Tiger @50

Did that super fast today. So basically we defused the demographic bomb, diversified our economy and became a Republic. We did a terrific job planning and implementing things at least between 1968-82. We should be thankful to our excellent constitution and FPTP system which have provided the stability necessary to have a fair chance of being a lot more than a country without a future.

Things have deteriorated significantly as from 2005 when a flat tax was introduced using three lies. This has caused everything to slow down and attracted the wrong FDI and people. Poverty and inequality have increased tremendously. The other big risk we're facing now is that there are attempts to turn our Republic into an autocracy with undemocratic devices such as a second republic, party lists and double candidacies.

Let's take our beautiful country back!

P.S. Click on the pic to see it better. Consider it as work in progress. And please note that the 30% for sugar in 1968 is an estimate.

After Navin Leaves

The party which turns 82 today will have to go back and have a good look at its glorious past. Especially the one which ended in June 1982. The one which played the biggest role in improving the lot of the many by rolling out our welfare state. The party which was the driving force behind the independence movement. The one who proved Meade wrong. The great party who was against proportional representation and party lists. Or double candidacies.

But don't count on Arvin to do that. He's no different from Navin who not only actively revised the history of the LP when he was in power but invents new Party DNA when he's not. The LP might not be able to do this for some time. That's OK as voters are becoming increasingly sophisticated and they will eventually get what Mauritius needs.

2017: The Year in Review

Q1: iPhone turns 10. Voters elect candidates wisely. Oxfam says income for bottom half hasn't grown for past three decades. Average performance for Mauritius. Countries use PISA to improve education system. Nation surprised to learn than history of Labour Party is larger than two Ramgoolams. Citizens evaluate ministers continuously. Metro Express not needed for now. Parliament goes live and direct. Sumputh resigns after PM finds package shocking.

Q2: Splitting the Sithanen toohrooh. Soornack explains how she made it. Le Pen gets closer to L'Elysee. Who is the fastest footballer? Two really dumb reasons we need party lists. Madhuri at fifty. MK said to fly understaffed planes. The Saint dead at 89. How you know you're not a big cat. Taxpayers handed multi-billion rupee bill. Top tax rates go up by 5%. Fighter jets have own sign language.

Q3: Meet the articulated bus. Referendum legislation can help avoid mayhem. Chester found dead. Singapore knows plenty. How Fowdar can help our democracy. Cleaners earning Rs1,500 per month have reason to smile. World discovers the SJ Theatre. Easy for Mauritius to boost its GDP by half. FPTP system allows general election to have recall component.

Q4: Why Mauritius is not in high-income group. Dead animal should be removed from coats of arms. They should be referred to as 30/3 and 3/5. A woman in the front row. Mauritius finds out she has an MP called Tarolah. Use the two o'clock rule to save lives. Simple tools to understand social contracts. Berenger makes new prediction. Podcast to find out things launched. December 2014 was worse than a 60-0. Look who's worried about inequality. 8 questions for voters. Voodoo economist is back. A plan for Mauritius. 4 out 5 voters don't vote for Boolell. 

Mauritius Discovers She Has An MP Called Tarolah

That was a few weeks ago. We also learned that he was a PPS. Mauritius found out about this obscure politician not because he made a game-changing contribution but because of what he did with his mobile. And while you would be hard-pressed to list half of the roughly seventy politicians that we sent to our National Assembly in 2014 it would not exactly be the first time. It would be an even bigger challenge to remember what they've contributed in making Mauritius better.

This is clearly a sign that our Parliament is way too big. And is costing us too much. It definitely highlights the absurdity of the suggestion that we need an extra 20 MPs to correct the lopsided outcomes that our excellent FPTP system produces on some occasions. It's silly for two reasons. One is that between 1977 and 2014 India has kept her number of MPs constant although the voting population there rose by half a billion. The other is that we can actually correct the imbalance by making our Parliament smaller. And that too without compromising the big advantages of the FPTP system or resorting to totally undemocratic devices like party lists and double candidacies.

Our FPTP System Has a Built-in Recall Election

Kind of. But it happens only when there's a general election. Given that politicians can inflict significant damage to our economy or take totally unpatriotic and completely stupid decisions like privatising water a lot faster voters need to be able to boot them out of office anytime between two general elections. So our excellent FPTP system should be improved by equipping it with standard recall elections -- something which Lalit suggested in early 2014.

We also need referendum legislation so our elected governments can ask for our permission on matters of national interest. For example Lepep campaigned against the Metro Leger but it is now proceeding with essentially the same unnecessary project. It should have organised a referendum to ask for our green light first. Same thing for the idiotic idea of privatising the CWA. It's nowhere to be found in their electoral manifesto. We never voted for it. Lepep cannot go ahead with that project before asking us what we think. We are not children. As they found out in Barkly recently.

Of course you realise that party lists and double candidacies are totally incompatible with recall elections. These two contraptions prevent us from deciding which politicians -- some might be inclined to shoot others -- we want to keep out of parliament. It's like a football game without a red card. Or one where selected players show a brown card to the referee to stay on the pitch after being shown a red one. Not a bad idea to make a list of the parties who are in favour of double candidacies so we can avoid them like the plague. Plus there's a by-election soon. So let's start: Rezistans ek Alternativ, ...

