2018: The Year in Review

Q1: Lepep Tram will not be biggest project ever. By-election hints at how return to 40 SMCs would make our democracy more vibrant. Error found in app of Electoral Commission. Reconstruction of great party cannot happen while he's there. Two Nobels didn't get Mauritius wrong. Sithanen toohrooh will grow by Rs300 billion if sanity not brought back to our tax structure. Mauritius turns 50. PJ announces resignation of President, latter has other plans. Calculation of Sithanen toohrooh explained. Road fatalities in Singapore fall by 14%. Next general election is going to be a lot more open.

Q2: Sound management explained. Chuttoo thinks Ivan wants to be kicked out government. The best Kreol dictionary in town. Why we shouldn't legalise pot. Is recruiting at the CEB biased? Recall elections are seriously overdue. More than 30% of World Bank reports never downloaded. Big electoral imbalances almost never last. 24/7 water for all should happen within five years. Putin begins last term with brand new car. Why creating the URA was a mistake. Wasn't 2018 supposed to be the year of the second 'economic miracle'? Some days are way better to present the budget. SEG has at least two more flaws. Another budget to nowhere. Only idiots will love Mars.

Q3: Water is a great role model. When will NASA go to the moon again? Weighing an elephant is no easy task. Sadhguru explains how India is different. Politician taking us for morons. Looks like something is brewing. That sugar has no future has been obvious for more than a decade. 10,000 Yankees died from cocaine addiction in 2016. Sharks want appointment with Minister. World listens as story of Chagos told at the ICJ. Road fatalities may hit all-time record this year. PM makes URA redundant. A framework to analyse decolonisation.

Q4: Pravind al lapes rekin ek enn lapipi danzere. Canada rejects proportional representation. Marx at 200. Shelina eksplik kuma fer zasar lisu. How important is ethnicity in deciding elections? Our roads killed 6,716 in 50 years. Although it promised several one referendum would be a great start. Mauritian voters are quite mature. Why politicians want a dose of PR. Why we lost two decades on electoral reform. Division of votes should become standard parliamentary practice. Doing Business is a misnomer. PM presses ahead with plan to make us a banana republic. Worse than termites.

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.