Download Citizen Concerns For Free And Understand Plenty Fast

Citizen concerns is the English version of Preokipasion Sitwayin, a book which I published last June and made available for free to drastically improve the level of debate in Mauritius. The best version is for the iPhone and other Apple devices but there's also a pdf version for all other phones and computers.

Enjoy the read and let us know how you found it.

70 An De Sela Moris Ti A En Gran Turnan

An 1956 Ptr, selon biografi SVR par Reddi ek Experiments in Democracy par Dukhira, ti pe lager kont propozision PR ki guvernman kolonial ti met de lavan kom system elektoral. Mem lepok Mauritius Times lans so gran kanpayn Down With PR. Malerezman le 22 Mars, Guy Rozemont, lider Ptr, desede a laz 40 an. Lerla eleksion parsiel dan Por-Lwi pu ranplas li vin en referandum lor PR. Me leta-mazor Ptr ti telman for sa lepok la ki zot fini par gayn parsiel la an Me kan zot kandida Willy Dupré bat Alex Bhujhoharry, kandida Parti Morisyin. Sa anter PR pu de bon.

Inpe letan avan li mor, Guy ti prezid en komite egzekitif ki ti expilse so frer Philippe depi dan Ptr akoz li ti vot ansam ek ban konservater dan Konsey Lezislatif an faver PR. Navin Ramgoolam abitie rakont en zistwar ki ti derule kot SSR lari Deforz kot sipozeman Guy ti tret Philippe de tret e ti bez li en kudpwin. Par kont zame Navin rakont expilsion Philippe depi Ptr.

Reform elektoral se en zafer mari konplike e tu sanzman a nu exselan system elektoral bizin pas par omwin de referandum. Promie referandum la pu san-angazman (non-binding) e deziem la avek-angazman. Me avan sa bizin ena ban bon kanpayn edikasion lepep ek ban diskision aproprie. Mon pibliye en ameliorasion elegan nu exselan system elektoral an Desam 2025 e an Oktob 2024 mo ti pibliye en gid ki parmi enta zafer explike kuma system elektoral rant dan striktir guvernans en pei.

Four Great Books To Download On Your Apple Device

Although I wrote Investment Analytics for pros sitting for the three CFA exams or enrolled in a Finance MBA I have noticed, over the past 26 years, that undergrads and ACCA students also purchased it. One of the youngest readers must have been that girl who had just completed her HSC. The digital version which was rolled out in October 2023 raises the learning experience to a whole new level.

Quantitative Methods Lifesaver, published in July 2024, will make you breeze through the QM part of the CFA Level 1 exam. The guts of this book are from the print copy of the Level 1 Lifesaver I developed over 12 years reducing it from 458 pages to 110. QMLS will be particularly useful in this era of big data and AI.

WTVFi2024 is a guide to help analyse electoral manifestos and policies in any country. It contains an insane amount of interesting information on Mauritian politics, the state of her economy, frameworks to picture governance in a whole new light and forecasts till 2029. The diaspora will love it. It was published in October 2024.

Finally FTF is a book that offers a governance-based improvement to the great electoral system we have in Mauritius. It's the product of looking at electoral systems for over twenty years and writing over 100 articles on the topic. FTF came out in December 2025.

Dose of PR Would Create Chronic Political Instability

Discover how we can improve the great electoral system in Mauritius by putting our latest book on your Apple device.

Here's One Important Reason You Don't Want PR

Master electoral reform fast by downloading our latest book.

Book Which Improves An Amazing Electoral System Published

The FPTP version that we use in Mauritius since 1967 has served us extremely well but during the past quarter of a century politicians have been trying to replace it with a mixed system which would be a complete disaster. The principal purpose of this book is to help prevent this calamity by critically looking at all the main electoral proposals since 2002. 

It also provides more than a dozen vital criteria to evaluate any electoral system or proposition and will therefore put the debate on electoral reform on a firm footing. The book which can be pre-ordered right away refines an interesting solution, backed by a thorough analysis of electoral data, we presented in 2014. Happy reading!

GE2024 Ep1: Dernie Traizon Navin Ramgoolam

Sanjay Jagatsingh · Dernie traizon Navin Ramgoolam

Voter Survey for GE2024 Goes Live

Takes only a couple of minutes. We'd love to get your responses in this anonymous poll. And we'll publish the aggregate results.

No Electoral System Gives More Power to Voters Than the FPTP

Anu Tiek En Palab Ki Abitie Fer Lor FPTP

The Jag! After 2016

The last time we took stock of the output there we had just finished the fifth part in our series on electoral reform. Since then we've added four more pieces in that thread and thirty-nine other posts till now. There were no articles last year though, the first time since 2016 but it's not the longest drought period on that blog. I have a good excuse. 2024 looks better with already two and both of them are in kreol. The first one was an analysis on six pledges of the LP/MMM/PMSD alliance – it uses four of our clips – and the last on why six titans of the Mauritius Labour Party are unlikely to vote for Navin Ramgoolam in 2024 or for the other two main parties for that matter.

