Your electricity and water bills are now reported to the MRA.

If your combined CEB + CWA payments exceed Rs 100,000/year (~Rs 8,300/month), your utility provider must send your name and exact amounts to the MRA. Automatically. Every year. No warrant needed.

The MRA gets direct access to the Civil Status & Population Database.

Your birth records, family relationships, registered address, all queryable by the MRA with no judicial process required.

Your insurer reports your car to the MRA.
Vehicle insured for over Rs 2 million? Your insurer now files an annual report to the MRA with your name and insured value. No opt-out.

The FCC can use your bank records in court — without a bank officer ever testifying.
This means you cannot cross-examine the evidence used against you. That’s not a technicality, it’s a constitutional right (Section 10) being quietly removed.

Refuse to hand over your phone to an MRA inspector? Rs 500,000 fine. Refuse to submit information? Up to 2 years in prison.

Sign a “Compliance Agreement” with the MRA and you permanently lose your right to appeal.

None of this required a headline. It was slipped into an Annex.

The Data Protection Act 2017 and the Constitution of Mauritius (Sections 9 and 10) exist precisely to prevent this. Whether anyone challenges it is another question.

Introduced in 2005, free transport for students & the elderly was a winning formula for the Labour Party to bag the election, and if my memory serves me right, MSM tried the duty free island. We are basically a population for sales, that’s how elections are won in Mauritius. But, do we have the resources and income to pay for it?

Free transport costs a significant amount of money to the government (i.e us, because we pay the taxes), and is very inefficient in its execution. Retired people who are already receiving pensions, are also granted free transport, why? Students, whether their parents are well off or not, also benefit from free transport, why?

Instead of targeting social groups to grant pensions, perhaps targeting students who really deserve free transport would be a better solution. To prevent the creation of different social class among students, don’t change the color of the card, just put a small stamp on it 🤷

Mauritius is taking a very bad direction, governments are over promising on subsidies, and they often squeeze money from the middle class to achieve their objectives. It genuinely feels like the rising middle class is being punished for their success, things like highly overpriced cars, subscription on number plates, higher taxes. Instead, why not promote prosperity, things such as investment schemes for new hires, professional courses allowances to those eligible that are subsequently paid only when the student show success, financial literacy in schools, programming & AI in lower secondary.

The current government is pissing everyone off because apart of austerity, there’s no proper plan or proposals to create wealth in the country. This means, to finance the deficits resulting from the mismanagement of the previous government, this government is adding taxes and isn’t showing signs that they want to find alternative ways to improve our finances.

Notice that I haven’t criticized its tendency to also reduce money handouts which in my opinion is a cancer to the economy.

But more importantly, because this government is failing to provide solutions, part of the population is expressing nostalgia of the previous government!

This is wrong. During the previous government’s tenure, elections were won by money handouts which eventually pump inflation and make a Rs 2000 allowance worth only Rs 1500 and less over time. No economy can survive this and no domestic currency can remain resilient towards the inflationary pressures this creates. What you want is better income, better productivity, better enterprise opportunities, not free money from the government, which, by the way, is taking that same money from us itself !

Moreover, while security island wide appears inexistent, the previous government literally appointed its own police force, financed by us tax payers, to persecute political opponents like its Russia. Remember the cases of planting, where the same guns were seized at two different locations from two different people? Or packet of drugs of the same size and type seized from multiple people which were later proven fake? We cannot reward that government for the hate we have for this one, it just doesn’t make sense.

Instead, let us realize that experimenting with the same parties that ruled this country for decades isn’t going to produce a different result. Let us try put someone new there, even though none of them is perfect, the only logical choice is to give power to a new party and expect a new result, rather than expecting new results from the same old parties that created the same problems over and over again. Stay objective on judging both governments, don’t reward the previous one for the poor performance of the current one.

