Your Island in 2008 and Beyond

If you must forecast, forecast often.

Paul A. Samuelson

This is what the tea leaves are saying.

Somebody else will celebrate Halloween at Reduit

SAJ will not get a second term as President because it doesn’t make any sense for Navin Ramgoolam to reappoint him as the MMM and the MSM will most likely go together in the 2010 polls. Indeed the leaders of these two parties will somehow try to convince us as from mid-2009 that our future lies with what they will dub as Federation III. As usual, it is their future that they would be talking about as that’s the only political combination that will allow them to hold the most important office of the land, albeit for about 2½ years each. Of course if you don’t vote for Berenger as PM, you could, again, be accused of being a racist.

Berenger not likely to go first in 2010

Berenger has always lost general elections when he has presented himself as either the only candidate to the post of PM or the first in a power-sharing agreement. This of course lends some credibility to the view that a chunk of the electorate in 2000 thought that SAJ would somehow not have handed power to the Leader of the MMM in 2003. Anyway, a safer bet for Jugnauth Jr. and Berenger would be for the latter to become PM in the second half of the next term.

Unless Sithanen is not kept on a tight leash

People in this country are really upset mostly because Rama Sithanen as the worst Finance Minister our country has known, and that by a very wide margin too, has been subjecting Mauritius to one global worst practice after the other. But Navin Ramgoolam has to share some responsibility for that mess because he didn’t recognise early enough that Faratanomics wasn’t going to be good for either the country or for the Labour Party and that he would need to waste a lot of his time cleaning up after the bean-counter. If Ramgoolam were to lower his guard and let Sithanen and other Bretton Wood idiots have their way in 2008, it would be game over for him for 2010 and Berenger could be PM until about December 2012.

But that seems less likely to occur now

When it comes to economic policies, Navin Ramgoolam will, from now on, call all the shots. He has little choice. Sithanen has been a national disaster and has been misleading us for too long when he has not been creating poverty with such enthusiasm. Ramgoolam understands that we are right in the middle of the equivalent of ‘shining India’ here. The common sense he heard attending The World Debate in Gotham City on September 27th last must have made him realise that Sithanen is a man on a mission: to be the only politician to have led a government to a unambiguous 60-0 defeat each time he has been its Finance Minister. The PM has also shattered Sithanen’s fallacious Triple External Shocks argument when he recently and rightly pointed out that sugar is a tiny sector (3%) of our economy and getting tinier. And he has sidelined Sithanen and Boolell from the recent talks with the MSPA. Ramgoolam will finally lose patience with his Finance Minister and sack him. You think he doesn’t have the guts to do that? Well, didn’t a relatively inexperienced Ramgoolam sack Berenger and the MMM from government in 1997?

Wanna a ¾ majority? Earn it!

Ramgoolam should stop blaming us for not having given him a super majority in 2005. He should instead remember that some of the best things that were implemented in this country, like free education, were done with a paper-thin majority and when Ministers still knew how to resign. He’s seriously kidding himself if he thinks he’s gonna get 45 seats just because he’s got blue eyes. Come to think of it, I am not even sure he’s got blue eyes! In any case a much better route for him would be to vigorously undo all the crappy policies that Sithanen has been recommending. 2008 will be a crucially important year because of the time lags that game-changing policies usually involve, provided they are given the go-ahead. It could also very well be the year the MMM will have a new leader: Lutchmeenaraidoo.

Person of the year

Attributed to Oil for the huge fiscal space that it has been generating for the past 3 years without derailing our economy.

Comments: density@intnet.mu.
No. 9 December 2007
© Sanjay Jagatsingh, 2007