“Social tensions do not erupt in an economic vacuum”

Interview: Sameer Sharma, Economist & Financial Risk Manager

‘When living costs soar, housing becomes unaffordable, and effort and merit no longer guarantee social mobility, frustration inevitably spills into the streets’

 *‘Growth will improve living standards only if the State taxes land speculation and passive corporate rents, eases levies on productive labour…’

* ‘Registering a company online in 48 hours is straightforward; the real hurdle for small and medium-sized enterprises is the ease of staying in business’

* ‘Villa sales do not build industrial depth or export complexity; they are one-off transactions that inflate land costs for citizens’

Behind Mauritius’s impressive headline GDP figures and high ease-of-doing-business rankings lies a widening economic divide — one that is increasingly straining middle- and working-class households and fuelling public discontent. In this candid and incisive interview with Mauritius Times, economist and financial risk manager Sameer Sharma dissects what he describes as an “extractive” economic architecture where corporate super-rents and speculative real estate windfalls vastly outpace national output, leaving salaried professionals and young graduates squeezed by inflation, stagnant wages, and unaffordable housing.

Drawing on stark macroeconomic data and findings from the World Bank’s October 2026 Country Growth and Jobs Report, Riding the Next Wave, S. Sharma examines why the post-Independence development engine has stalled, how domestic monopolies and state-linked conglomerates stifle mid-sized competition, and why talented Mauritians are increasingly opting out of traditional politics — or leaving the island altogether. Read on:

Mauritius Times: In the wake of the recent social disturbances, various social and historical factors have been identified as contributing to public frustration and, ultimately, unrest. To what extent, however, have the structure of our economy and the way it operates also contributed to these tensions? Could the economic model itself be a source of past and present discontent and, unless reformed, a potential trigger for future social unrest?

Sameer Sharma: Social tensions do not erupt in an economic vacuum. While historical and communal factors are often cited, the fundamental fuel of public anger is an economic architecture that has systematically squeezed working- and middle-class purchasing power while concentrating national wealth into fewer hands.

When living costs soar, housing becomes unaffordable, and young citizens realize that effort and merit no longer guarantee social mobility, frustration inevitably spills into the streets. Unless we reform this extractive model to create genuine economic freedom and fair competition, economic inequality will remain an active trigger for recurring unrest.

* Mauritius continues to perform well on international ease-of-doing-business indicators and GDP growth figures. Yet many middle-class and poorer households continue to struggle with rising living costs and limited opportunities to improve their standard of living. Why does this gap persist, and how can economic growth be translated into tangible improvements in people’s everyday lives?

The gap between glowing economic reports and actual everyday struggles is not an accident. It is the direct mathematical result of an extractive economic structure where corporate profits vastly outpace national output, while policy directs the resulting surplus straight to an entrenched elite.

Between December 2019 and 2026, corporate earnings on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius nearly doubled, surging by roughly 85% to 90% as derived from aggregate earnings across listed companies. Over that exact period, total national economic output grew by only 45% to 48%, even after factoring in the official 9% statistical upward revision confirmed by the International Monetary Fund as a standard technical rebasement. In short, listed corporate profits expanded at nearly double the rate of the overall economy, while compound inflation crushed the real earnings of everyday workers.

This dynamic shows Thomas Piketty’s economic axiom in raw practice: whenever the return on capital persistently outpaces economic growth, accumulated wealth pulls away while wage labour loses ground. On a small island where land is strictly limited, real estate financialisation makes this divide much worse. Converting thousands of hectares of agricultural sugar land into luxury residential schemes has generated hundreds of billions in lightly taxed capital gains for legacy corporate estates, while pushing ordinary residential land acquisition far beyond the reach of salaried professionals.

International ease-of-doing-business rankings remain a domestic comedy. Registering a company online in 48 hours is straightforward; the real hurdle is the ease of staying in business. Small and medium-sized enterprises rarely scale into formidable competitors because the domestic economy is carved into private, rent-seeking fiefdoms controlling distribution franchises, import lines, commercial banking credit, and port logistics.

The World Bank’s October 2026 Country Growth and Jobs Report, Riding the Next Wave, documented this defect with clinical precision. It established that industries with weaker competition account for roughly one-third of the country’s revenue and employment, exhibit lower labour productivity, and are characterised by a heavy presence of conglomerates alongside state participation.

