Gid Inkonple Eleksyon Parsyel Bel-Roz Kat-Born

42,052 elekter pe al vote dimans la semen prosen. Monn ekut pa mal emisyon kot enn pake kandida ti partisipe. Ansam avek se ki mo kone ala mo inpresyon lor zot.

Danrajsingh Aubeeluck. Lider seleb Parti Malin. Si bann zanfan ti vote se li ki ti pu eli. Mo panse li ti pu fer enn byen meyer minis de finans ki Sithanen.

Roshi Badhain. Dapre lord si li ti gayn pos minis ki li pe konvwate li ti pu ankor dan guvernman la. Kon fer komik me pa konpran enn pake zafer inportan. Par ekzanp li dir ki guvernman mank kas parski Ramgoolam finn tro depanse lor erport ek ring road. Li pa konpran ki se flat tax 15% kinn fu Moris dan tru.

Yuvan Beejadhur. Enn profesyonel kinn travay la bank mondyal. Pa kone si li okuran ki enn so ansyen koleg ek best friend koleg-la ki finn kul Moris. Linn fer enn lanket interesan kinn debus lor fermtir enn sant dasa ki pa tiena fire clearance.

Jack Bizlall. Pilye dan le mond sindikal kinn deza depite an 1976. Kontan avoy enn pake let. Si u pankor gayn enn let ar li enn ti patians u let pe vini. Kumans prepar u diksyoner pu lir sak trwa fraz. Lafors Jack se so bel leksperyans. Nun truv li dan buku konba. Trwa dernye lekzanp se cleaners ki ti pe gayn kinz san rupi, kriz pilot MK ek duty-free paradise. Lot karakteristik interesan Bizlall se ki li kit laport pu dormi mwin kuyon ki linn leve uver. Par ekzanp dan paragraf 2.5 lafidavit ki lin zire pu sa eleksyon la ena sa fraz la lor enn so piblikasyon: "which can yet be enhanced". Ti gayn 11.5% dan bo-basin dernye fwa. Enn zafer ki oken kandida Rezistans finn kav fer. Dapre mwa meyer kandida pu reprezant kat-born dan Parlman ek pu rehos nivo deba.

Why Electing Bizlall is Voters' Next Logical Step

To understand this we have to recall how they arrive at their decisions. In its most basic form that depends on two things: one is the information they have and the other is their ability to process that info. For sure they make very complex decisions. Which makes electoral data absolutely fascinating.

The First 60-0 Was The 

Optimal Decision, in 1982

It was the optimal for voters to keep every candidates of the outgoing Labour government -- which many consider as the best we ever had -- out of Parliament given the paucity of information that was available then and their sophistication level. Still if you dig a little bit you find out that there was some kind of order in the way they voted. This is apparent when we see who among the unreturned candidates grabbed the highest percentages of votes in their respective riding. As Table 2 shows SR got the highest, followed by SB and Duval. KJ who implemented free education after he came up with the idea was sixth. This table may be familiar to you. It is the same one we used to propose that best loser seats should have been allocated to these people as they had the highest ratings among voters -- Nicol Francois, a candidate from Rodrigues, actually came in right after Duval but doesn't appear here as our proposal wouldn't have granted him an additional seat to reflect the relative sizes of the voting pools of the two island. So what we can note here is that voters seemed to have said "Ok, we're booting all of the guys out but we have decided not to treat everyone of you the same way."

Extended Street Festival Puts More Lives At Risk

We don't seem to have learned enough lessons from the 30/3 tragedy when 11 people lost their lives in 2013 after 15 centimetres of rain fell on Port-Louis. We still have time to wisen up and move the Porlwi by Nature festival elsewhere. So as not to look stupid after the event. More bad things can happen over five days than over three.

• It's a wonderful idea to organise a street festival. There's not a lot that happens after 18h00 in Mauritius so the organisers definitely need to be congratulated.
• Thing is we've seen what happened on 30/3 (March 30, 2013) when 15 centimetres of rain killed 11 citizens (10 in Port-Louis) during the day -- see clip below from Antenne Reunion (https://youtu.be/ppVz408B-ps) and a report by Euronews (https://youtu.be/h62tjRYI0jo). It's appropriate at this time to remember that the two o'clock rule teaches us how things become a lot less manageable after sunset and that there's a given amount of time to retreat to safety.

