strike me as, frankly, a form of diplomatic blackmail. you are saying to the world, we believe there are some substantial oil deposits offshore in seychelles. and you ve signed an agreement with a canadian company we will give licences to explore 500 million barrels or more of oil unless you give us money now. that s a form of blackmail. no, no. what we are doing, we need to know what we have. this is normalfor a country. we re an independent state, so it s important for us to know what resources seychelles has. but would you. you re the president of the country would you give the green light for a massive offshore oil exploration programme in seychelles? yes, but let us also look at what the west is doing. with respect, can you just answer that simple question? we have to know first,
in collaboration with the french, we arrested another iranian dhow with 600 kilos of heroin. yes, it is a problem and we are working for us to address this problem. you won office in late 2020, so here we are in the spring of 2023. you ve had 2.5 years, roughly, to fix this and you haven t fixed it. no, no, we will not be able to fix it overnight. well. what have you achieved in 2.5 years? because the director of your drugs prevention agency, marie josette louise, she says there are not enough funds or people or appropriate infrastructure to tackle the drugs problem in seychelles. 0k. the strategy is simple. 0n the one hand, we are fighting the iranians who bring the heroin. and during those 2.5 years,
industry, fisheries. fish do not carry a seychelles passport. so these two examples of our two main industries clearly show the vulnerability of our situation, plus the climate change situation. for example, we do not have a plastic factory in seychelles. yet on all our islands, on aldabra, some of our youth, some years back, when they took to do a clean up, they collected over 20,000 tonnes. i appreciate the challenges you have, but with respect, mr president, you re not likely to get your way on getting this vulnerability index and making sure that you, with other developing economies, benefit from the climate change loss and damage cash that may be coming from the rich world. you won t get it if you, to put it bluntly, really annoy your fellow emerging countries. you said recently, the west prefers to give its money to countries that waste everything, where things just don t happen. that s a way of condemning
danger of exaggerating just how much the seychelles is going to be damaged by climate change and sea level rise? you ve claimed, i think, that 60 of the 115 islands in your archipelago could be lost. i don t know that most people think that s true, do they? well, it s because people don t really follow what s happening. you ve got to understand what the seychelles is all about. we ve got about 39 granitic islands. of course, mahe, being the main granitic island, goes up to 3,000 feet up, but the other islands are just a mere four metres, three metres above sea level. and already what we are seeing is, with the rise in the sea level and with greater surges, a lot of these islands are already changing shapes because the dune around the island is already being affected. therefore, these islands, similar to the maldives, stand to simply disappear.
was not serious. this administration is taking it seriously. and let me say, ok, you will come to victoria, you will come to the seychelles. 0k, we have ghettos where the drug trafficking is happening, but we are intervening. you say you re intervening and you ve given me a few examples, but you do seem to vacillate between punishment and treatment. sometimes you emphasise a very tough stand on punishment and sentencing, and at other, times you ve got your free methadone programme that you re handing out to anybody who wants it. right now, what works best for you? but this is where, again, just like any other country, you ve got to go after the traffickers. but we ve also got to realise that addiction is a medical condition. when somebody is addicted, you cannot put that person in prison, you ve got to treat that person. and the methadone programme is simply to allow those people