French President Emmanuel Macron has faced jeers from locals on the cyclone-battered French overseas territory of Mayotte, telling them they should be “happy to be in France, because if it wasn’t France you’d be 10,

In a clip published Thursday by online news outlet Brut, Macron angrily told an inhabitant of Mayotte, an island in the Indian Ocean, that the territory would be “10,000 times” worse off without the French state — comments that were swiftly slammed as neocolonialist.

Angry residents of a Mayotte neighbourhood damaged by Cyclone Chido heckled French President Emmanuel Macron when he toured it on Friday, complaining that potable water had not reached them nearly a week after the storm hit the Indian Ocean archipelago.