui réussit, crée un climat social que les expatriés de retour qualifient unanimement de « toxique ».

Frictions administratives et codes d'un autre âge

Le second choc concerne la structure même de la société. Habitués à la fluidité numérique et entrepreneuriale d'États ultra-connectés comme l'Estonie ou Singapour, les revenants se heurtent de plein fouet au monstre bureaucratique français.

Au-delà de la paperasse, c'est la rigidité des rapports humains qui interroge. Le modèle français reste profondément hiérarchique, cloisonné par le tutoiement sélectif et une méfiance naturelle envers l'inconnu. Là où les cultures latines ou américaines privilégient la spontanéité et l'accès facile aux réseaux professionnels, la France impose ses sas de sécurité relationnels et ses barrières de statut, perçus comme un archaïsme discriminant.

La conversation comme un sport de combat

En France, le débat d'idées est érigé en art de vivre. Mais pour ceux qui ont goûté à des espaces d'échange bienveillants, la discussion à la française s'apparente plutôt à un jeu à somme nulle où l'autre doit être mis en échec.

L'enthousiasme premier ou l'expression d'idées neuves y sont trop souvent accueillis par le cynisme, l'ironie ou la condescendance intellectuelle. Sous couvert de liberté d'esprit et de raffinement, les voyageurs pointent du doigt un conformisme social féroce. Malheur à celui qui ne s'habille pas, ne parle pas ou ne pense pas selon les normes de sa caste : le jugement est immédiat. Cette pression invisible étouffe l'audace et l'excentricité, des qualités pourtant célébrées partout ailleurs.

Le piège de « l'exception française »

Enfin, le ressentiment des Français connectés au monde cible l'insularité culturelle de leur propre pays. Nourris par le grand bain de la mondialisation et souvent polyglottes, ils observent avec consternation la crispation identitaire face aux influences extérieures, notamment linguistiques.

La défense parfois agressive de « l'exception française » et le complexe de supériorité historique de l'Hexagone apparaissent à ces observateurs comme un aveuglement identitaire. En refusant de s'adapter aux standards internationaux de flexibilité et d'ouverture, la France donnerait l'image d'un pays magnifique, mais figé dans son passé, incapable de dialoguer d'égal à égal avec un monde qui avance sans elle.

Pour ces Français d'ailleurs, le retour n'est pas une réintégration, mais un arbitrage permanent entre l'attachement viscéral à leurs racines et le regret d'un horizon plus vaste et respirable.

The Mauritian Mirage: A Development Model That Outruns Tap Water

For decades, we have been brainwashed by a well-oiled staging: outside the national cake baked by the "national champions" blessed by the regime, there is no salvation. Prosperity, we are told, will eventually trickle down. All we need to do is turn a blind eye to the progressive withdrawal of the regulatory state, swallow our dignity in the face of eroding social safety nets, and applaud Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures pumped up on the steroids of speculation.

Today, the awakening is brutal. The mirage is evaporating, leaving behind a dying corporate republic where the "winners" take practically all, leaving nothing but insignificant crumbs for the community. What our elites proudly call "development" is nothing more than a weapon of mass destruction aimed at our social cohesion—a political and economic tool of weaponisation that has destabilised our national structure and knocked it off its axis. Concrete and the excessive financialisation of the ecosystem: this is the recipe for the Mauritian mirage.

Let us face reality, away from the smoothed-out official statistics that must urgently be recalibrated to meet the actual expectations of citizens.

On one hand, the political power has transformed development into an electoral vanity fair. High-prestige, ultra-visible but economically questionable infrastructure projects serve as smoke screens for a deeply clientelist system. The strategy is one of absolute cynicism: impoverish the population through a constant depreciation of our rupee—now an undesirable currency that destroys purchasing power—and then, on the eve of elections, redistribute temporary handouts or pension hikes to buy social peace on credit. Anyone who dares to criticise this model is immediately labelled "anti-patriotic", a debilitating rhetoric that paralyses any desire for democratic debate.

