watering hole news - a bit of this and that

Last evening, I went to out to my favorite watering hole to share a glass of milk with friends, ala Rwanda, as usual we got round to discussing the subject of the moment, the very interesting times in which we live. Three points were brought up:

1. the answer to my friend's question: Apparently Mosisili rules the VOTES and Thabane rules the people, thus Thabane can command the people while Mosisili can only appeal to the votes.
   
2. that the government is going to intensify its undermining of the taxi industry, rumour has it that government has ordered more buses in order not to fall victim to the taxi industry again
3. that the formula used to for the calculation of proportional representation seats was completely invalid if ABC was decoupled from LWP and LCD was decoupled from NIP.
   

Of these three points only the later two are interesting.

The government has been talking about smart partnership and public private partnerships (PPP) these are supposed to benefit all stakeholders in that services that should be provided by government such as transport are provided by the private sector in partnership with government; government provides the regulation and the private sector provides the service at a reasonable costs because of the supposedly greater efficiencies that the private sector is able to leverage from their investments. In this situation everybody wins, the service is reliable, efficient and cost effective, the public is happy and government is freed from managing yet another service for which they have neither aptitude nor inclination. (Please note that I am not attempting to describe the taxi industry as its currently constituted, but rather the industry as it could be if all stakeholders took their role seriously.)

What concerns me is that the government's willingness to risk its credibility over such an insignificant issue, the government has not taken the time to engage with the taxi owners and the business community to try and understand why they closed their businesses, as usual government has talked at them and expected compliance. The were a few exhortations on radio, at no point did government say, "look we have the convention centre let us meet there in a few hours and work out a common stance: after all you are losing money we are losing credibility we are in this together." The whole smart partnership and PPP issue will unravel in one fell swoop if government were to go ahead with the rumoured ill thought and reactionary bus scheme. What, after all, would be the point of setting up a business if, government were going to use your taxes to compete with you?

The third point referred to the formula used to calculate the PR seats, my friends insisted the formula "fell apart" if the ABC/LWP and LCD/NIP alliance was not formalised, they insisted the alliances should be formalised and that the the alliance partners should be treated as one entity for the purpose of allocating PR seats. If have already blogged about what the outcome would be if this model was followed. What I found interesting was that my ABC colleagues seem to want to use every advantage at their disposal to get their way. The ABC/LWP alliance loses nothing if the alliance is formalised. The LCD would lose almost all the 21 seats that they have gained from their loose alliance with NIP. What my ABC colleagues are in fact saying is yes, we undermined the spirit of the law, in retrospect we are guilty, could we go back and rectify this situation. My question is would we have this generosity if the tables were reversed?

I have another question, should we reconstitute the Independent Political Authority (IPA)?