What programs do you have involving children?

When the convention for the protection of children's rights came along I was quite surprised. I was a member of the National Children's Council and, at the time, Mauritius was one of the first countries to rush to sign it, but as far as implementation is concerned I think we were dreaming. Mauritius is a small country. We're not like mainland Africa trying to fight for democracy. In Mauritius we inherited a welfare state from the British that has been maintained by successive governments. Now we've always had free primary education, and for the last 25 years free secondary education. We have a heavily subsidized tertiary education. If you look at it from the angle of the welfare state you have everything free; all you need to do then is take care of the side problems to ensure that what is free is implemented, to ensure that you do not have children on the streets.

What are these side problems?

The obstacles are with our housing problems and our levels of the work force. Very often children aren't sent to schools because there is a lack of kindergartens available that would enable the mother to go to work and leave the children there. So what happens? In a specific example, a mother with three children will not send the children to school because she has to go and work, and the other oldest child has to stay at home and take care of the other two. And once you break the cycle the child is no longer fit to go to school.

Are there any solutions that you are working on?

Solutions? The solution given to me by politicians, the one that organizations like Unicef make you swallow, is the convention on the rights of children. But the problem that we have with children is not in the law; we have the laws. It's not in the convention. Actually the problem is that we have too many laws and too few methods of implementation of the laws. If a child doesn't go to school, what do you do, arrest the parent? You can't do that because you cut off the breadwinner to the family.

What about placing the children in foster homes?

Recently somebody has learned somewhere about this word called "care." So foster parents are being looked for. We are going to come up with a plan for foster parents, having no idea how it works. "Fostering"--we do not have it in this place. All we have is sometimes we have a psychologist. Is it better for a child to have bad parents than have no parents at all? I put you in the care of foster parents and you might like it. It might be good. You might be happy, but in the absence of foster parents, if I take you to a shelter where you become an anonymous member of the shelter, you lose out, you phase out. And if the shelter is not equipped to take care of your education by the time you are placed in a home somewhere, or placed with relatives who are willing to take you for cheap labor (because you'd be doing odd jobs around the house) you lose out on education--which for me is the solution to all these problems. Access to education and not giving access to education to children from the deprived areas is something that we are all guilty of. Otherwise you maintain the ghetto.

What happens to those dropouts?

Child labor. We specifically don't want to know what's happening to these children. Go to any market, any of the open-air markets selling vegetables, and see how many children, in this country where primary education is compulsory, are on the streets today and what action is taken. Like I always tell people I do not like government to make me a present of problems it cannot solve. This is not my role. As chair of Macoss I am supposed to be chairing the umbrella organization with a view of the implementation of policies in the different sectors. Right now there is something on aging going on and I packed a few people and sent them out there to talk about aging. Last year I talked about aging more then anything else. This year I'm turning to the handicapped. I try not to follow the UN in its implementation of the yearly "this is the year of the volunteer." I kind of do things according to what we feel are the needs of this country. I was quite shocked yesterday to see on TV that the Prime Minister is receiving many of our brothers from mainland Africa; they are going to discuss aging. Is there anything as controversial as aging on mainland Africa? There's no such thing. And they've come here to discuss aging, so everyone wants trips out of their own country, trips for the boys: conferences, seminars.

What can you tell us about the problems facing the elderly in Mauritius?

The problem with aging is that we have 10 percent of our population in their 60s. We have so far been relying on the relatives, on the family, to take care of the old. We have very, very few public retirement homes. Now we're getting the English disease, which is a proliferation of private homes. You see, in Great Britain after they closed down a lot of the hospitals or mental hospitals, all of a sudden all those people who were out of a job opened up their homes as retirement homes. You have now in Mauritius a proliferation of private retirement homes, which are charging the eyes of the Earth as far as taking care of the elderly. We have been embarking in a Program to ensure that the prices of these homes are well defined--whether you want to have five-star status or one-star status or whatever. The people should know how much they have to pay. Recently we discussed pensions with the World Bank because we need to have a comprehensive aging policy on employment after retirement, on the education of the elderly, on retirement homes, on access to facilities for the elderly.

Does Mauritius have social security?

We have social security help for specific cases, people who are visited by doctors and feel that they need some help. What we have is a uniform pension for everyone who is over 60--whether you are a pauper or a millionaire you receive 1,500 rupees [about $150] per month when you retire. I'm trying to say there should be two types of pensions: one type for someone who already has a pension and another, higher one for those who never contributed anything to their pension before. In the factory they earn about 4,000 or maybe 5,000 rupees [$400 to $500] per month. But if Granddad is a pensioner earning 2,500 rupees [$250], nobody will get rid of him, and this will reduce the demand for old age homes. Granddad will be welcome in the family circle because his salary will help to pay for things around the house, so he'll be able to help take care of the children around the house. This will help to maintain the family system, which has been destroyed, and to restore it, especially in the inner cities. There will be no need to keep your 8-year-old daughter at home to mind the babies of 2 and 3. If you manage that way for a couple of years then you can send your 8-year-old to kindergarten and then on to school because that's the only way out of the rut.