Crucially, the World Bank observed that very large firms remain less productive than medium-sized firms, indicating that market inefficiencies prevent competitive mid-sized enterprises from scaling up. Real labour productivity resides in medium-sized enterprises employing between 50 and 80 people, yet these firms hit an artificial ceiling because conglomerates and state-linked groups control key inputs and prefer deploying surplus rents abroad or into speculative land rather than facing domestic competition.

This is reinforced by the moral hazard of the Mauritius Investment Corporation. When other nations structured pandemic corporate lifelines, they mandated strict risk-sharing with commercial banks to ensure private capital shared the downside. The Bank of Mauritius did the exact opposite: it absorbed the entire risk onto the sovereign balance sheet and offered heavily biased terms to powerful corporate lobbies.

There was an utter lack of capital markets competence at the MIC; officials had no grasp of convertible bond pricing or optionality. Many conglomerates received convertible bonds whose conversion options carry zero economic value for the sovereign because the term sheets were structured so that conversion would never be triggered. It was uncollateralized, near-free credit masquerading as quasi-equity.

Despite public warnings published at the time, including my own detailed critiques, the establishment pressed ahead. The resulting corporate gains remained strictly private, while the losses were socialized via a debased rupee, a $500 million foreign exchange backlog, and persistent domestic inflation. The new political regime has still not commissioned an independent, international forensic audit of the transactions of the Mauritius Investment Corporation — an investigation that would provide decisive evidentiary teeth to the Financial Crimes Commission.

Growth will translate into improved living standards only when the state enacts an uncompromising Land Value Tax on speculative land, taxes passive corporate rents, reduces levies on productive labour, and grants the Competition Commission the teeth to dismantle import cartels.

* What’s your take on the views expressed by several economists that Mauritius’s economic model is no longer delivering the benefits it once did in the decades following Independence and is gradually losing momentum? What changes are needed to make the economy work better for its people, create new opportunities and strengthen the country’s resilience?

Arguing that the model is merely losing momentum is a polite euphemism for an engine that has seized up entirely. The post-Independence development model succeeded by reallocating low-productivity agrarian labour into export-processing factories, preferential sugar quotas, upmarket tourism, and treaty-based offshore financial arbitrage. Every single one of those external tailwinds has either vanished or faced structural exhaustion. The economy is now dragging along at an anaemic 2.7% to 3.0% real growth, while public debt servicing consumes between 12% and 13% of the recurrent national budget, representing roughly 30 billion rupees out of 235 billion rupees in annual revenue.

To put this fiscal burden in perspective, Mauritians reading international news regarding France’s debt crisis should compare the underlying figures. France’s central state budget devotes approximately 10.5% to 11.5% of its expenditure to debt interest. Mauritius now allocates a higher proportion of its central revenue to servicing public debt interest than the French central state. Yet the structural differences between the two jurisdictions are striking. France is caught in an ideological trap because it is genuinely overtaxed, with mandatory public levies exceeding 43% of GDP and public spending exceeding 57%, pushing it to the limits of the Laffer curve on productive labour. Mauritius sits in the exact opposite posture. Total tax revenue hovers around 18% to 20% of GDP. Mauritius is not an overtaxed country; it is an absurdly mis-taxed country.

Our tax burden falls heavily on the upper-middle class and salaried professionals through direct PAYE, while arbitrary top-ups and phase-outs create punitive marginal tax cliffs that actively discourage overtime, upskilling, and executive innovation. Simultaneously, we pull micro-enterprises and small service providers into the bureaucratic compliance trap of mandatory VAT eligibility, creating working-capital nightmares for small businesses.

Yet the vast, speculative landholdings of powerful political party financiers remain untouched by any recurrent asset tax. While basic unprocessed food staples like rice and flour are zero-rated, our fiscal system relies disproportionately on indirect consumption taxes, fuel levies, and direct income taxes on labour. Meanwhile, speculative land windfalls, luxury zoning conversions, and captive import oligopolies face negligible fiscal friction.

Resolving Mauritius’s debt problem is technically straightforward: tax unearned rent, lower taxes on labour, and extract the state from commercial business. Instead, the policy establishment hides behind two distractions.

The first is the villa-sale mirage of foreign direct investment. Over 70% of gross FDI inflows represent foreigners buying luxury villas. As the World Bank’s Riding the Next Wave report confirmed, investment has shifted heavily toward real estate rather than productive, capital-forming sectors, dragging down productivity. Villa sales do not build industrial depth or export complexity; they are one-off transactions that inflate land costs for citizens. Meanwhile, genuine investors in productive sectors like renewable energy encounter bureaucratic delays, opaque procurement, and resistance from entrenched fossil-fuel and bagasse lobbies.

