HOW WILL JJ BELL THE CAT?

The Seychelles is renowned for its beauty that attracts a lot of foreign visitors and the accompanying foreign exchange to our shores. This cake of prosperity and investment seems to be eaten by a certain cat and its clan. Jj has recently announced that the cat will soon stop this corruption and be brought to justice. Jj has even go as far as proposing a number of measures to ﬁght corruption.

One of the most important instruments for ﬁghting corruption is currently being debated within Seychelles. This is the setting-up of an anti-corruption commission. We should however note that Seychelles has been living under the mantle of cronyism, conﬂict of interest and a monopolistic economy for the last thirty years. These attributes of our society has given rise to a number of corrupt practices, a lack of transparency, accountability, good governance and responsibility.

The current government by paying lip-service to the ﬁght against corruption raises the hopes of the nation, only to dash these when real action needs to be taken. How many times in the past have we seen so-called “Biro Konplent” open only to be closed given the number of cases of misdeeds that are brought to light. In other words wanting to ﬁght the ﬁght and walk the walk is very, very different from just talking the talk!

One of the most glaring examples of this arose during the recent visit by the IMF delegation to the Seychelles. SBC heaped accolades on the reports produced by the IMF. This was to quote an SPPF member of the National Assembly just “cheap politics”. It is very cheap given the anomalies in the accounting practices adopted by Finance Minister Danny Faure to present government accounts and the budget, and the heavy criticisms of the IMF in response to these practices.

This utter lack of impression has even led to a senior member of Minister Faure’s Finance team that had recently been “restructured for productivity, efﬁciency and goals delivery” being given a forced leave of absence. Given that senior members of the civil service will bent all the rules just to tell Jj what he wants to hear – how will they bell the cat so that all Seychellois can share in the cake? Only god knows….