What's in it For Me?

You don't have to be terribly intelligent to guess that whatever Navin Ramgoolam may answer to such a question asked by Pravind Jugnauth will not be as enticing for our parliament's newly elected MP as what the MMM will offer him as political option in 2010: a sharing of the land's top job. Especially when you look at the results of the last bye-election and apply an extraordinarily complicated analytical tool on which reputations have been built: arithmetic.

I mean, just subtract the, let's say, 6% of the MSM votes from the 51% Jugnauth Jr. got and add that to the 41% his uncle scored. And that's before considering that a chunk of the voters didn't turn up because there was no way they could send a clear signal to the government about Sithanen's mismanagement of the economy and because the stakes are not as high as in a general election.

Ramgoolam has also kind of boxed himself in. He can't even benefit from a snap election as Federation III can probably be set up in 24 hours or less, win the next polls and then show us why we will have to vote them out after five years. Then again, history doesn't always evolve in such a predictable fashion, does it?

Labour's Think-Tank Mostly Tanks

Indeed, the several MMM and MSM diehards conveniently turned Labour cling-ons only a few years ago just dealt SAJ a trump card for free. The latter can now accept or refuse to celebrate Halloween at Le Reduit next month. He can, for instance, stay on as President and then resign sometime next year to head a MSM-MMM coalition and possibly return as PM in 2010 for 5 years. Or he can stay on as the Head of State until 2013 and happily welcome the Federation III government for its swearing in. He can also refuse a new mandate and throw Mauritius right into an election campaign overnight.

This a major blunder because Ramgoolam could have nominated one of the many loyal Labourites still around instead. And quite surprising too given all the steam he let off, as pictured above, on July 10, 2005. Too bad the think-tank did not have a turbine besides him then. That would surely have brought our electricity prices to more reasonable levels.