The second distraction is the sovereign credit rating melodrama. The political class approaches Moody’s reviews with hysteria. Politicians with zero capital markets literacy warn that a one-notch downgrade will cause collapse, forgetting that the sovereign does not issue Eurobonds. This rhetoric exists to protect the narrative around the solitary local bank with an investment-grade rating — an institution whose recent international debt was already priced by global markets at non-investment grade yields anyway. Global investors price actual risk, not backward-looking agency notes. The claim that a downgrade would spark a run on Global Business deposits ignores that other domestic banks and South African institutions operate in sub-investment grade territory with continuous deposit inflows. They manage their balance sheets via disciplined asset and liability management and maintain deep foreign currency liquidity.

We must overhaul our tax philosophy. In the era of artificial intelligence, taxing human cognitive labour while coddling passive rents is economic suicide. We need lower taxes on labour and a 23% corporate baseline on passive rent-seeking, dropping to 15% via targeted credits for genuine value creators investing in advanced manufacturing, export software, and agritech. Taxing the unimproved value of speculative land — while strictly exempting active agriculture — will redirect capital from hoarding to production.

* Many observers sense growing frustration among professionals and the younger generation who no longer believe the system can be changed from within. Have they permanently turned away from civic engagement, or are talented Mauritians simply finding other ways to make a difference through business, civil society and grassroots movements, rather than traditional politics?

What comfortable observers dismiss as voter apathy is, in truth, an intelligent, self-preserving boycott. Mauritians are fed a flattering narrative about their democracy. In practice, traditional parties operate as dynastic patronage syndicates where candidacies, public posts, and board appointments are traded on communal profiling, personal loyalty, and campaign checks from corporate donors seeking regulatory protection.

For an educated, principled professional, entering party politics requires intellectual compromise. You are not invited to debate monetary policy transmission or fiscal architecture; you are expected to applaud the leadership and attend communal gatherings. The domestic media rarely provides meaningful space for rigorous, substantive debate on structural tax reform or market concentration, largely because major media outlets remain commercially dependent on advertising revenues from the very banking oligopoly, corporate conglomerates, and state-owned entities that need scrutiny. Public discussions are reduced to superficial corporate public-relations rhetoric and vague slogans about inclusive growth and capacity building, avoiding any forensic examination of who owns the land and who captures economic rents.

Talented individuals are choosing to bypass the political machinery entirely. Ambitious professionals are decoupling their livelihoods from the domestic patronage system. They develop export-oriented expertise in software architecture, corporate law, quantitative research, and digital services. They avoid domestic public tenders because the specifications are often tailored for connected intermediaries. By serving clients in London, Paris, Singapore, or New York, they build a firewall between their careers and local gatekeepers.

Simultaneously, genuine civic resistance in Mauritius does not sit in parliament; it operates through public-interest litigation, investigative reporting, and grassroots environmental advocacy. When citizens organize to clean up ecological disasters or challenge unconstitutional surveillance, they prove that civic duty is alive. It has simply abandoned established party ballots.

However, operating in an offshore bubble has limits. It works until the water stops running, the power grid trips, the dislocated foreign exchange market chokes your operations, or social instability knocks on your door. While building an export business protects personal dignity, it leaves the keys to the treasury, the central bank, and the regulatory apparatus in the hands of an increasingly desperate political-corporate nexus.

* How serious is the challenge of retaining links with young Mauritian professionals who have settled abroad, and what can be done to encourage them to contribute their skills, experience, investment and knowledge to Mauritius, even from overseas, while maintaining a meaningful connection with their home country?

The brain drain is an existential threat, unfolding alongside a fertility rate of 1.4 and a rapidly graying population. The World Bank’s Riding the Next Wave report highlighted that the share of tertiary-educated young Mauritians who are not in employment, education, or training has reached 51%, revealing a severe mismatch between educational output and domestic economic absorption. Yet the state’s response remains patronizing, relying on diaspora returnee schemes offering duty-free motor vehicles. Young professionals are not leaving over car duties; they are leaving because of the complete absence of economic freedom and meritocracy.

Consider the reality facing an ambitious technologist or financial engineer returning home. If you want to build an enterprise, you face a demeaning choice. You must either petition a politician for regulatory favors and public contracts, or pitch your idea to a domestic conglomerate whose idea of partnership is taking 51% of your equity so you become a dependent corporate manager running their internal IT department. You are not free to build, scale, and compete purely on the strength of your intellect. The moment you enter an area that touches an incumbent’s margins, you discover your permits stalled, bank accommodation complicated, and port clearances frozen.