How A Referendum Would Deepen Our Democracy

There are some issues that are really fundamental to our well-being and these are better addressed in a referendum. Especially when they are not discussed in manifestoes and electoral campaigns. Here are four.

1. Tax policy can break an economy and send a country to the dogs. Which is what the Sithanen flat tax has done. And that too without asking us for our permission. 

2. Currency policy. Only morons believe that competitive depreciation is Tiger stuff. Plus it matters a whole lot who call the shots at the BoM. For example in 2010 we were told that Manou was coming back. We didn't know depreciation-obsessed Basant Roi would after 2014.

3. Party lists are the equivalent of an English Premier League without red cards. We don't want them.

4. Privatisation of any part of our public utilities or other national assets. A government that wants to sell the CWA or saddle it with a management contract because it doesn't like its hotline is a good-for-nothing government.

Two Extra Dumb Reasons We Need Party Lists

One is that if there's a party that gets the most votes but not a majority of the seats that could be a "recipe for political riots and civil unrest". Voters in Mauritius don't give two hoots about vote share. They just pick the best candidates in every riding. Doesn't matter if they're from three different parties. And the party which elects the most candidates forms government. That's it. Of course a party can grab power without getting the most votes. That's definitely possible given how the number of voters in our constituencies vary. In 2014 the largest (No.14) was 2.71X bigger than the smallest (No.3). But we couldn't care less.

Besides the recipe for riots and unrest is well known: poverty and inequality. Like we saw one spring six or seven years ago across North Africa and the Middle East and next door. We even had a former Minister in Tunisia at that time who had to stay indoors because of what was happening on the streets. It didn't look like the people were mad because they had trouble grasping how the D'Hondt method works.

The second mari dumb reason is that an electoral system is fair when it "ensures that the top guns of the parties are returned to the Assembly... On the other hand, the public would have considerable difficulties to understand constituency elections without the participation of these stalwarts; such contests would lose some of its “panache” and legitimacy [emphasis mine]."

So 22,000 people thrown into poverty over five years, record inequality, savings at a 30-year low and a trillion-rupee GDP gap because of a stupid and low 15% flat tax is panache? And we should return the massively incompetent and the toxic? The mess of the trickle-down garbage was big enough that no major party wanted to take the oversized and unnecessary risk of having the outgoing Finance Minister as their candidate in 2010. Which was a first. And he didn't even run as an independent candidate. Didn't get elected four and half years later either. That too after changing for a 'safe' riding.

God bless the FPTP.

Trump Election Not Like December 2014

Clinton lost partly because she neglected too big a segment of American voters and thought a bit like she did in 2008 that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was hers for the taking. That was a big contrast with Trump who was very efficient in appealing to the reptilian brains of enough voters who don't understand for example that his proposed 15% flat tax is going to hurt them the most. These voters seem to be oblivious to how Reaganomics increase US debt from one to four trillion dollars in twelve years back in the 1980s. And what threw America into its worst recession in almost eight decades in 2008.

So that's very different from what happened here in 2014. It looks a lot more like the June 1982 elections when voters were not sophisticated enough to compensate for the lack of relevant information to take the decision that was in their best interests. But we've become increasingly smarter since then as a careful study would show. Intelligent enough to reject the wicked plan of a scheming trio two years ago.

Why Berenger's Electoral Reform Proposal is A Dangerous Flop

He wants to increase the number of MPs in our Parliament by more than 45%. That's totally ridiculous because anyone with an internet connection knows that our Parliament is already too big. By one yardstick we shouldn't have more than 12 MPs. We already have 5 times more than that. That's more than enough.

Berenger wants the bulk of that increase -- 20 out of 28 -- on a party list. That's dangerous and quite perverse. The Economist recently reminded us that party lists shift MP loyalty from voters to party leaders. Given the performance of our political actors over the past several years the last thing we want to do is to ask them to stop being accountable to us.

The MMM leader has been in the political landscape for 45 years. It's time for him to retire. And allow something that his party has been bereft of for a very long time to make a much needed comeback: fresh bold ideas.

2013: The Year in Review

January: The Economist says party lists are evil. Humanity starts its biggest gathering. Former MK boss explains how he was fired. Berenger announces he has throat cancer, steps down. Joseph beats Jackie Chan and wins award. Gandhi's assassination turns 65.

February: IPP contracts made public, finally. Heavy-rain shuts down water-starved Dodoland. Pistorius shoots model girlfriend by mistake. CEB contemplates getting Mauritius its own Fukushima. His Airness turns 50 and world longs to see Mike back. After attacking our rupee with our own money Duval tries to usurp the PM's prerogatives. PM says changes to electoral system shouldn't be done on a whim, promises consultative paper.

March: Women contribute a third more than what Mao thought. Fifteen centimetres of rain kill eleven in a flash.

Read the review for Q2, Q3 and Q4.

Party Lists Have Undermined Accountability in SA

According to The Economist which ran an interesting article on South Africa last October. The famous magazine rightly concludes that individual MPs don't worry about voters anymore: they instead bend over backwards to please party leaders who determine how far they end up from the top of the list.

Guess it too is saying that party lists are evil.