Another major event follows the historic victory of July 3rd: Labour and allies grab all 5 municipalities. That of course includes Port-Louis, Curepipe and Berenger’s stronghold of BB/RH. Of course most of the credit of this massive political achievement goes to the new man in charge of
1. No political leader in our short political history has staged a comeback by presenting himself as PM for five years. And this without any exit clause.
2. For the first time one of the three major political parties managed to beat an alliance of the other two winning a very comfortable majority.
3. It’s been a long time since we’ve had such a very strong PM in place. That was certainly not the case during 2/5-of-a-term Prime Ministership of Paul Berenger: MPs had just to threaten of provoking a bye-election to get the ear of the then PM and more.
4. All of this has been achieved quite disrespectfully of the divine signal: “The Guy Must Go”.
Naturally, the past few years has confirmed that skin pigmentation is no driver of stellar economic performance – a fact not unknown to anyone not living in the 18th century
What’s left on Ramgoolam’s shopping list.
This is not dissimilar to Michael Jordan travelling up his own little list of 50+ point performance at
1. Rama Valayden gets elected in Rose-Hill in 2010 or whenever general elections get called.
2. Labour and allies take all the 3 seats in Rose-Hill.
While the first item was already an intriguing possibility before July 3rd, the results of the last general elections in No. 19 have confirmed that very little is left to be done (less than 1200 voters need to switch allegiance). And that was of course before the October 2nd municipal results.
Those who don’t study history…
What happened to the MMM and the MSM this year happened to other parties before: no succession planning.
1. Labour in 1982: (Although, SSR did publicly hint about his successor in 1979).
2. MSM in 1995: Lutchmeenaraidoo and Dulloo were denied their go at the top party-job by being conveniently sidelined.
3. MMM in 2005: Berenger has been around for 36 years with only two as PM. For comparison, Stalin and Brezhnev were in the driver seat for 28 and 17 years respectively.
A Tale of 2 ages.
With the recent change of government we have left the ice age way behind to step into the... stone age. It’s a huge improvement: a sleepy D-350 has been replaced by a vigorous D-14000 (the reach in km of our economic diplomacy), we don’t consider ourselves the best managed country in the world and Prime Ministerial missions are not silly attempts to compete with National Geographic documentaries anymore. But it’s not enough. Here are a few things we should really worry about:
1. Rama Sithanen, Finance Minister, gives the impression that he does not believe in Financial Markets – there was nothing for Financial Markets in his recent statement about setting the stage for robust growth. That’s not good news especially after the overregulation and lethargy witnessed over the past 5 years and given that it’s one of the few pillars where lots of growth is still possible. Deeper capital markets will add up to 200bp to our growth rate and is one of the instruments par excellence for the democratisation of the economy.[2]
2. There is no doubt that this government is well-intentioned. It clearly does not indulge itself in the mathematics of hate. The problem, however, is that an integrated approach to problem solving has not been adopted. Richard Feynman, the daddy of quantum mechanics, among others, rightly observed that “everything is related – you just need to find the link”. For instance, our education and transportation problems are linked for obvious reasons. It’s not because this was not considered in the ‘rattrapage’ Obeegadoo that we need to forget about it.
3. We unfortunately don’t have a measurement culture here. I am sure you heard about “what gets measured gets managed”.[3] This goes even further: what is not measured technically does not exist. And the greatest ignorance-reducing strategy is measurement.
And where are we with the ‘branding
Comments: density@intnet.mu
[1] One may read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) and then Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (2005) for interesting insights on human decision-making including the benefits of a healthy ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
[2] It is no surprise that Mark Anson, CFA, Chief Investment Officer for CalPERS has been voted “Most Influential” in the current issue of the CFA Magazine. We will return to
[3] Which can be thought of as the modern equivalent of Lord Kelvin’s reminder of knowledge of the “meagre and unsatisfactory kind”.
No. 2 November 2005
© Sanjay Jagatsingh, 2005
