Nation Split Over Which is Worse

Is it his stupid flat tax which has broken the economy and created a Rs1,500bn GDP gap at the end of last year because we never got the 8% growth he promised for the past fourteen years or his ethnic electoral model which he used to forecast an 80% vote share for the LP/MMM alliance in the 2014 general election? While the problems created by his crappy economic model have partly been discussed not enough has been said of that ‘40%+40%=80%’ prediction of his faulty model which he no doubt used to change constituency — anybody thinking of changing ridings these days should avoid it as plague — and in the process elevated the status of reading tea leaves to that of an entirely respectable trade. 

The chart is a modest contribution to fill this gap. As you can see the bean-counter has made an error of 846,273 votes. That’s more than the 785,645 votes that alliance actually got. Which means that 40%+40% turned out to be equal to 38.5% — the thought of him being Minister of Finance again must have sent shivers down the spine of many voters. So the red/purple team got less than half what he predicted. It looks a lot like the GDP growth rate we’ve been clipping for the past seven years. They have all been less than half the 8% target. Is there a pattern here? Maybe. Maybe not when we look at the collapse of our savings rate. In any case 846,273 is a huge number of votes. It’s at least 400,000 larger than the votes that made us an independent country. In fact it’s even greater than the votes of the Independence Party and the PMSD in the August 1967 election put together. He’s now saying he got misreported and never said that. Even if we grant him this just for now I recall hearing him say that he’s predicting a 60-0. This implies a vote share of a little more than 65% (the vote share of the LP/MMM in 1995) and a still gigantic error of 543,667 votes. 

If you ask me I don’t think it’s important we decide which is worse. These are both catastrophes that need to be analysed carefully and prompt voters to require political alliances to have their tax policies among other things detailed in affidavits. They should also help us stay alert and not get distracted by the ethnic hogwash that’s going to be thrown our way in the next few months. Let’s stay focussed on the real issues. There’s no shortage of them. 

For Ramgoolam, December 2014 Was Worse Than A 60-0

See we know what happened on the two times the outgoing government didn't manage to get a single candidate elected. The incumbent PM along with what voters considered the best candidates were ranked just after those that were elected. For example the table below shows the eight unelected politicians who got the highest percentage votes in 1982. A similar situation occurred in 1995.

None of this happened to Ramgoolam in 2014. Thirteen MPs were elected but he was not one of them although he had topped his riding in the preceding five elections. Neither were Arvin Boolell -- he had bagged six consecutive wins since 1987 -- and Rama Sithanen whose electoral model must have suggested fleeing to a 'safe' riding. In fact four losing candidates did better than Ramgoolam. It was an amazingly wonderful result. Mauritius had said no the wicked plan of transforming her into a banana republic.

Simple Tools To Evaluate Political Projects (2)

In this post we look at the size of the cake which is the one of the two parts of the political project as we defined it in the first post in this series. We can have an idea of the economic cake that a government will generate if we analyse what politicians say, have in their electoral manifesto and have said and done before. We can also look at 5-year periods as it is the frequency at which the very interesting household budget survey (HBS) is carried out. This is done in the following chart.

The 8.5% led to the first 60-0. It's an interesting period where one cyclone wiped out two years of progress. Don't think voters were able to separate this from the skill level of the government they had at the time. The years 1982 to 1992 were free of major natural calamities, benefited from the great work done in earlier periods and happened in a very favourable international environment. That gave us the two biggest cakes of the thirty-five-year period.

The cake contracted by about 10 percentage points over the following ten years -- during which the second 60-0 happened -- and another 5 percentage points between 2002-07. The consolidation of our textile industry occurred in the latter period. Finally the last period is the first 5 years of the Sithanen flat tax. Pretty small numbers given the 8% growth that was promised to trickle down. 8% growth over five years is a cake that increases by 46.9%. This has contributed to a GDP gap of Rs269bn by the end of 2012. A cake smaller than expected of course translates into governments that get less done and increases the odds of getting booted out of power.

First 60-0 Turns 35

Three and half decades ago Mauritians were busy voting out every single MP in their government. This included Kher Jagatsingh, a 50-year old maverick, who had completed what he considered his biggest challenge: the reform and development of education and cultural affairs. After coming up with the idea of free education five and a half years earlier.

The tectonic shift of the results the following day didn't impress me that much. Because I was asking everyone calling in on voting day how they thought it would go. One deadpan answer from a trusted source gave me pause: 60-0. It sounded so real and definitive that other predictions received before and after that call kind of sounded fake.

Voters obviously did the right thing on 11 June 1982. Given their ability to understand the progress made at that time. They even showed wisdom in that complete sweep. And have gotten a lot more sophisticated since then.

Mauritian Democracy Competitive Again

From a very low point a few months back in our Parliament when Berenger was trying to prevent Jugnauth Jr. from doing one of the things we send MPs there: debate important pieces of legislation. In that particular case the dumb amendment proposed by Sithanen. We then had that period where Ramgoolam and Berenger announced their alliance and told us that they were sure to win all the seats in the next general elections as their parties represented 40% of the electorate each. With Berenger adding that when that would happen we could count on him to not bully the little -- I guess, extra-parliamentary -- parties. Yeah, right.

That was kind of funny of course because when an alliance had won all the seats -- in 1982 and 1995 -- it got only 65% of the votes. Not 80%. And the next election is not going to be an average election. Nope. We're talking of a really wicked plan to screw up three things: our system of government, our electoral system and the livelihoods of a majority of Mauritians. So a month ago it seemed that there was a pretty good chance that lalyans pep tuni would not even get 3/4 of the seats. But that was before the national rallies of October 12.

Since then everybody knows it's going to be a tight election. And thank God it is.

Why Labour/MMM Alliance is Dangerous

I'll give you three reasons.

1. It wants to change our excellent system of government – one of our most precious assets – for something inherently unstable to satisfy the fantasies of a couple of politicians. We don't want to do this as it would open a can of constitutional worms. Our Westminsterian system of government has enabled four smooth changes of government since 1968. This has allowed us to forge ahead at a healthy pace until 2005. And established our reputation as a vibrant democracy.
2. It wants to make all kinds of dangerous changes to our electoral system on the basis of a very weak report which has been demonstrated to be flawed beyond repair. That includes party lists which shift the loyalty of MPs from voters to their leaders. And double candidacies which are a recipe to make arrogant politicians unaccountable.
3. Sithanen has been chosen as its Minister of Finance. His regressive 'reforms' which began in 2005 have thrown 22,000 Mauritians into poverty – that's 17% of all poor people – and thousands more into a 9-year L-shaped recession. And he has proved to us that he doesn't understand at least two things: how the economy works and percentages. That's a pretty big skills mismatch.

This alliance will never win a 60-0. Far from it. The political exhumation of the toxic bean-counter will not exactly help. But we will have to vote very wisely – for example Lalit is good, Rezistans not really and abstaining bad – and send a very clear and loud message that we don't want any of this nonsense.

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 20% of the votes.