Padayachy Statements That Don't Survive A Fact-Check

1. Mauritius is in an economic boom (2024). His justification in August 2025 is that we've clipped growth rates higher than 5% for the preceding three years. The only reason we've clipped these growth rates is, as the following chart pulled from WTVF shows, that the economy has been rebounding from the nearly 15% contraction caused by Covid in 2020. We should also note that Mauritius has been one of the last countries in the world to get back to its pre-Covid levels of activity. 

3 Sputnik Products Government Should Buy Right Away

Numero Uno. The brand new Sputnik Nasal Vaccine. Both as a booster and as a 2-dose regimen. We know for a fact that different vaccines not only don’t have the same effectiveness in keeping us away from hospitals and the morgue but they are also not terribly good at preventing infection and transmission. As Israel found out even after a fourth dose of Pfizer. That’s because we have no soldiers to prevent Covid-19 from living rent-free in our noses and spreading around. But as the diagram shows – pulled from Sputnik’s Twitter handle along with the pic of how it is administered – a nasal vaccine changes all that by building a wall of immunity at the top of our airways. It would also make our vaccination campaigns a lot more efficient and provide most Mauritians with a better immune response through heterologous boosting. Plus as it’s a spray no needles are involved.

Vaccination Status Can’t Ignore Jab Longevity and Performance

While it was good strategy to have several vaccines in Mauritius last year there’s quite a bit of local data available now to narrow down our choices until better and in some cases more classic ones become available or Covid morphs into an endemic. More information is also coming from the jab manufacturers themselves. 

For example, Gamaleya, which makes the mix-and-match 2-dose Sputnik V vaccine has recommended its booster jab (Sputnik Light) 6 months after the first vaccine regimen and an annual dose thereafter. This compares very favourably with the 3-month cycle that seems to be the destination with mRNA shots like Pfizer. 

Padayachy is Two Budgets Late

He should have presented one early in January to put back corporate and personal tax rates on a sustainable and progressive path – raise maximum personal rates to 40% or more and the corresponding numbers for corporates not below 30% – because fourteen years of trickle-down economics were about to send our economy crashing into a wall. As chart 1 shows GDP for 2020 was expected to reach Rs530 billion before Covid-19 appeared on the scene instead of the Rs918 billion needed to keep the regressive tax code. That’s a shortfall of Rs388 billion. 2021 was supposed to be the year our GDP crosses the Rs1 trillion mark. That was not going to happen and our economic output would have still fell short of that milestone by a lot even in 2024. In fact the gaps between the two variables would have kept on increasing with GDP in 2024 less than half where the Sithanen flat tax had promised to bring it.