Of course Covid-19 happened during this 7-year period which explains why we had pieces on the vaccination status and jabs to buy in 2022 after we had become less ignorant about viruses. That was also the year of the 75th anniversary of India's independence. We published one piece on the Gentle Elephant when it was Midnight on August 15 in Bharat. Two days earlier we wrote a post on faith which started with a tribute to an extraordinary actor that said goodbye during the pandemic. We also investigated who's been the longest-serving General Secretary of the MLP. 

Other pieces included celebrating the 90th anniversary of a maverick, the Pope's visit, ideas to roll back drug use, an interesting piece on transport policy, comments on the offerings in the 2019 general election, fact-checking a toxic politician, decolonisation, the Central Water Authority, the World Bank and economic miracles. Plus one on the importance of the national currency in determining the wealth of a nation and another on an infamous anniversary. And more.

That's a lot of good stuff to read don't you think?

Discussing Electoral Reform With ReA

I spent plenty of hours over a number of years doing just that quite a long time ago with their strongman Ashok Subron. I had to stop talking to him when he told me that he was against double candidacies only to announce in a press conference afterwards that he was for them. Since then it has appeared in their electoral manifesto. While the obligation for a candidate to declare herself in one of the four dumb categories has to go we don’t need or want a dose of PR to do that. And we’re definitely not going to Viv to Morisianism with the resultant chronic political uncertainty and drastic loss of accountability which would accompany the corrupting of our FPTP system, the best electoral system in the world.

I spent about one hour with another long-standing member after he said he was in favour of a dose of PR. I hadn’t finish my explanation that he told me two things: “my god, what we've been proposing is so dangerous!” and “thank you so much for explaining this to me.” I went on to share some other implications of a dose of PR that are seldom discussed.

A third member told me he was for a dose of PR for the same fallacious reasons ReA have kept on harping for way too long. I showed him what Mauritian voters have been able to do with their PMs via our excellent FPTP system and how we'd lose this powerful tool with a dose of PR. His arguments were wishy-washy but he said he was open to changing his mind. By the way, I showed the same clip to a prominent member of Lalit and that gave her pause.

During my last discussion on electoral reform with a ReA member the latter agreed with my point that it indeed didn't make any sense to have 20 PR MPs each time because the lopsidedness that they sought to correct was not the same in every election. However, he told me that the political uncertainty a dose of PR would create is good. And that he had a solution. It's been almost two years. And still no sight of a solution.

Two Ways Mauritius Can Help With the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The first one is to share how as a multi-religious multi-ethnic population we've been coexisting peacefully for decades since we became independent.

The second way is to showcase our experience with the FPTP (First Past The Post) system, the best electoral system in the world. Our friends in Israel will no doubt be interested to find out that in Mauritius there have been only five general elections since 1996 while they’ve had eleven whereas since 2014 they’ve had five compared to only two here. Plus they had so much trouble forming a government with their PR (proportional representation) system after the 2019 elections that Israel had to go vote again in another three general elections during the past two years, narrowly escaping a fifth a few weeks ago. 

Adoption of a FPTP system like ours will free them from the nightmare of perpetual political instability that leaves the Middle East country with either a caretaker government or one which is not stable enough for way too long. Once they do this they will be a lot more serene to sit down around a table with the Palestinians to hatch a long-lasting deal acceptable to both parties. 

Renga At the Blackboard

To explain the mess proportional representation (PR) would throw Mauritius into after the Labour Party feared that the Governor would impose it. We’re in the first half of 1956 at the Port-Louis theatre or about two years before Seeneevassen passes away, Guy Rozemont had just died and the movement against PR is gaining steam. Dupré, the LP candidate, wins the by-election in the capital with 52% of the votes and this buries PR for good. So writes Sada Reddi in his 2000 biography of Sir Veerasamy Ringadoo, the longest-serving Finance Minster of independent Mauritius, its first President and who would have been 100 today. 

SVR has been unjustly painted as an incompetent Finance Minister (FM) of an incompetent government that had brought the country to its knees. The current economic contraction, forty years after the last one and when Ringadoo was Minister of Finance, will likely cast a more objective light on his performance. 

Doctor Who Gave Elephant Dose to Mosquito Fired

Seriously, a mosquito checks into a hospital because it’s not happy with its trademark hum and without doing any examination the doctor gives it the same giant injection of god knows what she administered to a hippo a few hours earlier. This has sent the poor insect into a deep coma and triggered an inquiry. It turns out that the doctor does this to every patient that visits the medical institution, big and small. The regular complimentary invitations to seminars organised by Big Pharma in posh locations may explain why an identical dose is applied each time. 

It’s not any different from the proposal of nominating 20 PR seats after each general election to correct any seat/vote share imbalance. Why would you use 20 MPs irrespective of whether you have a 60-2, 41-21 or 30-32? There’s no good reason especially when we know that this will create two types of political instability and blunt our democracy by preventing voters from keeping that many politicians out of parliament. Besides there’s a better and more elegant solution. 

Bizin Deklar Nu System Elektoral Kom En Trezor Nasyonal

One Reason the FPTP System is So Good

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. 

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. 

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.