User:Luchowa56

Becoming too Expensive to Live in Mauritius On my various trips to Mauritius, although still perhaps in its embryonic stages of development, I have noticed the country has made a progressive development, in the standard of living, the economy, and the standard of education.

However when I speak to many local people they have a different view on the standard of living. They say the cost of living is too high to have a decent standard of living; the high cost of living in the country is paradoxical, since it does not correlate to a high quality of life, at least not for those faring worse economically. According to them, this situation has in part been created by incompetent successive governments and/or corrupt practices,  get rich quick …and rip anyone off mentality, as well as the global financial crisis, among other factors... Many of my fellow Mauritian workers face hardship toiling up to 9 hours a day for a basic pay of up to Rs8000 per month working in hotels/catering/clothing/garments factories/offices. They find the cost of living too high. Clothing and footwear prices are expensive in comparison to other countries. Food prices are high. Transport costs are very high. Basically many basic items are expensive. Many businesses pile up big profits at the expense of these workers who continue to struggle in dire situations. Thousands of families are living in poverty despite people being in employment. Many rely on 3 or 4 people in a household having to share their salaries/wages to run their kitchen and afford some of the necessaries like a computer and a car and many are in debts. To make ends meet and/or to afford some of the necessaries, unfortunately, a significant number of people are prepared to ponder on giving up their morality… and indulge in unwanted relationships….resulting in unhappy homes and marriages… A significant number of traders exploit the situation and impose the prices they like.

The imposition of high customs duties on the traders is subsequently transferred to the trader’s customers. If you are a tourist visiting Mauritius or if you are a Mauritian living overseas and visiting Mauritius, you need to be vigilant when you shop otherwise you are the next quick catch for many traders who apply a different price to articles they sell to you. And….” quand zotte passe la main lor zotte proverbial…. Di sang….” Restaurants will charge you higher. By the very nature of a tourist restaurant the expectation is that you will only visit once. So they think it is acceptable to focus on getting every extra cent from their customers, rather than trying to attract repeat business through quality service and food. If you choose to eat in such a place, it pays to be on your guard. A tourist I met in Mauritius who went to visit friends in Mauritius said it almost ruined their holiday when they discovered how much it was for a meal in a restaurant. They wanted to eat out every night but they simply couldn’t budget for that once they got there. I told them to try the ordinary cafés and the more caring restaurants like Green Palm and its likes. Buying goods at a market can be a hit or miss proposition. But most of the time it is a miss. The price is often well above what you’d pay in a normal retail shop. The brands are often ones you’ll have never heard of before, and there’s always the risk of getting the item home and discovering that it either doesn’t work or doesn’t do what it should. Some people may shrug, chalk it up to experience and say you get what you pay for. In the building trade many builders take money from ordinary people who have saved every cent or who have taken out a massive loan to get a house or an extension built. They expect a quality building delivered on time, free of major defects, or minor defects fixed by skilled professionals. The fact is that there are a lot of unscrupulous scumbags/ conmen purporting to be experienced builders and building contractors but in fact they are incompetent, poorly experienced and intentionally deceitful. They use unskilled labour, substandard materials, and pay the unskilled labourer a pittance. Our appeal to political leaders is: they must revisit the regulation of consumer prices closely and sack those civil servants who are incompetent and corrupt. Let them go and work in a factory or give them some form of hard labour in the community. Political leaders must set the tone and lead the way, by consulting widely, and those who are well-off must travel like ordinary people, live like ordinary people and then they may understand that the grass is not yet greener in Mauritius as some would want us to believe. Having said that we do not need politicians telling us that we need to work harder to make it. Let us help each other like we used to prior to the late1970s... and enhance the status and quality of life for all Mauritians and not simply to make money for a few. Let us take some pride in our own ingenuity and believe in ourselves. == Heading text

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