Mauritius Discovers She Has An MP Called Tarolah

That was a few weeks ago. We also learned that he was a PPS. Mauritius found out about this obscure politician not because he made a game-changing contribution but because of what he did with his mobile. And while you would be hard-pressed to list half of the roughly seventy politicians that we sent to our National Assembly in 2014 it would not exactly be the first time. It would be an even bigger challenge to remember what they've contributed in making Mauritius better.

This is clearly a sign that our Parliament is way too big. And is costing us too much. It definitely highlights the absurdity of the suggestion that we need an extra 20 MPs to correct the lopsided outcomes that our excellent FPTP system produces on some occasions. It's silly for two reasons. One is that between 1977 and 2014 India has kept her number of MPs constant although the voting population there rose by half a billion. The other is that we can actually correct the imbalance by making our Parliament smaller. And that too without compromising the big advantages of the FPTP system or resorting to totally undemocratic devices like party lists and double candidacies.