Africa-Press – Mauritius. Mauritius Times: You hit the Agence France Presse hard in a post on Facebook to condemn a dispatch from this agency in relation to the Covid-19 situation in the country – “locally remotely guided article”, you write, “for better stab 250,000 Mauritians living from tourist activity… You are not going dead hand.
Why this firm and vigorous position? Dr Catherine Boudet: I hit hard on the Agence France Presse (AFP) which served as a Trojan horse to pass a dispatch with questionable and dangerous agendas for the country.
“Mauritius is facing an explosion of Covid-19 which calls for less than three weeks of the complete reopening of its borders” proclaims the famous AFP dispatch of this Tuesday, September 14, posted in the wake on the site of the express which admits to having its hand in the drafting.
Written in a mix of journalism and viral marketing, this pseudo-news from AFP paints a portrait of Mauritius on the verge of epidemic explosion. And the text is so exaggerated that upon reading it, one has the impression that the reopening of the borders heralds a Covidian apocalypse.
This is clearly an article that was written to torpedo the reopening of Mauritius. The chaotic content of this report does not correspond at all to the usual journalistic standard of this prestigious international news agency, AFP.
In her writing skills and the words used, she is more of a propaganda story than news journalism. She adopts viral marketing techniques to play on the emotional of readers: “serious situation”, “traumatic quest”, “alarming state” .
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The words are carefully chosen to arouse fear and concern in the reader and give him the worst possible perception of the health status of the country.
I am always shocked that one can want to discredit one’s own country in the face of foreign powers. * You refer in your post to the “game of local arsonists” which the AFP would lend itself to to launch “a real cluster bomb”.
Who would do well to harm the country and torpedo the Mauritian destination, according to you? It is not for me to point fingers at people. I show how the logics of discourse operate.
My specialty is analyzing content and deciphering rhetoric, whether political, journalistic or scientific. Then everyone is free to draw their own conclusions or interpretations.
I have shown that this AFP pseudo-dispatch meets the rules of viral marketing more than those of journalism. An AFP dispatch already has – by its very nature – a high potential for virality abroad.
And when the readers are potential clients of Mauritian tourism, we can clearly see the damage that this can cause. That’s why I called this pseudo-dispatch a media cluster bomb.
* The AFP dispatch nevertheless raises the question of the Covid situation in Mauritius in the wake of the growing number of cases of infections in the country, and especially in anticipation of the complete reopening of our borders from October 1 next.
This is a completely legitimate journalistic approach, since it is about asking questions about the capacity of state structures to deal with the pandemic, right?
The pandemic? What pandemic? A pandemic (from the Greek pan = everything and demos = people) is an epidemic that extends to almost an entire population.
AFP’s pseudo-dispatch highlights an explosion in covid cases that have increased five-fold since the borders were partially reopened in July, to just over 12,000 cases.
But even considering that the official covid figures may well be below reality, that makes 1% of the Mauritian population that has been infected since the start of the so-called “pandemic”. 1% of the population infected over a year and a half, can we call it a pandemic? It is time to put things in a fairer perspective.
What this famous AFP dispatch does not do . . . Which also does not raise the question of the capacity of the State services to manage the health situation and to face the reopening. On the contrary, it starts from the outset in a defeatist logic to show that the country is heading for disaster with the reopening.
In fact, she begins with a description that echoes the catastrophic narrative used by international media about the delta variant in India: overcrowded hospitals, scarce artificial respirators and full cemeteries.
Then all the rest of the article serves to support this starting scenario. And this is done not on the basis of facts or questions of principle, but by reporting the negative assessments of different actors who express their fears and apprehensions.
He thus uses techniques of magnifying facts and amplifying negative emotions, to speak to the reader on an emotional register . . . What all the propagandists do who want to prevent their readers from using their intellect.
And he pushes the vice until it concludes with the projection of a disaster scenario, waving the specter of a stage “where we may have to decide who gets oxygen and who has to die” .
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* In addition, there is another case that continues to make headlines: the murder of Soopramanien Kistnen and all the controversy surrounding the autopsy of the corpse. It’s a real surprise box, it seems.
As things are going, would you say there are more surprises to be expected – bad or even unpleasant? Kistnen’s murder and its judicial investigation are a real Pandora’s box. The latest episode revolves around the issue of falsification of the autopsy report.
Is it really a surprise, since we are used to falsifying a lot of things here in Mauritius? It is just that the curtain is rising on questionable practices in various state services, which have long been in force in a hidden way and around which the omission reigns with a good dose of hypocrisy.
We can therefore surely expect other twists, “surprises” or revelations in this affair, in a “Mauriflix” fashion. But I would tend to say that the murder itself was done for this purpose.
We are surprised, or we pretend to be, if we look at things through the small end of the telescope and in the direction that we have been kind enough to point out to us .
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However, when we examine the details of Kistnen’s murder, it is It is obvious that it was not a banal banditry but that it was perpetrated by professionals with a very specific modus operandi.
It is a modus operandi that can be found in countries where large cartels operate. Let’s be logical. If you want to make an annoying witness disappear, you don’t expose her charred body in a cane field on a windy day in an area where it can be discovered quickly.
So we wanted Kistnen’s body to be seen. If we start from this postulate, it was therefore necessary that certain elements could be brought to the attention of the public, while protecting the protagonists.
From there, there is a whole scenario that unfolds as parts of the case are revealed . . . Or rather as the extent of what has been hidden is revealed .
