Open letter to the new PM

 

“Gouverner pour le peuple – avec le peuple”

Dear Sir Anerood Jugnauth

Congratulations on your election victory, but there is something you need to know. Many of us didn’t vote for you. We voted against Ramgoolam. If you had been allied with him, you would surely have been humiliated instead of Bérenger. Do we have blind faith in you? No. It was not without reason that you were crushed 60-0 in 1995. In 2000, you were given another chance, but your party failed to live up to expectations and was replaced once more. Of course, the alternative turned out to be even worse. Will you do better this time? We hope so.

Corruption, Caste and Accountability

Do you trust Ramgoolam?

At the end of his first term as Prime Minister in 2000, Dr Navin Ramgoolam’s Government paved the way for the establishment of the Economic Crime Office to investigate corruption in both the private and public sectors.  Shortly after Sir Anerood Jugnauth ousted him, it was closed down and replaced with the toothless ICAC with no power to investigate crimes of the past. Was it a coincidence that a leading member of Jugnauth’s cabinet was under investigation at the time?

Hiding the truth from public scrutiny has become a characteristic of successive Prime Ministers and it seems that the longer they have tasted power, the more desperate they become. An article in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, colourfully entitled “Like baboons, our elected leaders are literally addicted to power“, explains why:

Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get ‘promoted’ to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly. This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power…But too much power – and hence too much dopamine – can disrupt normal cognition and emotion, leading to gross errors of judgement and imperviousness to risk, not to mention huge egocentricity and lack of empathy for others.

After 14 years as Prime Minister, is Ramgoolam going to even greater lengths than Jugnauth in order to feed his dopamine addiction?