gets together. i guess the difference between you and a country like nigeria is that you actually don t need to explore the oil because, more than anything else, you have an extraordinarily successful tourism industry and you have a very small population. yes. it s a very fine line that you re treading, though, isn t it, even on tourism? because you sell yourselves as a luxury destination with these pristine beaches, with the clear blue seas offshore. and yet the more you invest in expanding, for example, the number of hotels you have, the number of visitors per year you allow to enter seychelles, the more you risk the very qualities that you sell around the world. no, but again, this is where you ve got to know the strategy. right now, there is a moratorium on the building of new hotels. the number of visitors has been clearly defined. well, i ve seen different numbers. you had 334,000 tourists
privileged people you want as your high net worth tourists react when they realise, if they realise, that seychelles has the highest heroin addiction rate per capita in the whole world? it is a problem. it is a problem for us as a country. it doesn t make you sound quite so attractive, does it? yes and no. but i ll tell you. well, i m struggling to see the yes in that. i mean, it s not a good thing to be a country where10% of the local population is dependent on heroin. yes, sir. let me say, we have a big problem and my administration inherited this problem. but what are we doing? 0nly last week, we arrested an iranian dhow with one tonne of drugs 600 kilos of heroin and 400 kilos of meth. 0nly yesterday, i got information that,
yes! but what is it for? it s not just for seychelles. 0ur emission is zero because whatever we emit, we clean up. we are 100% protecting our mangroves, 100% protecting our seagrass meadows, as i said, 32% of our ocean. what about your fish? cos 90% plus of your domestic exports are actually fish, fish exports. so can you afford to stop fishing? no, we cannot. right now, we cannot. this is why, when we put all these elements in the basket, we re saying to the world, pay heed to our call. one thing the world will not appreciate is blackmail. no, no. hang on, there is one aspect of your strategy which does
to be able to do a day s work, for example. and as they fight theiraddiction, hopefully, to remove them from the methadone so that they can live a normal life. and this is the dilemma which any country faces. we are both fighting the drug traffickers way. again, you asked me earlier about what we ve done. in prison today, we ve got some very big traffickers and there are some that are waiting to be tried. so, fight the big traffickers and take care of the addicts, and, hopefully, we ll get the balance. i noted that you put much of the blame for the scale of the drugs problem on previous administrations. and you came to power after the other big party in seychelles that basically dominated politics for four decades, so you came in saying, i m a new broom and i m going to clean up seychelles, i m going to get rid
in 2022, which is quite a lot for an island archipelago of less than 100,000 people. some of your officials have talked about getting to half a million visitors. no, we will not. we will never get to half a million because it will destroy. and this is why the strategy of our tourism industry is the high class tourism, as you mentioned. we do not want backpackers in seychelles, we want the high class tourism. and this is what actually saved our economy, because during the time of covid, those people could still come to seychelles in their private jets, and, therefore, put money in the economy. so this is the strategy and the moratorium will stay. and.some of the hotels that are being renovated right now are five star institutions. how do those rich and