Africa-Press – Mauritius. Things appear to be moving very fast these days with one crisis or scandal chasing away the previous one, and today’s controversy casting a shroud over yesterday’s.
What initially started as the SAFE “survey/sniffing” controversy involving the Baie de Jacotet Landing Station quickly shifted to alleged espionage and counterespionage activities involving major players in the Indian Ocean, namely India and China and the latter’s major technology giant Huawei which was dragged into it, much to the public displeasure of the Chinese embassy.
Media’s attention thereafter focussed to the constructions underway in Agalega and to suspicions about the setting up of an Indian military base on the island, which has been denied by the Mauritian Prime Minister.
The words are important for an installation that can berth or accommodate naval and/or aerial surveillance vessels need not be a permanent military base as Diego Garcia or Djibouti.
Attention today has shifted to the opposition parties and their inability to come together for a protest march against the government doings and misdoings.
Initially proposed by the leader of the Labour Party for 12th August, it would seem that the unsolicited but “patriotic” initiative of the former CEO of Mauritius Telecom to rally all the mainstream opposition parties together with the other extra-parliamentary political groupings for the protest march has been to no avail: the controversial Bruneau Laurette and his citizen movement, the backings of which remain unknown to the public, has chosen to move out and will hold his own protest march separately at some future date.
A repeat of 29 August 2020, which has to date not delivered on its promise to overthrow the government, is what Mr Laurette may have in mind, but that remains to be seen, the more so since his Linion Pep Morisien appears to be already in tatters.
The base that was being laid for an extra-parliamentary movement which would surf on the wave of indignation that has been building up since the last three years seems to be falling apart. In any case, street protests don’t work in the Mauritian context.
Massive marches elsewhere have produced scant results and fail to create significant changes in politics or public policies, except for a few countries like in Sri Lanka recently and earlier in Egypt, Tunisia, and Ukraine.
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