By: Christopher Gill

I recently made a trip to Mauritius after my son was diagnosed with tonsillitis and the doctor at Victoria Hospital advised us that there was nothing that could be done for him and he was not fit to travel. We traveled immediately. Upon arrival in Mauritius, we made our way to the famous Darné Clinic, where the doctor ad-mitted him that same evening, had an anastiologist look over him, take appropriate blood tests, weighed  him, and the next morning at 7.30a.m. his tonsils has been laser-ed.  He recovered by 6.00pm that day and we were back to our hotel by 7.00pm for a decent meal and comfortable nights sleep for both of us. The operation was successful, a young life saved from the grips of possible malpractice. Prevention is better than cure at times, especially when it is your son.

Like many Seychellois, I travel to Mauritius often, as much as six times a year. On this flight as usual, I met a number of people looking for auto parts, searching for building materials like cement, steel, many doing the trip to buy clothes and sani-tary goods, sundries which they may need but cannot find in Seychelles. The flight was full, packed loaded to the brim. I estimate that no less than $400,000 leaves Seychelles on each flight to Mauritius. Little comes back in productivity. It feels more and more like a nec-essary trip to survive in today’s Seychelles. Soon, the SPPF may just tell us we need a spe-cial permit to travel to Mauri-tius - since the route represents an exodus of over $1 million from Seychelles economy per week. Compounded over 15 years, it will represent econo-mic collapse of approximately $180,000,000.00 or more spent on an economic survival flight. But for now, the SPPF say we are traveling! Yes, but for survival, not a holiday!

Tourists boom beyond visitors

Upon arrival, I noticed the airport had been partially streamlined and renovated to accommodate new welcomed traffic this cousin island is experiencing. This year, Mauritius will expect over 900,000 tourists to its shares. Not too long ago, it had only 500,000 tourist arrivals. From last year, tourist arrivals are up 19.8% - a significant increase in arrivals. In Seychelles, although we have a superior nature product and beat Mauritius heads over heals in natural beauty and beach quality and quantity, our tourist arrivals are only 12% increase from last year. This figure includes everyone Immigration could classify as a visitor, from merchant, seamen to sailors and over night cruise ship visitors.

We are the “most beautiful Islands in the world”. We could do much better. The Authorities there are going for the growth figures with all infrastructures in place already. They have sufficient water reservoirs, adequate electricity grids on line and roads, educational institutions in place, even industrial parks in Rose Hill have water and electricity and roads in place. The vacant lots are used to plant sugar cane and vegetables by local farmers pending the erection of an industrial park.

Mauritius is not waiting for tourist arrivals to keep their econo-my growing. As the price of sugar drops on the world market, they are quickly putting in place the Integrated Resort Schemes (IRS), selling these luxury homes to Europeans and granting them residential status in the Island State, not selling them passports. They are not reclaiming land to destroy their islands intrinsic assets to do this, but instead are relying on low production, low return sugar cane production fields to secure their future. Over the next few years, arrivals to Mauritius will start approaching the 3+ million mark if all goes according to plan. It seems to be well off the ground. They are not encumbered by an exorbitant wasted military budget and can deliver infrastructure wherein needed.

An array of airlines already flies to Mauritius and are willing to increase flights. This includes many companies that have bypassed Seychelles as a destination, like British Airways, Virgin Airways, Air Austral, Air Madagascar, Air France, which buys 75% of Air Seychelles seats at a discount, South African Airways, and some names we are not familiar with like Euro fly, LTU, Com air, if you never visited South Africa, to name a few.

In Seychelles, we have attempted similar projects to the IRS projects in Mauritius, like Eden Island and the proposed Ile Aurore project – and now St Anne Island project. The main obvious diffe-rence is that in Mauritius, they have established the right dynamics for these projects to best benefit the public in real terms, in Sey-chelles; we are trying to skip that stage of development and ignore the right dynamics. This is fatal. As humans, the good Lord has co-mmanded that in our personal lives, in our health, and in running our economy and national finances, we will pay for our sins.

Example, our currency still does not float, but we are selling apartments to overseas investors. Hence, the hard currency on Eden Island goes offshore and does not benefit Seychelles directly and adequately.

