[Blog] Open letter to Honourable Muhammad Reza Cassam Uteem, Minister of Labour and Industrial Relations

By Rama Valayden, Senior Counsel 

This Wednesday 27th of May 2026

Honourable Minister, I have followed your verbal assault on the websites of many radios. Having known you for a very long time, I was shocked to see your aggressiveness and the words you used against Joanna Bérenger. I asked myself how a person can change in such a short span of time. You are no longer honouring our august National Assembly. Far from what your father was, you are demeaning the reputation of our National Assembly.

But I believe that there are many pending cases at your office and I pray that you look into it with a sense of urgency as there are many breaches to The Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act 2023.

Please allow myself to ask you some simple questions:

How many contractual workers from overseas have been expelled from our territory?

Since you are Minister, how many contractual workers have been declared missing?

How many workers have complained about the seizure of their passports as soon as they arrived in Mauritius?

How many cases against employers have been lodged by your Ministry?

How many officers are posted to look into the complaints of contractual foreign workers?

How many dormitories have your officers visited since your nomination as Minister?

These are the preliminary questions before I come on the next occasion with specific cases of exploitation of contractual foreign workers.

How can we, as a country that has experienced indentured labourers, condone such practices?

I hope you will consider my open letter to you and try, at least, to remedy certain ill practices.

Furthermore, I am sure, in the light of your invectives launched against Honourable Joanna Bérenger, a visit (anew, if you have read same) of Peau noire, masques blancs by Frantz Fanon, published in 1952, is, in my humble suggestion, very important.

May God bless you and forgive you for being so apathetic to the ordeal of foreign contractual workers !

Yours in peace,
Rama Valayden, SC