On the other hand, the mega-conglomerates are orchestrating a genuine social downgrading. Under the guise of modernity and attracting foreign direct investment, thousands of hectares of arable land are converted into Smart Cities and luxury residential enclaves for wealthy expatriates. This is an extractive, rentier economy. While they reap colossal profits, the average Mauritian is purely and simply excluded from the real estate market of their own country. This deliberate choice is accompanied by a massive deindustrialisation of our real economy, sacrificed on the altar of quick profits.

The most tragic part lies in the complicity of the State: a tailor-made government backing allows these very same conglomerates to mask their lack of local innovation by exporting their model to the African continent. The objective? To replicate the exact same predatory blueprint in Africa, with profits stemming largely from the direct and indirect subsidisation by the Mauritian people, who finance their public infrastructure and tax gifts.

The result? A total and numbing disconnection between supply and demand across all sectors. Our system produces inaccessible luxury and standardised shopping malls, while popular demand calls for affordable housing, running water, and healthy food. Our education system continues to churn out graduates for a market that only offers them underpaid jobs, triggering a massive flight of our brains and vital forces, sickened by a system that humiliates them instead of rewarding them.

The ultimate irony of this vicious circle lies in the colonisation of minds. The people themselves, deeply vulnerable due to this economic asphyxiation, end up internalising this toxic development model. Victims of a societal Stockholm syndrome, ordinary citizens come to measure their own progress by the yardstick of plutocratic playthings: the opening of a new shopping mall becomes an event, the tarring of a road a royal favour, and the consumption of imported junk a sign of upward mobility. By applauding flashy but subpar infrastructure that excludes them, and the staggering profits of banks and conglomerates that empty their wallets, Mauritians validate their own marginalisation, confusing surface modernisation with genuine emancipation.

This incestuous alliance between post-independence politics and economic plutocracy creates a perfect apparatus of enslavement. To fast-track the projects of their financial partners, politicians deliberately weaken the rule of law, because a weak legal enforcement breeds precisely the permissiveness they need to capture resources. Corruption is no longer an anomaly in the system; it has become the indispensable lubricant for "development".

We are facing a choice of survival. Are we going to keep settling for these few flashes in the pan—these luxury cars growing in numbers on undisciplined roads—while accepting the normalisation of cheating, sloppy work, and mental alienation? Without a critical mass of conscious citizens, without an urgent overhaul of our regulatory institutions to break up monopolies and cartels, and without the courage to call out the evil that is consuming us, we will condemn Mauritius to be nothing more than an insiders' paradise built on the resignation of its own children. The time for half-measures is over. It is time to rebuild our nation on sound policies, not buzzwords.

Grow. Kneel to no (wo)man

A landscape has no single author. No one finishes it and signs it. Soil, water, light, season and time shape it, along with the people who tend it. Perhaps that is why Aniket Bhagwat, a globally recognised and influential landscape architect, designer and educator, in a podcast titled "Landscape Architecture is the Mother of All Arts", gives the discipline such a place of honour. It holds sculpture, architecture, painting and movement in one living frame, and it never stops changing.

Learning works the same way. We like to imagine greatness as a monument: a hero standing alone and complete. But monuments are what we build when we stop growing. Hero worship hands us the finished statue and hides the years of weather, failure and patient tending behind it. We copy the form and miss the process.

No one saw this danger more clearly than the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Raised by a spiritual movement to be its World Teacher, he dissolved the organisation built around him in 1929 and declared that truth is a "pathless land". He spent the rest of his life warning that the guru-follower relationship breeds dependence: the follower borrows certainty instead of earning understanding, and the teacher becomes a crutch. Blind followership, he argued, is not devotion but a way of avoiding one's own thinking.

Real greatness, then, is mostly self-taught, much as a garden is cultivated by its own conditions. You cannot force a plant to grow, but you can prepare the ground. The learner has to struggle, misjudge, observe and adjust, and that struggle is what trains mental agility.

