PARIS (Reuters) -New French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said on Monday that power will be restored to all households on the storm-ravaged Mayotte archipelago by the end of January, while the rebuilding of its shantytowns will not be permitted.
The slow pace of aid and delays in the arrival of clean water and electricity have angered residents of France’s poorest overseas territory, located between Madagascar and Mozambique about 8,000 km (4,971 miles) from mainland France.
Bayrou, whose first days in office were rocked by Cyclone Chido, the worst storm to hit Mayotte’s two main islands in 90 years, travelled to the archipelago on Monday to announce a raft of new emergency measures to rebuild, dubbed “Mayotte Standing.”
A special emergency bill, which will include measures to ban the kind of makeshift housing that was ubiquitous before the storm, will be presented in a cabinet meeting on Jan. 3 and be sent to parliament in the next fortnight, Bayrou said.
“We can’t let Mayotte become the capital of shantytowns,” he told reporters. “It can’t be about rebuilding Mayotte as it was. We must draw a different future for Mayotte,” he said earlier.
Bayrou did not say how he would re-house the thousands, many of them undocumented immigrants from nearby Comoros, who lived in hillside shantytowns comprised of flimsy huts before the storm and who have already started rebuilding them.
He was criticised for not visiting the islands earlier. President Emmanuel Macron was also heckled when he travelled to Mayotte earlier this month.
Bayrou said water supplies, a flashpoint even before the disaster, will be back at pre-storm levels before the end of next week. Some 200 Starlink antennas will be deployed to help restore communications.
Bayrou also said that early estimates given by the local prefect, who mentioned a death toll of possibly several thousands in the days following the cyclone, may have been overstated.
“We must be very cautious when we discuss this, but what’s striking with those we meet is that the rumours of thousands of deaths are not founded,” he said, mentioning a possible death toll in the hundreds.
The official death toll still stands at 39.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon and Michel Rose, editing by Ingrid Melander)
