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.

Labour Turns 90 in A Depressing Atmosphere

And it's not difficult to understand why. We wrote a post on several aspects of the greatest party in Mauritius yesterday. Navin Ramgoolam should seize the opportunity to restore the BRP at 60 and clear the air a little bit. 

Meet A 94-year-old Who Has A Gift For the PM

Ms. Dassyn was the first one to garland SSR when he was first elected in 1948. Now twenty-one years later she's the oldest elector in riding No.5 and on the same platform as him in Pamplemousses. They are meeting again for the inauguration of an ultra-modern hospital. So we discover on reading the chapter of Petals of Dust that starts on page 94.

The 357-bed hospital with 120,000 square feet of covered space has been meticulously planned and sports the first ICU of the island, an isolation ward among other important features and had become a necessity as a rapidly increasing population – the demographic bomb was in the midst of being defused – had reduced the beds/1,000 pax from 2.5 to 1.9 and was in line with government's promise and plan of upgrading the delivery of public health.

The 38-year-old Minister of Health who'd been in the job for two years – as well as eight in that of the General Secretary of the Labour Party – doesn't fail to give credit where it is due. He tells us that the foundation stone was laid in 1963 when Guy Forget had the portfolio while Harold Walter presided over almost all of the building work when he was in charge. There was even an arts competition. Architects, sculptors and labourers are thanked. He seemed to have had a lot of fun equipping the new gem.

The first time I went to the SSRNH I was quite impressed by the sophistication, scale of the facilities and ambiance there. Mind you this was the feeling of a boy who was probably in Standard III just waiting in the car. Many years later when I read Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first impression of Brasilia – Oscar Niemeyer designed it as an airplane – I immediately thought of my first encounter with lopital di nor. "The impression I have is that I'm arriving on a different planet." 

Meet One of the Most Important Political Partnerships in Mauritian History

Independent Mauritius Catches Up With One of His Most Brilliant Sons

Mauritians Say Goodbye To Their Longest-Serving PM

Two days of mourning to remember SAJ who has been PM of Mauritius for an incredible 19 years. He leaves behind a positive legacy essentially because he led Mauritius within the best electoral system in the world and a regime of progressive and sustainable taxation for most of the time he was in the driver seat. One of his most important contributions is without any doubt leading the effort to thwart an evil political plan in December 2014. His last fight was presenting in front of the ICJ for the Chagos. The 91-year-old will be cremated at the botanical garden in Pamplemousses in 10 minutes next to a colleague. 

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. 

Bizin Deklar Nu System Elektoral Kom En Trezor Nasyonal

Savings Likely to Hit At Least 60-year Low

It was there already in 2018 when it matched the 9% it reached after intense cyclone Danielle inflicted a 17.6% contraction to the Mauritian economy. As the table shows savings increased by a tiny bit last year but not enough to avoid the top three worst spots before COVID-19 arrived on the scene. We must also note that SSR is the only Prime Minister to have his two entries in the table linked to two intense cyclones. The other three PMs appear there because of two things. The first is the Sithanen flat tax which has broken the economy. The other is the removal of the tax exemptions which the people of Mauritius had been using to set up their long-term financial plans. 

The situation for Pravind Jugnauth is pretty worrying as all his three years as PM are very bad years for this fundamental statistic of economic resilience. Given that the figure for this year will likely go at the top of the table he should bring back some basic common sense by restoring a sustainable and progressive tax structure and personal deductions. This should start compensating for his extremely poor economic management of the past five years. 

Covid-19 Crisis Not Unprecedented

Nope. As the chart shows our GDP contracted by 10% in 1980 after cyclone Claudette visited us in the dying days of 1979. The contraction estimated by the Ministry of Finance for this year is between 7% and 11% so it’s going to be roughly the same. What’s going to be different is that since 2005 government has been working for the 1% while 41 years ago important components were being added to our welfare state helping tens of thousands of us have more meaningful lives. 

How a PM Can Leave a Strong Legacy

Who’s Got the Best Road Safety Record?

At an average of 151 road fatalities per year in office – fraction of year in office greater than half is attributed the full year – Navin Ramgoolam has the worst record (see 1). Barely better is Pravind Jugnauth. Bérenger is roughly between SAJ and PJ. The best is SSR. He would have had about 178 fewer deaths than SAJ had his prime ministership been five years longer. The two Ramgoolams have stints in office of the same length but NR’s tally is 424 higher. This is rather bad given all the progress that has been made in the field of road safety for the past three decades. And we have to remember that personal computers were not as ubiquitous before 1982 as they’ve been for the past twenty years.

