What's in it For Me?

You don't have to be terribly intelligent to guess that whatever Navin Ramgoolam may answer to such a question asked by Pravind Jugnauth will not be as enticing for our parliament's newly elected MP as what the MMM will offer him as political option in 2010: a sharing of the land's top job. Especially when you look at the results of the last bye-election and apply an extraordinarily complicated analytical tool on which reputations have been built: arithmetic.

I mean, just subtract the, let's say, 6% of the MSM votes from the 51% Jugnauth Jr. got and add that to the 41% his uncle scored. And that's before considering that a chunk of the voters didn't turn up because there was no way they could send a clear signal to the government about Sithanen's mismanagement of the economy and because the stakes are not as high as in a general election.

Ramgoolam has also kind of boxed himself in. He can't even benefit from a snap election as Federation III can probably be set up in 24 hours or less, win the next polls and then show us why we will have to vote them out after five years. Then again, history doesn't always evolve in such a predictable fashion, does it?