Emmanuel Macron left the French archipelago of Mayotte on Friday after seeing the dire needs in landlocked areas. The French president was confronted with the deep distress of residents overwhelmed by the damage caused by Cyclone Chido.
“We are a Nation” and “Mayotte and France, to the end”, wrote the Head of State on X in French and Mahorese, after two days of visit to the archipelago ravaged by the passage of the cyclone.
The cyclone – the most devastating that Mayotte has experienced in 90 years, with winds of more than 200 km/hour – has sown desolation in the archipelago: poor villages – and made up of numerous shanty towns – in ruins, grieving inhabitants and traumatized by visions of the cyclone’s apocalypse and cruelly lacking water, food, shelter, shredded trees, vegetation on the ground…
Assessment still provisional
According to provisional figures, 31 deaths and some 2,500 injured have been officially recorded. “It is likely that there are many more victims,” admitted Emmanuel Macron, recalling that a mission had been launched to verify the number of deaths.
Before taking off, the French president held a meeting of the interministerial crisis unit by videoconference, to “transmit to the government and administrations the useful actions to take”, indicated the French presidency.
Problem of illegal immigration
“We will not be able to resolve the fundamental problems of Mayotte if we do not resolve the problem of illegal immigration,” the president declared to journalists on Friday morning. “It’s a certainty,” he said.
In the medium term, it intends to increase, to almost double, the number of deportations at the border, which was 22,000 in 2023. Nearly a third of the population of Mayotte is in an irregular situation, according to the authorities.
Mayotte is separated by only 70 kilometers from the Comorian coast. At the time of the proclamation of the independence of the Comoros, Mayotte had chosen to remain in France through two referendums in 1974 and 1976. Poverty pushes Comorians every day to try to reach Mayotte by sea and at the risk of their lives to on board very precarious canoes.
“We want water!”
Emmanuel Macron went to Tsingoni, a landlocked town in the west of Grande-Terre, the main island of this archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Far from Mamoudzou, the capital of this poorest department in France, aid, water, electricity and food are slow to arrive.
“We want water, water,” several residents implore him. One of them, Badirou Abdou, says that helicopters “dropped (…) bottles on the football field”. “Fortunately we are a wise population who don’t rush, but that’s not the best way to do it,” he slips.
He warns: “here we are cut off from the world”, “there are people who sleep outside on the ground… illnesses are going to happen”.
“We’re not going to give up.”
It was “the quickest way” for the water to arrive, “but we will do better in the coming days”, replies the president, specifying that civil security had been deployed to “clear” the roads.
During his stroll, Emmanuel Macron crouches in front of Moinecha Djindani, 70, who blesses him in Mahorese. “You have to look me straight in the eye: I am your mother, I have a child older than you,” she told him, patting his head.
“I promise you, we are fighting to restore water and we are not going to give up,” the head of state assures him. “I’m very happy,” she agrees.
“Rebuilding” Mayotte
Around a third of the population of Mayotte, or more than 100,000 inhabitants, particularly people in an irregular situation coming from neighboring Comoros, live in precarious housing.
“Putting an end” to slums and “removing” these “unworthy” and “dangerous” habitats is one of the objectives of the “special law” promised by the president to “rebuild” Mayotte. Prime Minister François Bayrou has set a potential deadline of two years for this reconstruction.
“Mayotte is an island where we have invested enormously”, “simply it is subject to migratory pressure which means that it is collapsing under it”, pleaded Friday Emmanuel Macron in the face of accusations of disengagement from the State.
The French president left Mayotte heading for Djibouti where he is to share a Christmas meal with the French troops present there.
This article was automatically published. Sources: ats / afp
