The Worst Enemy of the Poor

That would be inflation. And the best friend of inflation is definitely Rama Sithanen when you realise that he has created almost as much inflation as the previous government did in 4.75 years (23.90%) in 2.5 short years (20.15%).

The opposition can count on him to make the lives of Labour MPs excruciatingly painful once parliament will be dissolved by everybody's favourite uncle. And that's after his crappy policies pulled Federation II out of the grave Ramgoolam so poetically dumped them into three years ago.

By 2010 cumulative inflation would have reached around 40% with the corresponding rate for the poorest of the poor gyrating around 55% if we use South African estimates. Bring the average growth (4.62% for Sithanen first 30 months vs 4.33% for the 2000-05 government) and unemployment rates (9.08% for the bean-counter's first 2.5 years vs 7.69% for those politicians that apparently gave us the best managed country in the world) into the picture and you confirm that there is no trade-off between inflation and a generalised measure of economic activity.

Something that has always been known to anyone with at least 2 grams of leadership!