RAM SEEGOBIN and LINDSEY COLLEN
for LALIT
When the masses come out onto the streets, “run riot” as it were, it is not usually for nothing.
Many of us in Mauritius have serious reasons to be angry: for some, there is already not enough food in the house, even as prices rise sharply. Most people don’t have stable jobs. Many have no work at all. Many live in over-crowded “lakaz zeritye” or over-priced rented housing. And, because we are humans, we have the power to look ahead. What do we see? The Government has no real plan how to ensure that we have food and housing in the future. It has no real plan for how to keep the Rupee stable to stop food prices shooting through the roof. It has no plan to create stable jobs for everyone. Nor even to find out how many people don’t have proper housing.
A greater truth
So, it is useless for the Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth or Vice Prime Minister Steven Obeegadoo to come and moan that the price-rises are not their fault, but are “because of the pandemic” or “because of the war in Ukraine”, or to claim that people participated in blocking public roads and burning tyres “because opposition politicians plotted it”. Jugnauth’s and Obeegadoo’s threats of more repression against people protesting make matters worse.
There is the pandemic. True. There is a war affecting supplies of food and fuel. True. There is no shortage of populists who plot things. True. But there is, behind this, a greater truth:
The MSM-led Government has no plan, and never has had any plan, to face up to the economic consequences of the Covid pandemic – and Covid has been with us for two whole years! The Government has no plan to face up to the economic consequences of a war – even though Biden’s USA has done nothing but threaten war with Russia or China, or both. The USA is never not at war. LALIT has warned of the dangers of impending war – war which interrupts supplies and delivery – to a Mauritius with no food sovereignty at all. It is pure Government folly that this remains true.
Our warnings
LALIT has predicted this kind of severe crisis. Our warnings built up to a crescendo in the past two years. We have warned in leaflets, on our website and Facebook, in political meetings, on posters, and in the Press. Often the trade union leadership has joined us in calls for food security on a large scale.
It is the lack of a Government “plan”, the lack of a “program” for the future of society that is the cause of the rebellions we have seen since Friday.
This absence of a plan of any kind to ensure the basics – roti, kapra aur makann – that, in turn, permits populists like Rama Valayden and Bruneau Laurette to use the rising fear and anger of the masses.
So, we accuse the Jugnauth Government of making “declarations” and gestures on food security and doing nothing more.
Never once has the Jugnauth Government made a single move to force sugar estate bosses, who control the arable land, to uproot, say one-third of their cane, and plant food crops. Never once. Never once has Jugnauth made a single move to legislate to force these bosses to re-organize their cane fields, over the course of 2-3 years, so as to sow seeds for food production in the totality of all their inter-lines. Never once. No. Instead this Government – stubborn, cowardly, licking the boots of the sugar oligarchy – just simply pours more subsidy, more of the peoples’ VAT dues, into propping up this useless sugar industry. The Governments of long-ago subsidized cane production because the industry brought in foreign exchange, paid Export Duty, employed 55,000 workers in stable jobs. Now it does none of that.
We accuse the MBC of the same crime. The national Television station announces a segment on “food security” and then names measures to subsidise the cane industry.
The intelligentsia
We accuse the totality of the intelligentsia, with few exceptions, of doing the same. The Press, Radio and TV, are all too cowardly to say the two words “uproot cane”. They are too cringing before the oligarchs to say “force the sugar-cane bosses” to diversify into basic food production.
The Mauritian oligarchs are more powerful relative to Mauritian society than Ukrainian oligarchs or Russian oligarchs to their respective societies. Until today.
The government and the entire intellectual elite persist in encouraging the cane bosses to sell off the only arable land the country has to millionaires from abroad. They assist in the concreting of arable land – with villas, malls and “gated communities”, an oxymoron if ever there was one. This, even as our food sovereignty is nil?
And then the Prime Minister wonders why people “desann dan lari”. And blames the pandemic or the war or of a couple of populists when food prices escalate?
Sugar estate land
Mauritius has to produce food for three reasons, and this, on sugar estate land. Not parsley and a lettuce and two chickens. We are talking about food production on sugar estate land, food preservation and transformation using the existing 20-22 old sugar mills’ infrastructure. We are not talking about abandoned or marginal land, or back gardens. No. Small scale production is a good add-on perhaps, but it does not feed the country on staples. We need to produce food:
1. For food security in times of war, epidemics and climate change.
2. For job-creation: in the fields, factories and in research, agronomy, transport and marketing sectors. And don’t come up with this lie that “Mauritians don’t like working the land”. Cane labourers had to be forced off the land with bribes and workplace harassment.
3. For foreign exchange, so that we can import the basics we do not have, and have a Rupee that is stable because we produce something to exchange.
At the same time, the Government must convert to proper renewable energy – solar, wind and sea – so that we are not at the mercy of fuel importers, on the one hand, and don’t contribute to pollution, on the other.
The working masses
And what do we do? Not the Government, but us, ourselves? The working masses of the country?
We call on the entire organized working class and on all thinking people in this country, to realize once and for all, that “desann dan lari”, on its own, will never, never ever create a better society. Even with those good intentions that pave the way to hell. We need action, including “desann dan lari”, including elections, including petitions, including all manner of protests, including strikes organized nation-wide, but … but based upon a common understanding, a program, to change society. How do we want society to be? How will we move from where society is now today, to the future we want? What must we do to bring this about? In other words, what strategy will bring our program to fruition?
When people came out on to the streets in Camp Le Vieux, Vallijee, Grand-Rivière, Ste.Croix, Chemin-Grenier, Trou d’Eau-Douce, Beau-Bassin, Mangalkhan, all over, it means they are anxious about, angry about, the rise in prices of staples in the context of the lack of any such program or any such strategy. So, this is the work before us: building this program in common, and forging the necessary strategy.
Revolutionary patience
And this demands patience. Revolutionary patience. It means painstaking meetings. Thinking alone and in groups. It demands courage. It takes the work of knowing the reality of everyone oppressed in our society. It demands of us the capacity to understand that each individual is both an individual and part of a social class – in crude terms, someone who hires and fires and pockets profit, or who works or needs to work, or has worked, for a wage or salary. It means we need to understand the very flow of history, as we live in it, and how to work within that flow. It demands of us the ability to listen, to understand what our neighbour already knows from the very nature of his or her work, as we hope they will listen to what we already know. This is why LALIT brings out a bimonthly political magazine. We recruit on the basis of this on-going development of a common understanding of a political program and of the strategy it demands in order to come true.
A common understanding
Everything can change fast. But it cannot change faster, for the better at least, than our capacity to agree upon a program. A program is a simple thing. It is not pious wishes, about vague “values”. It is not a shopping list of ill-fitted demands either. A program is a common understanding of what we need to do – what we need to do for immediate change that will bring us nearer our long-term aims. And this knowledge of “what is to be done” is based obviously on our capacity, together, to analyze society today, its different classes, and the way history is moving at the moment. Then we agree on specific “demands” that, taken together, as we win them, will bring us nearer to what we aim for: an equal society, a society without different social classes, a society of freedom not repression, a society without militarism or patriarchal hierarchies dominating us, nor exploitation of us by those who make profits from our work.
25 April, 2022.