This dynamic wrecks the domestic labour market for young graduates. General government, parastatal bodies, and state-owned commercial entities employ well over 20% of the formal workforce, serving as a political mechanism to distribute secure jobs to party clienteles while draining productive talent away from dynamic sectors. Meanwhile, because private conglomerates dominate domestic industries and prevent competitive mid-sized firms from emerging, new graduates face a severe shortage of potential employers. With virtually no mid-market competition to bid for talent, entry-level wage growth for university graduates has stagnated at near-subsistence levels relative to the cost of living.

Add to this the open secret polite society avoids: the rise of a powerful narcotics economy. With an estimated street turnover running into tens of billions of rupees, drug cartels are establishing a parallel financial empire whose influence risks rivaling established corporate lobbies. When laundered cash distorts real estate prices and compromises law enforcement, a legitimate merit-based career path looks like self-delusion.

Furthermore, the back-office business process outsourcing and corporate administration workflows that policymakers celebrate as modern pillars are precisely the tasks that agentic artificial intelligence systems are automating. Anyone with analytical clarity knows this model is on a collision course with reality, yet official circles — advised by prime ministerial economic advisors who remain intellectually stranded in the 1980s — remain completely unconcerned.

Those who left did so because they recognized that the system is engineered to protect mediocrity. Reversing this requires dismantling the gatekeepers: open, competitive recruitment across public institutions, unhindered capital convertibility, and economic freedom where success depends on what you know, not who you placate.

* Older generations see Mauritius through the achievements and challenges of the post-Independence years, while younger people expect higher standards of meritocracy, sustainability and digital governance. How can we bridge this generational divide and build a shared vision for the country’s future?

Bridging this generational divide requires clearing away mutual incomprehension. The older generation views the country through the rear-view mirror of scarcity, while younger citizens view it through the windshield of global reality.

The post-1968 generation lived through genuine existential dread: communal strife, double-digit unemployment, structural poverty, and vulnerability to global sugar cycles. For them, establishing the universal welfare net — free healthcare, universal education, subsidized staples, and the Basic Retirement Pension — was a monumental achievement. Having witnessed that precariousness, they possess high tolerance for administrative decay and political clientelism, viewing them as acceptable costs for communal peace.

The younger generation does not compare Mauritius to 1968; they compare it to peer jurisdictions that built high-income, meritocratic societies. When they see the Central Water Authority losing over 50% of its potable water through leaking pipes while politicians inaugurate cosmetic water tanks, they see administrative incompetence. When they see lagoons polluted, wetlands paved over for concrete malls, and public coastlines fenced off for luxury enclaves, they see environmental capture. When they see an aging elite lecture them about patience while living costs soar, their response is to book a one-way flight out of the country.

A shared vision cannot be built on nostalgic appeals to gratitude. It must be grounded in fiscal reality.

First, consider the math of pension solvency. The welfare state cannot be funded in the 2030s by an economy dragging along at 2.5% growth with an aging, shrinking workforce. As the World Bank underscored, by 2033 nearly one in five Mauritians will be over 65, placing unsustainable strain on pensions unless productivity accelerates. The Basic Retirement Pension will be paid either through currency debasement or through productivity-driven economic expansion of 4.0% to 4.5%. The young cannot generate that growth within a closed, feudal economic structure.

Second, we must move from welfare handouts to operational delivery. Accepting broken public utilities in exchange for political favors is a losing bargain. Potable water in your tap twenty-four hours a day, reliable power, and clean hospitals are basic civil rights, not sovereign gifts.

Third, we require generational fiscal equity. We need a fiscal compact that stops extracting wealth from the wages of the young through regressive indirect taxes and punitive marginal brackets to subsidize passive asset portfolios, shifting the tax base onto unearned land wealth and corporate super-rents.

* Politics has traditionally been a driving force for change in Mauritius, but many people feel that political parties have become rigid and resistant to renewal. Where will the next generation of national leaders emerge? Will it come from a renewed political class, or from a stronger civil society willing to take on greater social and political responsibilities?

Expecting established political parties to renew themselves is akin to expecting a cartel to voluntarily deregulate its own industry. The major party machines are thoroughly institutionalized dynasties. The party leader is not a first among equals; he is an autocrat presiding over a court of loyalists. Internal democracy is nonexistent. Policy manifestos are drafted not by rigorous working groups, but by a handful of elderly retainers whose primary qualification is personal devotion to the political brand. The recent political cycles confirmed that a change of regime merely brings a change of beneficiaries to the trough, while the underlying architecture of patronage, opacity, and corporate capture remains intact.

