Voice of Maldives Islands

I bumped into this bright young kid friend working in a private radio/tv station. She aspires to be a journalist after completing her a ‘levels. ‘You know, you guys are ***ing on our head in the name of independent journalism. We want facts and only facts and no opinions. ..’ I blurted out and went on and on about expressing our frustration with the media. In her defense she told me this ‘You know, we can’t show certain colours, people, pictures and read particular news’. Some of you may not be surprised to hear that but I was shocked. What?!! Did they specifically instruct to do so?’ I asked her No, it’s done very subtly and I want to get out from this circus and i’m not gonna do journalism. Changed my mind you know’. She said Listening to factual, objective, well analyzed news and reports are a dream; we thought we realized with the new constitution. Truth is far from it and the whole media is guilty of playing partisan politics in the name of national interest and indepe...

Maldives is a country where you would not find a single correlation between fat salaries to public officials and improvement of the sorry situation we are in, even if you spend 100 lifetimes to search for it. Take a look at how money and blood is squeezed from our systems (literately and figuratively) for the past decade. In this decade we have lost count of how many times the salaries, perks, benefits to public officials are raised.  For instance, number of tourists coming to Maldives is at an all time high reaching nearly a million. Yet, Maldivian businesses are begging for dollars. The banks do not have funds to give loans for ordinary citizens. Where is all the money?  Maldivian businesses (especially tourism) using every available resource in the country to make profits,  are happy to keep a paltry amount for salaries in our banks and stash the rest in foreign banks, leaving  our economy, ordinary businesses and citizens dry.  MMA and the polic...