Why Implementing Lalit's Advice Makes A Lot of Sense

You know, the one that recommends bizin plant manze lor later tablisman. This is good advice any which way you look at it. Let's start with a historical perspective. As Chart 1 shows you don't need to be the best thing since sliced bread to understand that the sugar industry has been in an irreversible sunset phase for a long time. It accounted for close to a quarter of GDP forty years ago. Now at less than 1% it's about twenty-five times smaller. That too despite the silly policy of 'competitive depreciation' aka politik rupi mari feb. We can even calculate the approximate time it will hit the zero mark. That should definitely inform our national strategic decisions. Keeping a corpse on costly artificial respiration many years after the soul has departed ain't exactly a smart decision especially when at the same time you cut the oxygen supply of incubators. We can keep a 100 hectares as a souvenir. At most.

Lepep Should Shift From TINA to TAMBO

TAMBO stands for There Are Much Better Options. It's an acronym I coined back in 2007 when Dr. TINAnen was busy breaking the economy with his flat tax. It essentially demonstrated that there were more useful things to do than to turn back the clock of social progress between never-ending stories of gato-pima and savat leponz. Like considering several good options and picking the best. Feasible if you're not endowed with a reverse Midas touch.

Spreadsheet Nirvana

The decision of going ahead with the Lepep tram is afflicted with the same There Is No Alternative disease and doesn't address the No. 1 problem of our transportation policy: the growth of private cars has been left unchecked for way too long. On April 1, Georges Chung was heard saying that there were no alternatives to the tram. Isn't that a jurassic comment? And a couple of days ago he seemed to be in a state of total bliss while standing in front of a spreadsheet of the project – we were also told that half-a-dozen accountants did not take up his challenge of finding faults in it – that has been presented literally as having no risk. But he doesn't want to share it with the media.

Mauritius Doesn't Need the Metro Express to Go Bankrupt

Because the Sithanen flat tax has been taking care of that. In quite a splendid manner actually. As we've pointed out recently the associated toohrooh has already reached a trillion rupees. Which is equivalent to several years of GDP. Anybody who has studied up to at least Form III understands that continually growing at less than 4% -- that too in depreciated rupee terms -- instead of the 8% you promised will land you in very deep trouble pretty quickly.

We've seen our PM make a surprising visit to India before presenting his budget. The implementation rate in the public sector has slowed down. If the Metro Leger has been replaced by a watered-down version it's not because we have so much money that we don't know what to do with it. A special purpose vehicle has appeared and the debt ceiling will be amended. What do all these signs tell us?

Simplistic is Not Simple

The flat tax is simplistic. It's not simple. Your iPhone is simple. It's the product of deep thinking. No one said it better than a famous swami from Cupertino: “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Of course you shouldn't use only the messing up of the tax structure to understand our predicament or to assess the skill of Dr. Calamity as Finance Minister for that matter. That would be quite unfair. You definitely cannot omit what he's done to our savings rate. That's another name for the multi-layered savings plan that many voters had crafted over several years if not decades. Until the bean-counter decided to blow it up when he started to build the facade of a low-tax jurisdiction. More on this later.

Sithanen Toohrooh Crosses Trillion-Rupee Threshold

This happened at the end of April. Yep, a trillion rupees of GDP is missing with respect to Dr. bean-counter's forecast of average growth of 8% after mindlessly slashing top tax rates to 15%. That's like our GDP for 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 combined. 6 years of GDP. Or roughly those of 2011, 2012 and 2013 put together. So it's been a failure of epic proportions. Nothing has hurt Mauritius as much as the Sithanen flat tax. Absolutely nothing. No natural calamity has done this kind of damage. And boy did we have calamities in the last 50-60 years. Because nothing has shaved off more than four percentage points off the target growth rate six years in a row. As a comparison the consolidation we saw in the textile industry -- especially in 2003 and 2004 -- cut down growth by only 2% and that too in only one year. Let us also not forget the extra 22,000 Mauritians that were thrown into poverty over the first five years of the fake reforms. #prayforzanzibar.

One and Twelve Zeroes

1,000,000,000,000 rupees is not exactly the smallest number you'll encounter today. That's 257 times what the sugar industry is expected to contribute to our economy this year. No typos here. Two hundred and fifty seven times. Or if you want about USD29 billion at our seriously depressed exchange rate. That would have bought 3.6% of Apple at recent prices. Or the whole of Uber according to a valuation by NYU's Damodaran.

