French president promises food, water and to rebuild as emergency services search desperately for survivors
Distraught and angry inhabitants of Mayotte shouted out their grievances to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as he visited the island, five days after it wasMacron, in the French overseas territory on Thursday to assess the destruction wreaked by Cyclone Chido, said he would extend his trip by a day so he could inspect remote areas of the Indian Ocean archipelago. He has declared a national day of mourning on Monday.
“Mr President, we fear that this is becoming like Haiti,” he said, referring to the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden Caribbean country that has been in a state of emergency since March. Mayotte, located near Madagascar off the coast of south-eastern Africa, is France’s poorest region. Macron’s plane carried 20 doctors, nurses and civil security personnel, as well as four tonnes of food and sanitary supplies. “Don’t leave too soon,” one airport security official, Assan Halo, begged the president as he arrived. “We have nothing left.”
“The tragedy of Mayotte is probably the worst natural disaster in the past several centuries of French history,” the prime minister, François Bayrou, said.
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