The next generation of leaders will not emerge from party youth wings, which serve as finishing schools for communal calculation and ministerial deference. They will be forged through external disruption. True leadership is emerging from independent investigative lawyers, environmental scientists, trade unionists who refuse to be co-opted, and uncompromised economists. These individuals build credibility by telling the public the unvarnished truth while the political class peddles comfortable fictions.

Furthermore, the patronage state operates on a simple mechanism: it buys political peace by distributing fiscal favors, public sector jobs, and state contracts. But as public debt hovers near 81.5% of GDP and debt servicing eats up 12% to 13% of government revenues, the fiscal space to bribe the electorate is evaporating. When the state can no longer print or borrow enough to paper over structural cracks, the patronage model will implode under its own weight.

At that juncture, the public will have no use for political dynasty heirs or aging backroom fixers. They will need technocrats who know how to manage a debt restructuring, stabilize a dislocated currency, rebuild a fractured power grid, and restore basic institutional credibility.

* However, despite frustration with bureaucratic delays and political patronage, Mauritius still has relatively strong judicial, legal and electoral institutions by regional standards. Are these institutions losing their effectiveness, or do they simply need bold, independent leadership and meaningful reforms to fulfil their potential?

Mauritius’s apex institutions — the superior courts, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the ultimate safety net of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council — remain the thin line separating the republic from full-blown authoritarian kleptocracy. The continued presence of the Privy Council is the single most valuable institutional asset this country possesses; it is the reason global investors still retain confidence, knowing that executive overreach can be overturned by an independent bench in London.

However, beneath this apex canopy, the rot of institutional capture has advanced aggressively.

First, consider the regulatory and oversight apparatus. The Financial Services Commission, the Bank of Mauritius, the Financial Intelligence Unit, and the anti-corruption machinery now centered under the Financial Crimes Commission have frequently operated under executive shadow. When an institution’s primary, unspoken mandate becomes protecting the ruling alliance’s financiers and burying evidence of high-level misconduct, the rule of law becomes a pantomime. We see this in the complete refusal to publish a forensic audit of the billions handed out by the MIC, and we see it in the central bank’s persistent refusal to tell the public the truth about foreign exchange reserves and multi-tiered exchange rates.

Second, we must speak frankly about the quality of institutional appointments. In recent years, public nominations have descended into a bizarre combination of political patronage and cosmetic public relations. We are told to celebrate gender representation on boards and regulatory committees, while entirely ignoring whether the appointees possess the technical competence to read a balance sheet or understand monetary transmission.

Look at the Board of Directors of the Bank of Mauritius and the Monetary Policy Committee. Central banking, macro-financial modeling, foreign exchange liquidity management, and asset and liability management are highly specialized disciplines. They require seasoned quantitative economists, fixed-income veterans, and battle-tested risk managers. Instead, these critical bodies are packed with political loyalists, civil-service generalists, and public-relations nominees whose primary function is to nod along to executive decrees.

When the team steering monetary policy lacks the technical depth to understand how their own net open position regulations distort the commercial banking sector, it is hardly surprising that the domestic currency market ends up fractured into three separate rates while a $500 million backlog paralyzes commercial trade. Appointing pliant generalists under the banner of progressive tokenism is not governance; it is the weaponization of identity to shield incompetence.

Third, the operational courts are plagued by structural attrition. While higher court judges are independent, commercial and civil cases routinely take five to seven years to drag through the system. This delay is an active subsidy to deep-pocketed conglomerates, who use prolonged litigation to bleed smaller, innovative challengers into submission.

Our institutions do not need cosmetic re-branding. They need radical statutory insulation: make the appointment of the Central Bank Governor, the MPC members, the Police Commissioner, and the heads of integrity institutions subject to open, rigorous parliamentary confirmation hearings with supermajority thresholds. Strip the Executive of its power to reward loyalty with sovereign stewardship.

* If you had to identify three immediate and practical priorities to restore public confidence and encourage professionals to believe in and contribute to Mauritius’s future, what would they be? Should the emphasis be on better governance, economic diversification, greater democratisation and civic participation, or a combination of these?

The standard policy prescription usually offers vague buzzwords: diversification, capacity building, and dialogue. This is useless. Governance, macroeconomic sanity, and competitive markets are indivisible; you cannot fix one while leaving the others in the hands of cartels. To pull Mauritius back from the brink, three non-negotiable structural priorities must be executed.

