Africa-Press – Mauritius. Colleen from South Africa wants to live in Mauritius. She wrote a message on the blog expat-blog. com and it goes as follows: ?I am a teacher in South Africa. I would like to teach in Mauritius.
What is the average salary of a teacher at an international school in Mauritius (primary school)? Would I be able to live fairly well on this salary (food, rent, transport, etc.
) ? Please get back to me.
? Somebody did get back to her, an expatriate living in Mauritius ? Julien from Grand Bay and founder of the blog.
?In a private school? I think most of the private schools are in French but you should contact those schools.
? Helga from Cape Town also sent a message to the blog.
?Hi Julien, I see you recently moved to Mauritius ? are you happy there? What are/were the challenges for you personally ? and what (website or other) route is best to get answers through regarding red tape? What about IT people ? is there work for outsiders? And how does Mauritius receive IT businesses wanting to branch out to Mauritius?? Helga received a whole lot of advice from Julien ? the gist of the message being that Julien who has been living in Mauritius for more than a year is ?happy? here and is looking to recruit people to work in his company.
?There is work here for outsiders as long as you are skilled and experienced?, he wrote to Helga.
?You can branch out here without any problem. Have a look at BOI Mauritius.
? Eventually, Julien realized that Helga could have the qualifications he was looking for in a CSS/PHP developer and asked her for her CV and ?an idea of the salary she expected?.
We do not know if Julien ended up hiring Helga but it?s so easy nowadays for foreigners to get a work permit to work and live in Mauritius that it wouldn?t be surprising.
This trend has been going on since 2005 when the Alliance Sociale came into power and Finance minister Rama Sithanen presented his much-celebrated reforms to ?open up the country?.
The latest one seeking to ease the opening up even more came in the form of an incentive to attract foreign workers ? a work permit would be made available to those earning Rs 30,000 or more.
Risng property prices ?That?s nothing!? says MP Nita Deerpalsing, who has recently expressed her outrage at the fact that it is becoming too easy for expatriates to come and live in the country.
In an interview she gave to the weekly Mauritius Times, the MP asked, ?Is it true that the west coast of our country is becoming a wealthy South African enclave? If that is so, is that necessarily good for our country from a long-term perspective?? Asked what she meant by those questions, MP Nita Deerpalsing told us that it had been brought to her attention that an inordinate number of mostly South African and French expatriates lived secluded from the Mauritian people and only mingled between themselves.
This phenomenon in turn, leads to prices of property going up and becoming more and more out of reach to the average Mauritian citizen, she added. Finance minister Rama Sithanen to whom we spoke about this ?opening up?, reckons that there have been around 2,000 expatriates who have benefited from the government?s opening-up policy.
?This is a choice we have made. Let me say something else ? opening up has been a good thing for Mauritius. At the time of independence, the country?s GDP per capita was $200. Now thanks to the choices we have made, it is $7,000.
Those choices have been sugar that we sell to foreigners, tourism where we depend on foreigners to come here, and textile that we sell abroad, the financial sector, the ICT sector that depends on foreigners.
What would be wrong would be to close up to the world. What would happen if we did that? But all this should be well regulated and well supervised. ? Finance minister Sithanen adds that when he asks those who criticize the decision to open up, ?Where else do I get money from, they tell me ?it?s not their problem?.
Well, it is mine!? But as another Labour MP asked, ?How does letting people in on the condition that they earn Rs 30,000 have to do with investment? How much money are they bringing in ?? Questions that Prime minister Ramgoolam and his government will undoubtedly have to answer in the very near future as the number of expatriates living in Mauritius rise.
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