Lepep Not Mandated To Sell Any Part of the CWA

It’s Not in Their Manifesto

Page 19 has five points under the heading of “Fourniture d’eau”. One such point is “Remplacement à court et moyen termes les tuyaux désuets afin d’assurer une fourniture régulière 24 heures sur 24…” Basic common sense when we know that 1,600km of our pipes – some of which are over 50 years old – need to be replaced, right? Another one is “Aménager des barrages dans nos rivières pour récupérer autant d’eau que possible pour être canalisés vers les stations de traitement”. Who will disagree with this when we know we don’t capture enough of all the rainfall that we’re blessed to receive every year? The three other points deal with the Bagatelle dam, emergency water trucks and reforestation. No mention of privatisation of any part of the CWA or subterfuges like affermage. Didn’t see any plan for the CEB to create private companies to avoid the Central Procurement Board either.

Did Lepep Change Its Mind?

If it has it will have to ask voters for their permission on such a fundamental issue because there is no way it would have won 47-13 in December 2014 if one of its electoral pledges was to mess up our public utilities one way or another. It can do that in two ways. One is to call for fresh general elections and the other is to organise a referendum on the issue. A referendum is a lot better as it would enlarge our democratic space and enable Government to get the clearest of signals.

Wong Had Little to Do With Massive Amount of Poverty Created

Because he was not Finance Minister (FM) during any of the past eleven years when by far the most backward policies -- top tax rates were set too low and this broke the economy -- our country has known were implemented. For sure he has been a member of Cabinet during the last two and half years and as such has to accept part of the responsibility of the mess we're in because he could have vehemently asked for the end of the worship of the golden calf. Or at least distanced himself from it. Besides he was until recently a member of a party which has two interesting words in its name: Social Democrate.

XLD, Less So

Of course Xavier-Luc Duval (XLD) has a lot more to do with all the poverty created over the last decade because he was in the driver's seat for quite some time -- close to three years. But before we look into this let us not forget that poverty and the fight against it is heavily dependent on two quantities: the size of the economic cake (GDP) and how it is shared. From the 2012 household budget survey (HBS) -- which tells us about the sharing -- we know for a fact that the poorest two-tenths of Mauritian households saw their shares shrink by 10% to 15%. That's their smallest shares in at least two decades if you care to know. So we don't exactly get bonus points here. And what about GDP?

Decomposing the Sithanen Toohrooh

A disaster of epic proportions. As we've shown before a Rs927 billion GDP gap had accumulated over the eleven years ending in December 2016. This gap aka the Sithanen Toohrooh gives us an indication of the serious damage that that politician with a massive skills mismatch has inflicted to our economic machinery and which others who followed didn't fix. This is captured by Chart 1 which shows how the close to a trillion-rupee GDP hole can be split among the six Ministers of Finance we've known since 2005.

How Bad is Trickle-Down Economics?

Trickle-what???

What the hell is that? It's a deceptive argument that the economy can grow a lot faster if we keep on reducing the top tax rates. It was first tried by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and failed miserably. For example the national debt of the US increased from $1 trillion to $4 trillion over a 12-year period. This regressive taxation regime was reveresed as from 1993 when one William Jefferson Clinton won the Presidential elections. And what has been its impact on Mauritius?

It Has Screwed Up Our Economy

Well, you've seen what it has done to our country after Sithanen implemented a pretty barbaric version of it as from 2006 -- the flat tax -- with the blessing of one crypto-socialist. The bottom line is that we ended up with the smallest national cake baked over a five-year period as far back as we can remember and the cake-cutting was pretty bad too. At the end of 2012 there was already a cumulative GDP shortfall of about 275 billion rupees -- that's the GDP of Mauritius for 2008 by the way -- with respect to the promised 8% robust growth trajectory. If we make the very conservative assumption that government would have reduced its revenue collections to 15% of GDP this translates into a revenue shortfall of over 40 billion rupees -- you multiply the last two numbers. 54 billions if it kept its revenue share of GDP at 20%. 

That's a lot of money. For instance the 1,600 kms of leaking pipes that the CWA has to change will cost only 19 billion rupees. So there would have been more than enough money left over to beef up our public utilities and help our friends in Fond du Sac avoid losing everything twice. And do a million other mindful things to push Mauritius forward. PPS would not have been told repeatedly by the NDU or their Ministers of Finance that there is no money. For all these years. Call Services Limited would also have had a much easier time.

Lev Pake Reste Turns 10

Yes. Already. A recap. So Ramgoolam nominates Bheenick as Governor -- one of his best decisions ever but that too after a year and a half of doing God knows what -- but Sithanen is unhappy so he threatens to resign or maybe he does. The PM is out of the country at the time but makes an appeal to the Minister on national tv. The latter eventually changes his mind -- after about a week -- when his pick as the BoM chief gets the SBM chairmanship. But not before swallowing something that's not exactly a grass snake and creating an urgent need to amend one famous Chevenement formula.