Another example, since René told Seychellois who did not like his social experiments to leave for the last 33 years, as these new projects come on line, we will need a new labor impetus which will cost us dearly to maintain on the supply side. When we import labor, we export hard currency. While that imported labor resides in Seychelles to fulfill his contract term, our economy must feed that labor with food and drink, that when you look at the bottom line, cost us in hard currency. Onions and lentils are paid for in dollars not in Seychelles Rupees.
It does not appear the Government have done the numbers. Numbers don’t lie. These projects will lop side our population base and place a major strain on the supply of foods and stuff needed to live before they even cut the ribbons on opening day.

Port Louis Port Booms

This year, the shipping port in Port Louis is experiencing an unprecedented increase in traffic by 40%. This is substantial. Not long ago, we were told by the SPPF leadership that they were working on making Port Victoria a hub in the Indian Ocean. This pipe dream is now over. The shipping hub of the Indian Ocean is Port Louis – Mauritius. Port Victoria has not moved fast enough to remain competitive. Now, it must strive to remain operational and keep things working as best as possible, unless we have a military build-up with China as the main engine or possibly the Indian Ocean Alliance (IOA), which we are not a part of it, behind any future growth of Port Victoria.

Ships from South Africa have reduced trips to Seychelles substantially. All our cargo from South Africa is sent to Port Louis, and then consolidated for a weekly shipment to Seychelles. This is an incredible loss of time and money for the business community. This cost is of course passed on to the consumer - inevitably making us less competitive in a very competitive region.

The work required to undo this quagmire is a challenge, but it can be done. We may want to start by ordering the construction of some single hull cargo ships in Seychelles name instead of another double hull oil tanker, we see only in pictures. We do not sell oil, but we do trade in goods in the region. For the price of one oil tanker we can buy 2-3 cargo ships. Our shipping problems will be solved in no time. We also compete in the region. Our customer base does not have to be restricted to Seychelles only, but can include Seychelles, hence substantially reducing the cost of shipping goods to Sey-chelles, in the face of prohibi-tive price structures, that can turn our country into a bunch of deserted islands in no time.

Cyber City up and about to run Cyber City is a new business conceptualized with the idea of creating a new economic heart beat along the lines of the Internet Technology (IT).

Cyber City is exploding in construction of modern buildings which will house internet based call centers to serve the world’s big business that need multi lingual specialists in French and English. Mauritius after all had adopted into African One and has made the fibre optic connection to the world. They did it early and paid very little.

We, in Seychelles, under the leadership of Albert Rene and James Michel, have only talked, talked and talked about this fibre optic connection year in and year out for no less than 10 years. An endeavor to better all our lives cost $3 million 10 years ago, today, will cost us prohibitive excess of $33 million to complete.
As it stands, the Government have made us an IT backwater island village with no real future for our up coming generations in the field, no matter how talented they might be. Nor do we have an opportunity to compete with Mauritius in the region any more in this field. For us in Seychelles, because of the Government follies, the computer will remain pretty much just office furniture for us, for generations to come, while many in the world use it for creativity and business opportunity, catapulting wealth crating bases with good ideas in numerical denominations we cannot imagine under the present set-up.

Fish catch down for all of us

If there is something we have in common with Mauritius on the economic front, it is that our fish catch for 2007 is down. We are experiencing the worse catch in 11years. In Seychelles, our tuna production is down by 40% for the year. This represents a substantial loss in revenue for the Government of Seychelles. 60 per cent of all our national revenues are earned from the Lehman Brothers IOT cannery and subsidiary incidences of revenue. This is a substantial shortfall for Seychelles this year.

On the other side of this financial short fall is this: as tuna catch goes down, the price of tuna goes up (supply and demand), making local cannery prices offered for fish too low an incentive. Purse seiners will opt for other market options for their catch. Lehman Brothers better do the numbers quickly because soon, they too will start paying the price for the Government not establishing a tuna fleet over the years – to safeguard and extract our most valuable resource. As the Government us to build more traps to fish parrot fish and cordonnier along our coast, our biggest catch is getting away!

In one generation, under SPPF, we have squandered the resource of our fish stock worth hundreds if not billions of US Dollars to the people of Seychelles. Now, the Government tells us they are working through the details of points to double our GDP in 10 years. If we allow them to go on like this, we will only double our debts and double the failure around us.

When I was in University studying Government and Political Science, I was only 19 years old. I did not pay much attention to the advice of my Professors, then. Today, one word of advice, I recall feels like a masai warrior spear going through my brain from my Economic Professor: “Beware of Governments that just plan, plan, plan – talk, talk, talk – and tax, tax, tax”!

May God Bless all freedom loving Seychelles!