# No it’s not, but how you think it is matters.

Slogging day & night for a life full of money that you don’t have time to spend isn’t really worth it. You will never see the joy of having the freedom to spend not only because you spend look hours at the office, but because you are so absorbed by work that on your little free time, your mind is still too busy to guide you to where you should be spending your money to be happy.

But then, does that mean clock-in at 9:00 and out at 17:15 will solve the problem? Nope ! 👎 People don’t pay you because you have certificates and wear a shirt 👔 to the office, they pay you for the value you bring to their organization. If you cannot produce the output that are both qualitatively and quantitatively solid, your salary will reflect that, and your two hour before sunset free time will be spent on waiting for your bus ride home, not driving to your favorite beach for an ice cream 🍦 in your car 🚗.

# This is another of my wake up call, I did not write a solution because now that you know the issue with misunderstanding work-life balance, you can use your cleverness to fix it.

No it’s not, but how you think it is matters.

Slogging day & night for a life full of money that you don’t have time to spend isn’t really worth it. You will never see the joy of having the freedom to spend not only because you spend look hours at the office, but because you are so absorbed by work that on your little free time, your mind is still too busy to guide you to where you should be spending your money to be happy.

But then, does that mean clock-in at 9:00 and out at 17:15 will solve the problem? Nope ! 👎 People don’t pay you because you have certificates and wear a shirt 👔 to the office, they pay you for the value you bring to their organization. If you cannot produce the output that are both qualitatively and quantitatively solid, your salary will reflect that, and your two hour before sunset free time will be spent on waiting for your bus ride home, not driving to your favorite beach for an ice cream 🍦 in your car 🚗.

This is another of my wake up call, I did not write a solution because now that you know the issue with misunderstanding work-life balance, you can use your cleverness to fix it.

Yes, if AI can produce a whole music album, it can also replace lawyers, analysts, accountants, engineers, and many more. And if you think you can outplay it by ignoring how much useless human interventions are getting, wait until companies choose an agent that costs $500 a year over 5 employees thats cost $1000 a month each.

Okay but how can you adapt?

Stop using AI for silly stuffs, and stop asking AI to think for you. What you need is first, identify the processes that your activity involves, its challenges, and design a workflow for each of those processes. This is just the first step, you haven’t created anything new, you’ve just made an existing tasks much more efficient.

Then, once this free up resources and time, make the AI analyse growth prospects in whatever revenue generating tasks that exists for your role, focus on the more lucrative ones, and design business development agents that will tap into those opportunities. This creates a loop of sales that leads to identifying new problems, therefore new solutions, therefore newer sales. It’s just a cycle of design, analyse, and execute.

Companies use these confidentiality clauses very cleverly, the make you feel special by asking you to keep your salary secret against your own peers. In short, you are sitting at the low-level tables, earning a low-level salary, but believes you are doing better than your friends while the top executives are getting the sundae 🍨!

We can break this !

First, understand that you are not competing against your own colleagues, but against cost of living. It’s okay if you and your friends are both driving a Jaguar 🚙, what’s not okay is accepting the Honda Accord while your colleagues are stuck with their Suzuki Swift, thinking you have done well in life.

Second, know that knowledge sharing doesn’t deplete your competitiveness, it creates a community of specialists. No one has won in life alone, everyone did it with help, or acting as a group. Instead of trying to become a cheap super star, become a member of an elite group that demands high salaries and perks. Keep abreast of new knowledge, technologies, and skills, and keep it safe within the group, not yourself.

Third, accept that sometimes you have to take the second prize for the bigger picture. Think of Formula1 🏁 , the pilot is often asked to let his colleague win, for the team. Accepting that your colleague climbed the ladder before you in your organization can mean you doing the same or better at another firm. Fighting against him brings the price for both of you lower. Remember that you are not a tree, you can move. And the organization you work at is not your life sentence, nor do you own it, therefore you have to let go of the fallacy that you have to anchor your whole career at that firm only.

Conclusion: Acting as a group makes you more powerful, it always has, it will always be.