Chart 2 confirms how much we’ve fallen behind Singapore. While she has seen the total number of road deaths fall decade after decade Mauritius has seen her numbers increase by 40% in the second decade and literally stay flat for the next two. This has caused the gap between our totals to narrow substantially and it might even disappear by the end of next year. Which would be another source of embarrassment for us given that our population is about four and half times lower. But the next decade can be a lot better if we do two things. One is to ask candidates currently seeking our votes how they intend to bring these numbers down fast. The other is to assess the credibility of these plans. 

A Former Lord Mayor Remembers Another

60 Years Ago, Voters Seize Wonderful Chance of Sending Maverick To Parliament

At that time it was called the Legislative Assembly and he's about twenty-seven-and-a-half years old on that 10th Monday of 1959 in colonial Mauritius. He already has a lot under his belt. He had co-founded the Mauritius Times roughly five years before and had spent 17 months outside of Mauritius literally globetrotting during which time he secured a 30-minute meeting with Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher and Vice-President of India. That's barely a decade after the British had been sent packing. Just imagine the energy in the atmosphere. But more happens in that long trip. A lot more. He travels to London and on his way back stops at Paris where he's lucky to have lunch with l'Abée Pierre thanks to contacts established in India. These meetings and travels reinforce what his self-customized education - reading many right sutras very early in his life didn't hurt - has already taught him.

So voters elect him on his first attempt as a candidate in a general election. More was to come his way. Elected as Secretary General of the Labour Party a couple of years later, a post which he kept for about 21 years, he used this position to bring method to the madness in the party. This period would coincide with his work in three Ministries as one of the most important architects of our welfare state. 

Two other factors made the completion of such a massive amount of work possible. The first is that his biggest fan happened to be one SSR. The other is the mathematician he married. 

Why Electoral Reform Got Sidetracked For a Couple of Decades

The first reason is that the really smart politicians who understood the dangers of proportional representation (PR) passed away thirty or more years ago and were not replaced by a crop of a similar calibre. SKJ and SSR died in 1985 while Renganaden Seeneevassen who was one of the fiercest critic of PR was gone even earlier – he died in the middle of 1958. The only politician of that generation who is still active is SAJ which would explain why he dubbed PR a komeraz. But then again he doesn't seem to fully understand all the risks of PR. This is reflected in the dangerous bill on electoral reform before parliament. It has failed to address the problems with government formation countries encounter when they add a dose of PR to a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. And we definitely cannot count on Navin Ramgoolam and today's Labour Party to bring wisdom to the debate. They're deeply mired in trickle-down economics and bean-counting.

The second reason is terms of reference (TOR) that were too narrow. From Sachs to Sithanen only PR solutions were considered although better non-PR solutions exists. There was even a brief attached (see screenshot) by the MMM to the TOR of the Sachs commission. It's fine to raise an eyebrow. The big plus of course is the internet. Ideas can spread a lot faster than before in our hyperconnected world.

PJ Could Top Grim Table By Year-End

The one for ten years of biggest road fatalities. A word of caution though. In two years – 1995 and 2000 – there was a change of PM so the corresponding numbers don't entirely 'belong' to the PMs listed for them. We allocated the full year to the PM who was in office for more than half of the year.

PJ who is already in the list along with three former PMs – Bérenger's first entry of 144 for 2004 is at the 17th spot – is likely to see his number for 2018 go all the way to the top under three scenarios. The first two are if the last third of this year relative to the first two is like those for 2016 and 2014. The third if we extrapolate the total of 115 deaths reached at the end of August. Another entry might go in the middle of the table if 2018 is more like 2015. Of course all four entries would bump his entry for 2017 – his first year as PM – out of this ranking.

We haven't made good progress in road safety for way too long. And in the last thirteen years the economy-breaking Sithanen flat tax and other indecent fiscal exemptions have ensured that we didn't have enough money to bring road deaths down in a significant and persistent manner. Unlike say Singapore which has seen road fatalities decline in every one of the past ten years except two – here they have been increasing for each of the last three years with Bodha as Minister – reducing them literally by half. The type of tax structure you have determines the number of people who die on roads. So this makes the flat tax akin to a drone assassination programme. And exposes the absurdity of calls to transform the revenues of the dead sugar industry into a guaranteed fixed-deposit.

Two Nobels Were Not Mistaken About Mauritius

Kot zot pu kav vo nu bann dirizan sa!

