The view from behind the wheel

No, not mine. The taxi driver's view from behind the wheel. As you can guess, I've been cabbing a lot to and from work.

So one of my openings to the world outside of my ceramic-tiled flat-screened workplace is conversations with taxi-drivers.

The main villain in the story is the government. The main hero is the "small man" eking out a life for himself and his children by driving people around.

The government offered free public transport to old people and students, one of their greatest offences against taxi drivers. God knows it's now a choice for pensioners to stay home or travel around our big country. It was never a choice between a cab and a bus in the first place. But anyway...bad, bad.

The government raised the price of petrol. Taxi drivers need to raise their rates. And become less competitive. And lose clients.

The government allows lorries to go round belching dark smoke but enforces the law on cabs getting regular servicing. And this injustice hurts.

As you can tell, I find this humorous, because I'm able to see the other side. But to those people hoping that their children will get scholarships to study abroad, trying to go and fetch their kids from private tuition and also make sure their passenger reaches home on time, worried about the state of traffic on today's streets because if they have an accident they lose one month's income or more, it's no fun.

So this is Mauritius at the moment, through a taxi driver's eyes. But we all agree that another election (our last was last year, a regular 5 years after the previous one) now is not the solution, and that whatever money the nation has is better invested into future projects than another campaign. At least it would seem that, somehow, we've got our priorities right. Let's hope.