Greatest Party of Mauritius Turns 85

It gave us so many things. Improvement in worker conditions early on. Followed by a decisive victory against proportional representation. Then the most magic of moments: independence. Along with an excellent constitution and electoral system. Newly-born Mauritius was a left-for-dead country even before the oil crises and terrible cyclones of the 1970s but brilliant policies enabled us to make significant progress providing rapid upward social mobility to the many. 

Since 2005 however it is in its darkest period, furiously betraying its DNA. It’s time for the Labour Party to reconnect to what works.

Why Savings Collapsed Despite Surviving Three Intense Cyclones

Essentially because a bean-counter started taxing bank interest as he needed to find other sources of government revenue after he reduced top tax rates before flattening the tax structure to 15%. The flat tax was supposed to generate growth rates of 8% every year since 2006 but as we’ve clipped rates far lower than this – 2019 will be the ninth year they are under 4% – savings, as expected, have never recovered. 

As the chart shows this is very different from the rebound we experienced after Danielle, Gervaise and Claudette visited us. Removing the battery of exemptions that a whole nation had used to patiently craft their long-term financial plans over several decades and the record inequality the unsustainable and crazy tax policies created didn’t help either. But there was more than injury. 

Berguitta To Spend Day in Mauritius

It's been almost eleven years since a significant rotating air mass made it to our Met's cyclone Hall of Fame. For a visit of an intense cyclone you have to go back eighteen years when Connie checked us out for three days at the end of January. Only about 10% of cyclones actually go over us -- Berguitta would be the sixth since 1945. The last chick to do this was Christelle, a moderate depression, twenty-three years ago. It gets even more interesting if you want to find out when was the last intense cyclone that crossed Mauritius. This singular honour goes to Claudette which ruined Xmas 1979 and threw Mauritius into an economic depression -- GDP contracted by 10% in 1980. This was a scary time to grow up. Especially if you had tasted another pretty little thing called Gervaise four years earlier.

Given that it's been thirty-eight years since a cyclone got to know us up close and personal there is a good chance that one in every six Mauritians will experience something new in the next twenty-four hours. Oh yeah one last thing. As the airport will be closed tomorrow, Berguitta has organised her own means of transportation.

RIP Sugar

It's heading there. Less than 1% of GDP now and declining further. It would already have been dead if so much good money had not been thrown after its bad situation. And if it was not for the completely silly policy of competitive depreciation. I heard Krepalloo Sunghoon mention that it costs Rs17,000 to produce one ton of sugar that now sell for less than Rs15,000. How much bigger would the loss be at the very reasonable rate of 25 rupees to a dollar? No wonder then that thousands of acres of sugar cane have been abandoned. But that's kind of natural. We can't pursue activities that are incompatible with the kind of money that is needed to live properly here. Unless if we want to allow modern forms of slavery like too many seasonal workers and God knows what else. Just like we use cars and buses to go to work. And not horses.

We should use the land under sugar cane to grow food and to create more productive opportunities for our unemployed youth. So that we move Mauritius forward.

Cyclones Pose New Risks to Mauritius

Gone are the days when an intense cyclone like Claudette would shrink our GDP by about 8%. That's because four decades later sugar weighs about nineteen times less in our economy. The risk now is being visited by a series of cyclones in a much shorter period of time. We will have a lot more flooding so we need to prepare for this with drains that are not built to accommodate the rainwater of one large cyclone in a month but like three of different sizes in three weeks or less. Contingency plans will therefore have to be carefully updated. So should our relationship with fellow creatures.

Waiting Better Than Massive Bat Culling

Our flying fox had been red-listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) because its population was expected to decline by about a third in the next twenty one years. Culling 18,000 bats is equivalent to exterminating 20% of the species -- in a few weeks -- if you think there are 90,000 of them. Additional pressure that the endemic bats might find impossible to bear. But wait. Not everybody agrees there are 90k bats: the IUCN puts the actual figure closer to 50,000. Which would mean that the operation under way will be eliminating a third of Zorro Volador Negro de Mauricio.

Projections of the IUCN may also be too optimistic as meteorological data appears to have become increasingly shaky: cyclones and hurricanes have been showing up in places great-grandmothers never thought possible. Plus we've seen several cyclones lining up in our neck of the ocean in the not-so-distant past.

The upshot of all this uncertainty is that we need to tread super cautiously. For sure there seems to be more bats now -- Mauritius has been spared by strong cyclones for several years -- but more people are netting their trees. Which should give government pause to consider other mitigating measures that have been tried elsewhere. Especially given that bats are not the only fruit predators in town. And in any case many of them will not survive a major cyclone.

Catastrophic Week-end Turns 35

Between 21 and 23 December of the International Year of the child a pretty little thing called Claudette visited us. Probably because she got jealous that Pele had kicked a few footballs at our George V Stadium a couple of years before. If I remember correctly we celebrated Xmas without electricity as Mauritian power lines didn't offer any major chewing problem for an intense tropical cyclone.

The upshot is that the 3-day visit helped put our economy into a depression: a 10% contraction. 1979 was also the year of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident which was essentially due to a flawed interface design. And of a major switch of how the US Fed carried out monetary policy.

If you plan of drinking in the next few days, don't drive, take a cab or pick one of your friends as a designated driver. Staying alive can be a lot of fun.

Where Were You On February 6, 1975?

Because that was the day a pretty little thing called Gervaise spent the day crossing Mauritius. If you were old enough not to have been in diapers then you probably ate some faratas on that day.

The damage to our economy was extensive as you can imagine. You may also wish to take a look at a manuscript that Mr. Padya filed about one aspect of the intense tropical cyclone here.

So 1975 was not a boring year at all: February we get Gervaise and three months later students are on the GRNW bridge.

Gelane: My Week-end Plans

It could weaken back into a tropical storm when it gets closer to us on Saturday according to Weather Underground -- a really cool weather site. Here are its expected path and satellite shot as of a few hours ago.

Forget About That BBQ, Gelane is on its Way!

That's what I understand from looking at the satellite pictures and other charts at TSR. It's currently a cat 1 hurricane but should morph into cat 3 as it swooshes between the land of ti-lipie lor gro-lipie and its smaller sister Rodrigues. Looks like it gonna get closest to us by Saturday evening.

What do you think?

External Factors are Unfavourable Only When Berenger and Sithanen Are in Government, Right?

Wrong. Take sugar for example. It's one of Sithanen's Triple External Shocks and one of the reasons he's put the middle-class and the poor on a strict diet for almost four years now. But sugar was already a small sector back in 2005 -- 4.2% as the above table indicates and close to 2% this year -- so that the initial 5% reduction in the price we sell our sugar at would have reduced growth by about a fifth of a percent. Not a lot you will concur.

Compare that to 30 years ago when sugar represented close to 19% of our economy and was hit by a pretty little thing called Claudette. That led to a sharp contraction in our national production in 1980 with the sugar sector responsible for over three quarters of the 10% decline in output. That year also witnessed the second oil shock with the real price hitting a level that was to be surpassed only last year. And as if that was not enough a new chairman of the Federal Reserve by the name of Paul Volcker took office and stopped targeting interest rates. The latter of course were to go through the roof and plunge the world economy into a nasty recession.