Chetan Ramchurn
It is not going well. Certainly not for Ramgoolam Junior, nor, indeed, for the country. Law and order are increasingly in tatters, communalism is clearly on the rise, with several name-and-shame expeditions directed by extremist militias against those they deem to have transgressed their religious precepts. Economic liberalisation is proceeding at full throttle, leaving the population increasingly bereft of protection; the welfare state is under attack, and leadership is conspicuously missing in action.
This week, when facing PNQs from the Opposition over his volte-face on the pension issue, the Prime Minister failed to maintain his composure. Visibly nettled, lashing out with everything but intelligence and humility, he presented a sorry spectacle.
Bay of Pigs and the BRP
Ramgoolam is no JFK. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy resisted the urge to launch an attack, thereby averting a nuclear maelstrom. At the height of the Kaya riots, our present Prime Minister was nowhere to be seen.
The present galimatias surrounding the pension issue, however, has much in common with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in that both were driven to disaster by what Irving Janis termed groupthink. The NeuroLeadership Institute defines the concept as “the tendency of groups to become so swept up in a spirit of camaraderie and belonging that they stifle their doubts, silence dissenters, and rush to consensus without fully analysing ideas.”
Surrounded by the future President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, and his Whiz Kids, just as Ramgoolam was surrounded by a preponderance of private-sector technocrats on the BRP issue, the errors simply accumulated.
The crucial difference? JFK possessed the humility to ask, “How could we have been so stupid?” Janis (1971) observed that the President’s inner circle “comprised one of the greatest arrays of intellectual talent in the history of the American government—Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Douglas Dillon, Robert Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Allen Dulles and others.” Our Prime Minister, who appeared rather pleased to enumerate the credentials of the experts advising him on the pension issue, may likewise have believed he had assembled a similarly formidable team capable of producing the best solution. How mistaken he was.
In his seminal work, Janis identified eight symptoms of groupthink.
The first was the illusion of invulnerability.
The second was collective rationalisation, whereby decision-makers discounted “warnings and other forms of negative feedback that, taken seriously, might lead the group members to reconsider their assumptions each time they recommit themselves to past decisions.”
The third was a belief in the inherent morality of the group, which, in the BRP affair, may well have been supplanted by what was perceived to be the best interests of the private sector.
The fourth was stereotyping, a symptom that appears even more pronounced in the Mauritian case than during the planning of the Cuban landing. Janis noted that victims and perpetrators of groupthink often held stereotyped views of their opponents, believing them to be “too weak or too stupid to deal effectively with whatever attempts the ingroup makes to defeat their purposes, no matter how risky the attempts are.” That this government chose to conclude its latest Budget Speech with a quotation from an avowed pro-laissez-faire, anti-socialist and anti-taxation thinker such as Bastiat should come as no surprise.
The fifth symptom was direct pressure on dissenters, applied to “any individual who questions the group’s shared illusions or the validity of the arguments supporting a policy alternative favoured by the majority.” Was the Prime Minister’s stance, and that of those around him, during the meeting with Subron—who questioned whether certain pensioners would be excluded from the pension net—an illustration of this very trait?
The remaining symptoms are self-censorship, which, in the Mauritian case, would scarcely have been necessary, given that the present Head of Government had himself been harping about the pension system’s unsustainability since 2025; the illusion of unanimity, which, in the domestic context, would hardly have posed a problem among a majority of oligarchy-friendly members; and finally, mindguards, individuals who “protect the leader and fellow members from adverse information that might break the complacency they shared about the effectiveness and morality of past decisions.” In the Mauritian case, the individual who led the country to the flat-tax model may well have fulfilled that role.
Blaming the experts seems out of place. A Prime Minister has to ensure that those with whom he surrounds himself will advise him in such a way that the greater good is achieved.
Farcical
How can MPs, seemingly delighted when the means test was announced on Friday, as evidenced by their table-thumping extravaganza, once again indulge in comical table-walloping on Monday when it was abandoned? That the Prime Minister has lost the plot leaves little room for doubt, but why are there so many seasoned figures eager to prolong the country’s misery? A few members of the governing alliance were courageous enough to express their distaste for the amateurish manner in which the pension issue had been handled. Let us now hope that they will not be punished for echoing what the majority of the population feels.
As farcical as the behaviour of some of our MPs was the Budget Speech itself. Some half-baked measures sprinkled with a few fashionable buzzwords (fintech, digital finance, oceanic research et al.) do not a new Mauritius make. Merely repeating AI does not transform Mauritius into a regional hub for artificial intelligence and cloud services. Likewise, including the Blue Economy in the Budget Speech does not create a new industry. More than ever, the Government seems out of touch with our reality. The perception emanating from those in office is that the have-nots lived lavishly between 2014 and 2024, so much so that they now need to be brought back to reality through harsh measures.
Hardly surprisingly, since a number of lackeys close to the oligarchy now occupy positions within the circles of power, nothing will be done to ensure that the billions handed to them during Covid are recouped. This is the roadmap so vehemently desired by capitalists, as is the exclusion of dividends from what constitutes income when calculating pension entitlement for the means test. Good riddance.
An even greater disgrace could have befallen the present Government had the means test been locked in. Indeed, a Cabinet member revealed that it had even been contemplated that this folly should be entrenched in the Constitution.
An ersatz serious exercise, this Budget nevertheless contains some much-needed measures. Seemingly inspired by the No Child Left Behind Act of the Bush years, the present Government aims to make education as inclusive as possible (“deep conviction is that no child should be left behind”). Many felt that more should have been done to reduce the number of feminicides. We should have looked at what Spain has achieved in this regard following the Ana Orantes case, and how feminicides subsequently fell by a third. Spain established specialised courts dealing exclusively with violence against women, with complaints processed rapidly, in most cases within 72 hours.
Under Spanish legislation, state authorities intervene proactively and pursue legal action ex officio. In this model, the police and prosecutors may arrest suspects and initiate criminal proceedings on the basis of third-party reports, notwithstanding the victim’s wish to withdraw the complaint.
More importantly, since he was at the helm when it was enacted, would Ramgoolam not be wise, as Minister of Finance, to reassess the flat-tax regime? Does he not feel that we have become a magnet for the Guptas, Mamys, Agliottis and Sobrinhos? He has to look hard at himself in the mirror and begin owning up to his many mistakes. Do we continue to flirt with the reputation of being a rogue state, or do we disembark from an unsustainable model and embark upon more solid foundations?
Lobbying for a low-tax jurisdiction on behalf of the global business sector is intense. It is ubiquitous across media channels, where paid sponsorships are increasingly commonplace. A strong presence online and in the traditional media does not make for a respectable, sustainable and sovereign state.
On the Budget and its disconnect from reality, to paraphrase Proudhon, who, when debating with Bastiat, said:
“Your intelligence is asleep, or rather it has never been awake. You are a man for whom logic does not exist. You do not hear anything, you do not understand anything. You are without philosophy, without science, without humanity. Your ability to reason, like your ability to pay attention and make comparisons, is zero.”
Minister of Finance, it is time to go back to the drawing board before it is too late.
