Ramgoolam Gets His Own Blog

Actually it is suppose to be the official website of the Labour Party but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It's Ramgoolam all over the place: father and son.

The section on the party's history unsurprisingly attributes everything that has been done by the Labour Party to SSR. There are absolutely no nuances. It's like attributing the entire field of Mathematics to Newton. Gauss never existed. Or Einstein did everything. Feynman who?

Navin's pic is in the header to the right of the party's logo and its payoff line au service du pays depuis 1936. I didn't know he'd been serving us for that long. No wonder his energy level is so low.

Stimulus Package: The Timeline

The Ultimate Red-Tape Machine

That would be a fitting name for the Empowerment Foundation which had blazed some new trails last year by... changing its name from the Empowerment Fund. That's because after 3 years in operation it has spent only Rs800 million instead of the Rs3 billion pompously announced by you know who. That's barely more than a quarter of the budgeted amount in case you're wondering.

The unspent Rs2.2 billion has gone towards reducing the deficit and debt-to-GDP ratio as per standard bean-counting practice. For sure it hasn't meant lower wastage levels. Nope. The damning government auditor's report constantly reminds us that this is yet another area where Sithanen has miserably failed to deliver - he referred to it as the bloody report in 2005 and promised to wage war against the Rs5 billion that's wasted every year.

It would be also interesting to find out about the administrative costs of this foundation and compare them to traditional public service delivery.

How Were The Economic Seas in 1995?

That would be an interesting question to put to Rama Sithanen. Because that was one of the two years in which we sent a new government to parliament with the power to corrupt absolutely.

While the global economy was in a tailspin in 1982 conditions were incomparably better at the end of 1995. For instance Bill Clinton was getting ready to grab four more years at the White House in the following year.

But that didn't prevent Sithanen and friends from scoring less than 19% of the votes.

Savings Rate Collapses Brutally

It has hit a 30-year low of 12%. How did we drop from an average savings rate of 26.4% between 1990 and 2004 to such a low level? Who's to blame? Bheenick or Sithanen?

IELS Saying Incinerator Doesn't Make Sense

In a piece recently published in the Forum pages of Le Mauricien Karim Jauferally, the President of the Institute for Environmental and Legal Studies, highlights the shortcomings of the project including:

• serious health risks exist because Mauritius is not exactly a world-beater as far as the enforcement of environmental standards go
• the incinerator will burn 3/4 of the 400,000 tons of waste we produce per year although 1/2 of the latter quantity is green waste
• a penalty will be levied if less than 300,000 tons of waste is sent to the incinerator which kind of removes any incentives for us to produce less waste -- see I told you the MID project should probably be renamed MIP (Maurice Ile Palabres)
• a purchase price of Rs5.71/Kwh for the electricity produced by the incinerator which would be more than 60% that of the IPP contracts -- an abusive price that Ramgoolam has promised to review for about two years now
• a tipping fee of USD39 per ton of waste

What do you think of all this?

The Economic Weather Under Federation 2

Sithanen likes repeating something the Prime Minister said in parliament back in April: In 2005 there was no recession, the sea was calm, the sky was blue and the sun was shining. That statement is not quite true as we've demonstrated before.

Indeed in 2005 our textile industry contracted by 14.7% after shrinking by half that amount in 2004. One of the causes of this severe recession in that industry -- about 25,000 people lost their jobs over a 5-year period -- was the expiration of the 30-year old multi fiber agreement. And given the weight of that industry in our economy (8.1% in 2004) its performance in 2005 was negative enough to drag GDP growth by about 1.2%.

Contrast that with the effect of the global recession that started about a year ago. The fact that it didn't affect Mauritius as much as the textile recession shouldn't have surprised us. Our banks have been churning out record profits and unlike in the US our financial system was not on the brink of collapse.

So, what you have to take away from this is that something affecting one of our main industries can be more devastating to us than a global crisis hitting many rich countries.

How Really Difficult Was the CPE Maths Paper?

Some are saying that it was at a difficulty level not seen in years. Others don't agree. To find out we should send the math papers of the last few years to psychometricians.

These professionals who are trained to sort out issues like the difficulty of tests could also shed some historical light on when the so-called CPE fever started rearing its ugly head if we submitted end-of-primary exam papers of the last 35 years or so to them.

US Has Plan For the Too-Big-To-Fail Darlings

According to the New York Times, the United States are about to give themselves more options to deal with the gigantic risks that such firms create for the economy at large. These include kicking management out, taking control of the firm and playing around with their capital structure so as to minimise the risk to the system as a whole (the so-called systemic risk).

A fair response, I guess, to the uproar of throwing good taxpayers' money after bad behaviour.

Cachez-moi cette vérité que je ne saurais voir

Dans une interview, Nizaar Dowlut, un entrepreneur engagé dans la communication visuelle, met en évidence ce que la propagande, l'aveuglement partisan et la griserie dissimulent:

"Il n'existe pas d'encouragements pour aider les PME à se mettre en place à Maurice. Les banques ne prêtent qu'à ceux qui ont de l'argent, pas à des jeunes qui veulent lancer un petit business. Alors comment voulez-vous qu'un jeune se lance s'il n'a aucun moyen, s'il n'a aucune garantie à offrir à la banque en vue d'obtenir un prêt. Le système mauricien est tel que seuls les jeunes ayant des moyens peuvent se lancer dans le business."

Quid des discours officiels alors?

"Ce ne sont que des discours."