Mentorship is the gardener's light touch: a little pruning, a stake for a weak stem, a warning about frost. The best mentors know their own journey well enough to show the dead ends and the luck, so their path looks walkable instead of miraculous. They never radiate invulnerability, and they work toward becoming unnecessary. In that sense, the mentor Krishnamurti would have accepted is one who refuses to be a guru.

So admire the great, but don't kneel to them. Study how they grew, then tend your own ground.

Why the Mauritian Obsession with Rote Math Is Starving Our Future

Walk into a typical primary school mathematics classroom in Mauritius, and you will witness a pedagogical tragedy masquerading as discipline. A teacher stands at the whiteboard, meticulously detailing the steps to a formula. Rows of silent, stressed children copy these instructions into their workbooks, preparing to regurgitate them for the next high-stakes hurdle—the Primary School Achievement Certificate (PSAC). We call this education. In reality, it is a system of mechanical compliance that is actively building math anxiety while starving our children of genuine intellectual curiosity.

If Mauritius genuinely wants to transition into a high-tech, innovation-driven economy, we must stop treating mathematics as a rigid set of rules to be memorised. We need to burn the old playbook and adopt a model that prioritises thinking over copying. For that, we must look to Japan.

The contrast between our classrooms and a Japanese Sansu (primary maths) lesson is damning.Japan's globally lauded approach achieves its top international standing not by rushing through topics, but by using a highly structured, coherent, and sequential curriculum. In Mauritius, we pass down answers from on high. In Japan, teachers deliberately withhold them. A typical Japanese lesson revolves around just one single, complex problem. The teacher does not show the pupils how to solve it; instead, the children are thrown into a collaborative struggle. They work individually or in pairs, grappling with the problem, inventing their own methods, and discovering alternative solutions.

The magic happens during the class discussion, where the teacher acts not as a lecturer, but as a guide for a collective investigation, helping students dissect why certain approaches succeed and mapping out shared misconceptions. Our system asks a child: Can you find the right answer quickly? The Japanese system prioritises deep conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning over speed and rote memorisation.

By forcing Mauritian children to memorise shortcuts for exams, we are creating a dangerous illusion of competence. Our pupils can plug numbers into a pre-learned template, but the moment they face an unfamiliar, unstructured problem, they freeze. This soul-crushing approach strips the creativity out of a beautiful discipline, turning mathematics into an object of fear rather than a tool for exploration.

To its credit, the Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE) has tried to patch the sinking ship. Digital initiatives like MathsWeCan aim to target student misconceptions. But let us be frank: updating the technology is useless if the underlying classroom culture remains suffocatingly rigid. You cannot digitise your way out of a broken teaching philosophy.

Adopting a Japanese-style problem-solving framework requires courage. It requires the Ministry of Education and school inspectors to allow teachers to slow down. We must stop policing teachers based on how quickly they can rush through a syllabus and start measuring them on the depth of their students' comprehension. A child who spends forty minutes struggling with a single problem, exploring its boundaries, and failing, has engaged in more real mathematical thinking than a child who mindlessly breezes through ten identical exam worksheets.

We must also dismantle the isolation of the Mauritian teaching profession. Japan’s mathematical dominance is fueled by lesson study (Jugyou Kenkyuu)—a relentless culture of collaborative teacher training where educators regularly observe each other's classes, dissecting exactly how children interact with a problem. Mauritian teachers, by contrast, are often left isolated in their classrooms, trapped by bureaucratic deadlines.

Mauritius boasts grand ambitions of becoming a regional hub for technology and artificial intelligence. But let us not kid ourselves. An innovation economy cannot be built on a foundation of human calculators. If we continue to teach our children what to think instead of how to think, we will doom them to be obsolete in a world driven by automated problem-solving. It is time to pull down the old, top-down whiteboard culture, embrace the productive chaos of inquiry, and finally teach our children to think for themselves.