1) More cases of delinquency

People who struggle to make ends meet breed a frustration that do not sit inside them for too long, they lash out in one way or another. Their primitive instincts start to come out just as this government is trying to put us back into primitive times. Their actions are no longer dictated by reason but rather by force, and this is also the only way they find control over their life.

2) Less money for education

It is already a thing in some households where expenses on children’s education are being scaled back just because food is too expensive. A child who goes to a public school without correct school materials and uniforms, little to no pocket money, and basic food will likely not perform well. We should not compare children of today to when our parents went to school with just a “dipain diber” and water, at that time everyone was able to relate to each other because the disparity between better-off (not rich) and poorer people was not as prevalent as today. (This comes from stories of my parents - just in case you ask me if I was there then)

3) More time & resources towards drugs.

Isn’t it staggering the number of very young people involved in drugs peddling nowadays?? This is probably the consequences of a more hungry generation that has been fed by instagram reels showing very successful people (though some ended becoming OnlyFan), which then raised the standard of a good life. 10 years ago having a car slowly started to become a staple, now having one isn’t much a show of success as having a premium vehicle. (Perhaps why BYDs resemble premium EU vehicles to attract buyers). So the guy at 25 wants to achieve those, and what’s easier than selling cheap synthetic drugs to just everyone?

What should we do?

Just let us breathe a bit. The educated populace (not those with certificates, but those who also got a functioning brain that thinks) understand the austerity, and we are at the limit. And it is also true that this is also the populace that can tolerate it. Whoever falls below not only have little to no awareness of how finance works, but they are also very much the most hit! We cannot keep on adding taxes when whatever we import is already priced in an increasingly higher exchange rate. Let us rather find ways to encourage enterprises, food & marine industries, sustainable investments from abroad that not only bring infrastructure, but also energy at a cheaper cost. In short, lets have some effing vision!!

TLDR: Because we tolerate incompetence and reward communalism.

Our electorate is very unique in that we criticize poor leadership but vote for our castes and religion. We want good policies but believe we need to be represented by our ethnicity. The result, governments form, they break apart, they form again, and all they do is exploit this weakness of ours.

Imagine employing a gardener at your place, very often you will look into the background of that person, and ask for references and morality certificates. Why? Because trusting a person to come to your place for work, while your family is present, and properties exposed, is a risk in itself. But in politics, politicians with police cases, unresolved controversies, who made press on some form of scandal, always find their way back. These are the people we trust to manage the whole country, and decide on ours’, and our kids’ future.

The 2024 election was the only election in which a country raised up for its future. It was the first time the people were on the roads, policing police cars for possible fraud attempts, to that I say well done. However what we elected then was just another side of the same problem, incompetent and lack of vision.

Let’s face the facts, our people are running deeper into an abyss of poor mentality that stems beyond the lack of opportunities and increasing costs of living.

Entitled We are.🚫

Don’t flag yourself but how many of you were actually craving for that MRA money transfer back in the day? You thought that money was entitled to you why? Because you wanted to tax the rich? Or because you thought you contributed to this economy (like every one of us paying taxes and VAT)?

The thing that you need to understand is that: no one owes you anything. I do not owe you a big chunk of my earnings in CSG, I did not took money or resources from you to pay you that back. I make money because I produce far more, I am involved in the progress of this economy and therefore I get paid for it. Part of my money isn’t owed to you. Yet so many people thought it is a right bestowed upon them, in a country that has no natural gas, fossil fuel, rare earths, or precious metals mines.

TLDR: You Do Not Deserve CSG.

We don’t like to work. 👷‍♂️🧑‍🌾👨‍🍳

Real Life Event: My entrepreneur friend lost a multi-million rupees contract because his employee didn’t show up on time. The client was pissed, while the employee was having a work-life balance activity in the middle of the week.
Conclusion: He will sack most of his local employees and hire foreigners. Go ahead, blame him :)

TLDR: Before you think you are underpaid, make sure you are at least earning some money. Businesses don’t wait for you, they need growth, you need salary.