Why Politicians Shouldn't Get Corporate Cash

Kozelidir Person of the Year 2018

It wasn't difficult to name AOC for this. She's such a big bowl of fresh air. And boy does she know what she's talking about.

How does a Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez sound for 2020?

Chomksy On How To Stem Flow of Refugees

Finalman Rekin Pann Vot 'Under Protest'

Le promye desam li pa ti ankor deside si pa li ti pu konplis pu transform Moris an enn repiblik bananyer. Sirma linn mezir anpler reaksyon tre negatif sosyete sivil par rapor a sa simagri PR ki MSM/ML ti propose la. So gran dezakor se ki li truv sa kuma Sachs so Model A alor ki li prefer Model C. Bel dezakor! Wadire kiken pa le aval pwazon parskinn bliye met enn tigit lavani.

Pli sir li pe espere ki Privy Council pu dir lor ka Medoint avan antam/kontinye negosyasyon. 

5 Reasons Labour/MMM Alliance Lost in 2014

1. Attempt to shift to a semi-presidential system for funny reasons without asking for voter permission in a referendum

2. Adding proportional representation (PR) to our electoral system – that would have created a lot of political uncertainty, bloated an already too big parliament and snatch a powerful weapon voters have – without getting our green light in a referendum first

3. Bérenger as PM – the guy who has only been able to win internal party elections for the past 18 years with his on/off antics and was far from being an impressive PM during 21 months

4. Sithanen – the bean-counter who killed our savings culture and introduced the economy-killing flat tax – as FM 

5. Impact of trickle-down economics (at least Rs540bn of GDP and Rs108bn of government revenue missing at end of 2014) that is Ramgoolam putting the 1% first

And what do you think are going to be the important factors in the next general election?

How Big Should Our Parliament Be?

Certainly not larger than the 66-70 MPs it can have under the current system. Increasing it by 50% to over 100 or even by 11-15 as the PM would like to is out of the question. Justifying a bigger National Assembly (NA) because our population has doubled since 1968 is problematic for at least two reasons. One is that according to Google or an interpolation of decennial census figures the number of inhabitants in Mauritius has in fact increased by only 58%. Two is that the size of our NA rose by 75% between 1963 and 1967 while the number of citizens increased by a mere 9%. Interestingly using the 1963 as base year yields a parliament of 70 which is how big it is today. 

It's way better that we compare our population/MP ratio to those of other countries. On this yardstick we do very poorly – more than 140 parliaments out of 195 do better than us. This is precious information as we can use it to find an optimal size for our NA. That's done in the chart and we've highlighted Denmark because 40 is kind of a natural number for us as this is how many MPs we sent in 1959 and 1963 when we had single-member constituencies.

The number of electors is not a useful measure either as this can increase with policy decisions – like it did in 1975 when the legal age was reduced by three years. Plus we shouldn't forget that the number of Indian electors increased by half a billion from 1977 to 2014 without any increase in the number of MPs. Besides we definitely don't want more MPs when we look at their average output especially when we know that each one costs us at least Rs2.6 million per year. What we need instead are recall elections.