The crux of the Labour Party’s politics has always rested with the creation of a ‘state bourgeoisie’. The strategy, in broad strokes, has been as follows:  use the state and public banks to prop up and enrich a class of businessmen who would owe their fortune to the party and serve as a financial bulwark to ensure the continuity of its rule. This was an earlier iteration of what the South Africans today call the ANC’s ‘tender-preneurs’.  To make the whole thing work, the party always relied upon bringing together an unstable coalition of allies: dodgy businessmen, unions willing to be bought off with nominations and socio-cultural groups to provide captive audiences for the party. The latter two in the equation usually had to make do with crumbs.

The problem with this strategy is that it has always spectacularly backfired. Money does not equal electoral strength: in 1982, Labour had much deeper pockets and the whole state apparatus but was still wiped out. And again in 2014, Labour and the MMM had deeper pockets but were still trounced by a rag-tag, hastily created coalition of whatever was left over. And rather than being an asset, the party’s proximity to this state bourgeoisie has always been a liability: it has never been able to guarantee electoral victory, but it has never failed to bring grist to the mill to the party’s opponents who pointed to the various rags-to-riches stories within the state bourgeoisie as evidence of Labour’s endemic corruption. We saw this shortly after the MSM came to power in 2014 and the litany of allegations that put Labour on the back foot. In fact, had the MSM been any better at governing, less authoritarian and more magnanimous towards the Labour Party and its leader, Navin Ramgoolam, it is more than likely that Labour would have been simply wiped out (much like the IFB of old). What is more, this strategy has been surprisingly brittle: whenever Labour has lost power, usually the state bourgeoisie has reacted in one of three ways: sections of them went quiet waiting for better days, others bereft of state support were simply ruined while still others simply switched sides (as the state bourgeoisie did in the 1980s, and is today exemplified by the likes of Rakesh Gooljaury). And so the cycle has continued. 

As the Labour Party is salivating at the prospect of simply stepping back into power riding on anti-incumbency against the MSM it can ill-afford to simply return to its shenanigans of the past. In the short-term it may win the next election, but in the longer term, the advantage lies definitively with the MSM. Pravind Jugnauth is much younger and can ride out at least another decade in politics – unlike Ramgoolam. And there is nothing to suggest that once accustomed to power, the younger Jugnauth will not improve (remember Ramgoolam’s first term that ended in the communal conflagration in 1999?). In short, 10 years from now, the MSM will still be led by Pravind Jugnauth whereas it’s unclear who will be heading Labour (assuming that the party survives Navin Ramgoolam’s exit). And if at that time all that Labour has to show for it is yet more Gooljauryesque deals with shady businessmen and relatives of ministers, then there can be no surer recipe for the party’s extinction. 

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