That was a really strange week. See if a Minister cannot be present at his office there has to be a colleague who steps in for him. We've seen this so many times: another member of Cabinet will answer parliamentary questions on behalf of the officeholder when the latter is out of the country. If a Minister resigns our excellent constitution takes care of that seamlessly. And that too without the PM having to be at his desk. The Ministry can also be reassigned to another colleague. For example SAJ held the Ministry of Finance for a few months last year. So did Ramgoolam in 2014. But none of those happened back in February 2007.

Besides there were radio reports that updated us on the absence of Sithanen at the Ministry of Finance -- on an almost hourly basis -- and which wondered if the Minister would be back in time for the important meetings scheduled for that week. It's not any different from a hospital receptionist nervously wondering if she would finally see the surgeon walking towards the operating theatre for some critical intervention. It would be interesting to know how the meetings went on if they went on. If there was a Minister present. If not what was the explanation provided to the people attending those meetings. And how many were cancelled.

Von-Mally's Choice Reveals Why Party Lists Shrink Democracies

Lists to Party

Check the party lists for the ongoing Rodrigues Regional Assembly (RRA) elections and you will find the Leader of the Mouvement Rodriguais (MR) sitting at the top of his. That could be a lot safer for him than contesting one of the 12 FPTP seats especially if the MR doesn't grab too many of them. Which makes it more difficult for voters to dump Mr. Von-Mally. See you needed at least 48.19% of the local region votes in the riding of Port-Mathurin to get into the Regional Assembly back in 2012. A tad more than in 2006. Whereas all you need to qualify for a PR seat is that your party gets at least 10% of the island region votes and it doesn't get enough FPTP candidates elected. There's also another way Von-Mally could get in: his party grabs a majority of the FPTP seats but that majority gets neutralised by the PR seats. He would then go in on the first of the 3 extra seats that guarantee that the winner of the FPTP competitions forms the regional government.

Dumping Made Harder

So how can voters dump Mr. Von-Mally? By casting less than 10% of the island region votes in favour of the MR -- so that party doesn't qualify for any PR seats -- and not granting them a majority of the FPTP seats -- so they can't benefit from any of those extra 3 seats. This would mean dumping all the candidates that are on the party list of the MR and not electing enough of their FPTP candidates. Which is kind of difficult for voters to do as these are events they don't directly control. Plus nobody is saying they actually want to wipe out a whole party. They might just want to get rid of its Leader. Maybe because he's been around for way too long. Mind you, I have nothing against Mr. Von-Mally and his party might well be the best option for our fellow countrypeople in Rodrigues. Just making a point here. But the way the electoral rules are currently set do not allow them to toss him out surgically. And that shrinks the regional democracy as they take an important and efficient electoral weapon away from voters. The Economist warned us about this kind of risk four years ago when it reported how party lists have undermined accountability in South Africa. That of course was before the appearance of one new species: the Minister-Slave.

An Inquiry into the Wealth of Two Tigers

What If

Let us assume for one second that Singapore had kept the value of her currency against one USD at its average rate of 2.2002 for 1985. Not a bad objective as combined with positive growth rates generated by adjustments in the real economy her people would have felt a lot richer when going abroad for holidays or to grab companies and ideas to move forward as a nation. If she had kept the value of her currency constant at that level then at the end of 2015 her GDP per capita would have been $33,047. Quite a number don't you think?

Better Than South Korea

That's better than the $27,222 of South Korea. You know the country which makes your Samsung smartphone. Better than the $29,867 of the Italy of Massimo Bottura -- the guy who drops a fistful of pasta in a boiling pot with mathematical precision. And just above the land of the rising sun. Yep, the shogunate was pretty zen at position 24 with its $32,479.

But Tiger Had Other Plans

Except that Singapore did not manage to keep her currency fixed at that level. In fact over the 30 years since her currency has appreciated quite a bit against the USD. Indeed the average exchange rate in 2015 was 1.3748 to the dollar. That's a 60% overall appreciation which has enabled the Asian Tiger to clock $52,888 per capita and to hop over an impressive list of countries. Like the Germany of Gauss at rank 18, the UK of Newton at rank 13, the Sweden of Borg at 11 and Denmark -- where people take a lot less sick days because they are on their bikes so often -- at position no. 8. So the appreciating currency has enabled Singapore to overtake fifteen top countries in a thirty-year period. At these levels it's difficult to hop over just one country. But Singapore was jumping over one such country on average every two years. Simply amazing.