I AM about to lose my mind with the travesty that’s taking place around me so today, I role-play! I am pleased to announce that I am now a UN election observer and that I arrived a couple of days ago to surreptitiously observe the way municipal elections are being held in that shining example of democracy, that star and key of the Indian Ocean, Mauritius, the land of equal opportunities. I generously share my notes with you.

Very amused by slogan of the incumbents new town, new vision, it says. The funny thing is that the coalition in power doesn’t have an electoral programme for the towns whereas the challengers published theirs some time back.

A local journalist told me it’s a sign that the Prime minister who flatters himself to be a modernist, is in fact, already in post-modernism that’s why he doesn’t need a programme!

I did chuckle.

On the same matter, I heard on government’s mouthpiece (it’s called the MBC), a journalist say that the Prime minister went to a town called Curepipe to “personally share his vision with the people of that town.” I did listen attentively but I didn’t hear anything that resembled a vision.

I am at this point getting rather desperate to know what they are proposing!

I think I can see things a bit clearly now. The opposition says the elections are about giving a lesson to government.

Fair enough as far as the stakes are concerned but it doesn’t seem as if those elections will be about the management of the towns. In fact, I heard the Prime minister say that he didn’t give any tickets to members of the former administration because they didn’t do well. I got so confused that I nearly gave up on the whole observation thing wasn’t he the one who gave them tickets in the first place? Wasn’t he the boss all those years? When I asked around, people just smiled. Go figure!

The Prime minister told the people of Curepipe that he would “give” them a multi-purpose centre (it seems an inhabitant had approached him to say that the locality was in dire need of such a centre). Obviously the man – a lawyer and a doctor, I hear – didn’t say he would “give” them the centre if they voted for his party but my guess is that it was implied. I did wonder if that could make a case for electoral bribery but I haven’t heard the electoral institutions rebuke the PM so I suppose all’s well.

I was a bit confused with the opposition there’s the MMM whose leader is Paul Bérenger, there’s the MSM whose leader is Pravind Jugnauth and there’s the coalition that is known as the remake and whose leader is

Sir Anerood Jugnauth. But the MSM leader is nowhere to be found. Some say his partners have asked him to lie low as he doesn’t “sell” very well. Very perplexing!