If you remember your Aesop's Fables, you will recall The Mountain in Labour: “A mountain had gone into labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain gave birth to a mouse.” That is exactly what jumps to mind after all the nice talk about electoral reforms which resulted in lining up a hotchpotch of rehashed ideas in a four-page text that looked more like a joke than a consultation document. Why?

The proposals were thrown at us at a very quick press conference in a detached, nonchalant manner. There was no passion, no faith, no conviction. The whole exercise looked as if the bombastically paid advisers just concocted a shoddy formula more or less the same way a bad pupil scribbles something meaningless in his exercise book with the hope that the teacher does not complain that he did not do his homework. It’s clear that the Einsteins who wasted their time working on the reform tried very hard to serve us an unpalatable meal that they didn’t want us to eat. Why?

You will also have noticed how quickly the spin doctors went back to sleep. We were getting ready to hear them try and convince everyone that Pravind Jugnauth – who inherited the seat of prime minister from his father – had suddenly found the magic formula to put an end to all the ills of our electoral system by having 18 more MPs we didn’t directly vote for waltz into our National Assembly to contribute to bleeding us white. There was none of that. We almost started missing the propaganda machines that worked overtime for the Chagos chapter. They couldn’t even get started this time! Why?

To begin with, look at the semantics: The Best Loser System will be replaced by the ‘revolutionary’ Best Loser Seats (Seriously?) with the additional handicap that the candidates who will be nominated to those seats won’t be sanctioned by the electorate but handpicked by the party leaders on the basis – I presume – of er… ethnicity, with the additional qualification of the length of one’s tongue once it touches the boots.

And, as if the number of MPs and ministers we have was not disproportionate enough, we will now have more people sitting in our National Assembly congratulating themselves for lowering the national IQ every time they open their mouths and we will waste even more money on them.  More Teeluckdarrys, more Tarolahs, more Rutnahs, and possibly even a few Mungroos and Gowressoos will have their pockets bulge at our expense through salaries, cars, overseas trips, junketeering and per diem, without even having to be elected! If they manage to bootlick their way into the National Assembly twice, we end up paying for their pension too… All this without the system serving the purpose it was meant for: that of having the percentage of votes translate into seats, thus reducing the gap between the winning and losing parties. Why?

Ah, but we will force political parties to field more women. Big deal! If parties start looking for a quota of women by hook or by crook, just for the sake of boasting that they are fielding more women, we might end up with more Gurib-Fakims, more Boygahs, more Hanoomanjees, more Montys, more Jadoo-Jaunbocus… Why?

Basically what the Einsteins sitting at the Prime Minister’s Office have produced, after months of hibernation, is a proposal where the mathematics are wrong, the system is less democratic, the cost is higher and the problems are the same if not worse! Why would a political party serve the population a proposal almost inviting them to reject it hook, line and sinker?

That is the ball you should keep your eyes on in the next few weeks. The answer may soon come your way!

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