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* All the scandals that we have known for a long time are not to worry the government, it seems, with regard to the absence of a strong opposition in front of the political power in place, but also of which appears to be the indifference of the great majority of Mauritians.
Obviously, social media opposition from the comfort of your own home is not enough . . . What do you think? As it stands, with a comfortable majority in Parliament and fragmented opposition, Pravind Jugnauth remains in control of the political game.
In an electoral system where “the winner takes all”, the current reorganizations of the political field do not change anything in this state of affairs.
The fragmentation of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition even works to strengthen the majority bloc in its dominant position, even if one might have thought that the MSM in power was a little in the mode of a “Gallic village besieged by the Romans ”, to use the image of the well-known comic strip.
Yet one cannot say that the parliamentary opposition is weak or soft. It is even the opposite; they are very active, at least in their speech. Prior to 2019, the parliamentary opposition tended to be gentle with the goat in the hope of once again being in alliance with the ruling party.
But since they lost all hope of an alliance with the MSM, they have become very vocal and do not hesitate to release file after file. So we finally have real opposition in the country. And most importantly, even though they are divided in their war of egos, it can be seen that they can work together to get these files out.
They operate in concert with their opposition press and with extra-parliamentary opponents like the Avengers, and even Bruneau Laurette who (logically) politicized himself in the process.
This opposition seems to have made the choice to be very “vocal” in its function of denunciation, relying on social networks to gain both visibility and “nuisance value”.
But it also acts, relying on techniques of “lawfare”, that is to say of politicization of court cases. It is in particular the editorial line of the Avengers, which makes them successful with Mauritians.
But, for the moment, as has been said, the government has no reason to be shaken by the actions of the opposition as long as it has its comfortable parliamentary majority and as long as the lawfare of the opposition does not.
succeeds in knocking down no head. * Navin Ramgoolam’s state of health does not help matters for the opposition either. Do you see a reorganization of the political field and even within the opposition in the weeks or months to come, whatever the case?
The reshuffles of the political field that started last year on the opposition side are very interesting and have not finished their gestation process. In any case, this gestation process will not find its culmination until the election deadlines approach.
What is particularly interesting now is that since the Wakashio episode, a zone of collaboration has been created between the classic parliamentary opposition, made up of the Labor Party, the PMSD and the MMM, and the entities of the extra-parliamentary opposition (Reform Party, Rezistans ek Alternativ, 100% Citoyens, Avengers, Linion Sitwayin Morisien by Bruneau Laurette).
And that is nothing new. These beautiful people were joined last February by the resigning of MSM Nando Bodha who, in the meantime, has also created his own party.
But this cooperation is not so surprising insofar as the members of the main extra-parliamentary entities, the Avengers or the Reform Party, are political personnel who have also sat in Parliament, whether Rama Valayden, Sanjeev Teeluckdharry or Roshi Bhadain .
So their original political socialization favored their de facto rapprochement with the parliamentary opposition. In this very changing and diverse landscape of opposition, a single alliance was formalized last May between the four “dinosaurs” that are Xavier-Luc Duval (PMSD), Paul Bérenger (MMM), Nando Bodha (ex-MSM) and Roshi Bhadain (Reform Party).
Called the Alliance of Hope, it seems at this stage to be only an understanding between leaders and therefore, as such, vulnerable to any potential war of egos. Not to mention that it has already created sensitivities within the apparatus of the parties involved.
So, it is quite possible that there is still circulations of political personnel to come, as, for example, the recent group resignation in regional number 6 of the MMM.
As for the hospitalization of Navin Ramgoolam in India because of covid, of course it is a political “game changer” . . . But one which has all the probabilities to play in favor of the government block.
De facto, the PTr finds itself obliged to prepare for the succession of its leader, who so far has done everything to resist this evidence. It is a testing period for the Labor Party, which is known to be monolithic and solidly organized.
But the internal wars that are likely to play out will temporarily weaken him, especially as the leader’s hospital stay will be long. In addition, different inheritance options will go hand in hand with different alliance options, which can only further confuse the political spectrum of the opposition.
* Recomposition also for a three-way fight and dictated by the balance of power on the political spectrum at present .
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In view of all that we have just described, political field in full reorganization, fragmented but cooperative opposition, formalized but unstable alliance, we cannot even say whether there will be a three-way fight in the next legislative elections.
We don’t even know when the next municipal elections will be held, but even the configuration of the municipal elections will not necessarily be decisive for the general elections.
What remains certain is that the Mauritian political field is still strongly polarized around the notion of the strongest. The criteria for identifying this “stronger” are based on concrete data but also a lot on psychological elements.
It is this “stronger” perceived as such by the parties, the media and the electorate that will polarize the pattern of alliances in the run-up to the elections.
In my opinion, the main Achilles tendon of the government is the policy of compulsory vaccination. Because we do not know the long-term side effects of anti-covid vaccines, we cannot estimate the potential damage to public health in the medium term.
If so, immunization may well become a political variable, although at the moment there is no political divide around immunization. Mandatory vaccination carries, in my opinion, a political risk for MSM.
In any case, politically, we are in a period of irreversible transition. The usual voting patterns, of the “ethnic mathematics” and / or “casteist vote” type, could well be reduced by new emerging variables.
Even if the electoral system continues to determine the superstructure of the political game, we will have to prepare ourselves to integrate into the political analysis of electoral behavior certain new data and even still invisible to the naked eye for the moment. I mentioned vaccination but there will be more.
