Having been vaccinated against such previous exercises, I reluctantly sat to watch the national television on June 11, 2021 at 17h00, work duties obliged. The 1st 30 minutes stretched my eyes beyond their orbit: Am I E.T who just landed on a different planet? Or did I smoke something that brought me into an alternate reality? Or did they …?
In a nutshell, we are governed by some mad bunnies severely affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect which for the sake of the reader “is a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general”.
Forget about criticism or proposing marginal improvements to a very very bad budget. This is the time to pray to every single God known or unknown because 3 more years of this is a straight route to hell from whose ruins a dismantled and destroyed country may never recover, at the very least as an independent nation.
Nation-building is a forgotten word in this era in which words such as compromise, sacrifice, hard work, production before rewards have disappeared. Equally so, words such as global strategy, country-level risk management have disappeared which is quite surprising in a world full of uncertainties. To quote a British journalist, instead what we got was a beautiful exercise of pissing around the margins of the problem. Painting the wall with fresh paint was never known to strengthen the wall!
So what is the problem exactly?
It is first one of competence where ‘3rd grade professionals’ are occupying 1st grade positions, hereby limiting 1.) the capacity to work at the required level of complexity to address root causes or core issues and 2.) the ability to prove macro-economic coherence between multiple sectors which do not and should not work as isolated units. The Dunning-Kruger effect doesn’t help.
It is one of being unable 1.) to tear the past where required and to reboot fresh with sufficient confidence and strong macro-economic policies to be competitive in the open international market and 2.) to leverage on international geo-politics sufficiently in advance to build competitive advantages for the country. Flogging a dead horse never made it run faster.
It is one where 1.) all people in this country have grown poorer due to the debasement of our national currency 2.) Some kids are sleeping hungry island-wide while we choose to look elsewhere or to throw more money into useless ego-driven projects and 3.) all previous allocations to improve the livelihood of the vulnerable have been clawed back insidiously by this continuous ongoing debasement of the rupee.
It is one of living in delusion or in ivory towers or of suffering from severe myopia (make your own choice) where early 20th century economic policies are thought to be still fit for purpose and where continuously throwing good money at inefficient public service is deemed heroic enough to warrant “imbecilistic” claps.
It is one where high-ranking public officials, being too handsomely paid, do not have any skin in the game anymore. They do not care about efficient public education, health, social security services etc… because they can afford to pay for private services for themselves and their kin. They are therefore as useful to forward-looking policymaking in the interest of the country as processed cheddar (a luxury goods nowadays) would be to the diet of a Frenchman worthy of this appellation.
Finally, it is one where a severe lack of imagination caused by all of the above makes you want to pull your enlarged eyes out of their orbits and shred them in order not to have to witness this again. Instead, can we be granted some relief by putting the sick dog to sleep (figuratively of course!)? We pray accordingly.
The still sound Maurichien