The first priority is to restore monetary reality, eliminate rating-agency hysteria, and deepen domestic capital markets by bringing in a new generation of professionals with genuine international markets experience. The Bank of Mauritius must immediately cease the artificial, administrative defense of an overvalued rupee, allow the currency to find its genuine market-clearing equilibrium, clear the $500 million backlog, and stop the blame game targeting commercial banks that are simply executing prudent balance-sheet asset and liability management within regulatory net open position limits. We must silence the political panic over sovereign rating reviews, recognizing that international debt markets have already priced local credit realities and that backward-looking agency reviews are symptoms rather than the disease.

Deepening domestic capital markets requires leadership that actually understands modern market structure. Stop issuing hundreds of fragmented, illiquid sovereign paper tranches that sit dead in domestic bank vaults. We must adopt the Bank of Canada model, where the operational execution of sovereign debt is managed by a specialized debt management office issuing exclusively large, liquid benchmark bonds. We need an active interbank repo market with securities lending and must pursue Euroclear eligibility so our bond market integrates with global capital rather than surviving as a captive domestic clearinghouse.

The second priority is to conduct a full forensic audit of the Mauritius Investment Corporation and execute the wholesale divestment of non-essential state-owned enterprises. Commission an independent, internationally reputable forensic audit of the entire MIC portfolio to reveal to the public exactly which conglomerate subsidiaries received convertible loans, on what collateral terms, at what interest rates, and what their real repayment records look like. Provide those findings directly to the Financial Crimes Commission with a mandate for criminal recovery where fiduciary duty was breached. The era of socializing corporate losses under the veil of confidentiality must end.

Concurrently, get the state out of running commercial businesses. The government has proven it cannot manage competitive enterprises. State-owned commercial banks, state insurance companies, and the national telecommunications provider create very few productive jobs, generate negligible economic value, and desperately require capital that they cannot secure under dysfunctional state governance. Execute a structured, transparent divestment program to privatize or bring strategic private equity into these entities. For essential public utilities like the Central Water Authority and the Central Electricity Board, purge political appointees from the boards and install professional management bound by legally enforceable performance contracts to slash the 50% water distribution leakage, modernize the electrical grid to accept distributed renewable power, and subject utility pricing to an independent, technically competent regulator.

The third priority is to rebalance the tax code against economic rent, lower levies on human labour, and unleash domestic competition. Impose an unbending land value tax on idle, speculative real estate holdings and luxury smart city developments, while maintaining an absolute, ironclad exemption for all productive agricultural land under active cultivation to safeguard domestic food security. Force corporate cartels to either develop their land productively or sell it, breaking the artificial property bubble that strangles the young.

Lower and rationalize personal income taxes on productive professionals and dismantle the arbitrary top-up cliffs that discourage hard work and ambition. Raise the VAT exemption threshold so small businesses and freelancers are not choked by compliance costs. In an era of artificial intelligence automation, taxing human cognitive labour while leaving passive corporate rents untouched is self-defeating. Shift corporate tax to a 23% baseline on passive, rent-seeking sectors, while lowering the rate to 15% for genuine value creators investing in advanced tech, precision manufacturing, agritech, and industrial exports. Finally, give the Competition Commission real teeth and political independence to dismantle structural distribution monopolies, break exclusive import agreements, and eliminate arbitrary barriers to market entry.

Mauritius does not suffer from a lack of technical solutions; it suffers from a surplus of institutional capture. The country is not poor; it is poorly governed by an exhausted elite that mistakes its own survival for national progress. Until the population finds the civic courage to confront the rent-seeking duopoly of politicians and conglomerates, the best and brightest will continue to do the only rational thing left: pack their bags, step onto an airplane, and leave the ruins of the miracle behind.

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Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 6 November 2026

Tags:; public debt, Brain Drain, Civil Society, Competition Commission, Corporate Profits, Corporate Rents, Cost of Living, Economic Diversification, Economic Growth, Economic inequality, Economic Model, Financial Markets, Foreign Direct Investment, governance, Import Cartels, Institutional Capture, Interview Sameer Sharma, Labour Productivity, Land Speculation, Mauritius Investment Corporation, Mauritius Times, Meritocracy, Middle Class, Political Patronage, Purchasing Power, Social Unrest, Structural Reforms, Tax Reform, Taxation, Wealth Concentration, Youth Unemployment