Camille Moutoo at a SELEX dinner

Certainly not James Meade who submitted his famous 1960 facts-based report a few months after visiting Mauritius. Incidentally he landed here exactly eight years before 12.3.68 and about ten days after a pretty little thing called Carol had spent five days checking us out. Start to read the clear report and it won't take you long to appreciate – if you'd been led to believe otherwise – how bad a hand we had been dealt five decades ago. You might even then be able to connect the dots and understand that he and his team were proved wrong by a group of exceptional men and women who saw far and loved this land of ours like nobody did since.

Likewise Vidia – the V in V.S. Naipaul – made some really sharp observations about Mauritius. The kind of insights that would make the day of any policy wonk whether it was in 1973 or forty-five years later. Don't like it too much that he called us an Overcrowded Barracoon? Well, we had one of the highest population densities in the world back then – we still do sitting at no. 007 – and you've surely not forgotten what are the two things Malcolm said we grow here. As a matter of fact it would be far too generous a compliment if someone used these two words to describe us today. Given how much we've regressed.

And then there is Stiglitz who found that everything was going on swimmingly in our island. His 2011 visit occurred a few years after a toxic bean-counter had done extensive damage to our economy and to the lives of thousands with his flat tax and reverse Midas touch. The massive irony of course is that Joe was part of the successful economic team of Bill Clinton who had reversed the harmful tax cuts of a bunch of Voodoo economists led by one Ronald Reagan and the first Bush President – this had caused US debt to balloon from $1tn to $4tn in twelve short years.

The least he could have done was to share his experience and recommend that we make an economic about turn. After all the Sithanen toohrooh had grown to Rs116bn by the end of 2010. A huge amount roughly equal to our GDP for the last six months of 2006 but only one tenth of the level it reached last December. But he didn't preferring to put his foot in his mouth and spraying us with excessive doses of flattery. I don't think this made him gain any new fans among those who had raised at least one eyebrow when he got that prize – which is as old as our independence – from the Swedish central bank.

Free Education Turned 40 in January

I was planning to have a write-up coincide with the anniversary of this crucially important national event. It just didn't happened. Got quite busy on Kozelidir: this is post no. 123. Haven't posted this much in five years. Also the thirteen pieces on The Jag! this year -- a new record -- took a lot of time and effort. You can imagine how much when you read some of these essays and when you consider that only ten such posts were published over three-and-a-quarter years. Still I am not about to let 2017 disappear forever without saying a couple of things.

First is that some people consider Free Education -- for secondary and university students -- as an electoral bribe that was bound to happen after students gathered on the GRNW bridge. Since when does mindfulness always happen after a protest? Our youth took to the streets in May 1975 while the beautiful electoral pledge was announced seventeen or eighteen months later. We know who implemented free education. You may not know who came up with the idea. Returning to pledges wasn't Lepep elected on the promise of a second 'economic miracle'? Still waiting for it eh? Let's not forget Navin Ramgoolam who promised to Put People First but ended up putting most of us last. Or Sithanen who told us poverty would disappear by 2015. Saying something is one thing. Doing it quite another.

The other thing is that granting Free Education was consistent with the extraordinary stuff accomplished by that generation of Mauritians who were born between let's say 1900 and 1945. You know the great people who proved Meade wrong and build the welfare state. Among them a couple of people really stood out: Kher Jagatsingh and his biggest fan, Seewosagur Ramgoolam.

Here's what KJ -- who many consider as the hardworker who has contributed the most to the advancement of Mauritius -- had to say about the implementation of Free Education:

"When almost by accident and force of historical circumstances, I was offered the portfolio of Education and Cultural Affairs in January 1977, I was already aware of the long and arduous task that awaited me. It was a crucial and decisive time to be Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs. This colossal task of reform and development was a real challenge, the like of which I had never faced before."

Phenomenal work doesn't always get recognised overnight.

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.

Some History On Its Way

With the departure of Soodhun there's a possibility we might see Fazila Daureeawoo in the front bench of our Parliament. This would open the door for her to become the first female acting Prime Minister. All it will take is for the three ministers that are highest in the hierarchy to be out of the country. And it might happen when President Fakim -- who's been awfully quiet about recent threats to our national unity -- is in the Le Reduit. The odds of Ms. Daureeawoo making history are actually higher as PJ would have to dump Collendavelloo, a huge and growing electoral liability, soon. Very soon.

And if you noticed more history was made last 12 March when for the first time a Prime Minister of Mauritius who attended our flag-raising ceremony at historic Champ de Mars hadn't declared a community in a general elections. It would have been basic poetic justice for this honour to go to SSR the first time the Four Bands replaced the Union Jack. But that was not possible. This didn't distract the team he built from proving Meade wrong. A very tall order.