Bruneau Laurette: The Bigger Political Picture
14.03.2023
Populist opposition figure and petty-bourgeois hero Bruneau Laurette, the minute he became joint-leader of the new political party set up by former “chief chef” in the Jugnauth “lakwizinn” Sherry Singh, came under attack from what was left of his own political base. Others still supporting him were left saying, “Bruneau kone ki li pe fer”, meaning they did not know. Is this what is now masquerading as “politics”?
Laurette paired up with Sherry Singh the moment he was bailed out at the end of February, after being locked up in November when 44 kilos of haschish were found in the boot of his car parked in his open garage. He is living under the severest bail conditions imaginable. Laurette claims the haschish was planted on him. He says it was because he is a political enemy of Prime Minister Jugnauth and because he denounced the head of the Special Striking Team (the new anti-drugs squad Jugnauth set up presumably to begin dissolving the Anti-Drug and Smuggling Unit as called for by the Commission of Inquiry on Drug Trafficking). It is a fact that the various drugs squads in Mauritius – and elsewhere for that matter – do resort to planting drugs on people. Otherwise, the drugs policemen argue – even argue publicly on occasion – they manage to arrest only the small fry, while the public cries out for big fish. Many people that get drugs planted on them, like Bruneau Laurette, unfortunately, then have to depend not on the law for their defense but on their own credibility. And this is anathema to the important legal doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty”; it reverses the burden of proof. (1)
But all this is merely an introduction.
Let us look now at Laurette’s politics, and political credibility, so as to judge him on that. He is too central a figure in the press and on radio to ignore him, politically. And if Zelensky could rise from comedian who plays the piano with his “part” to someone who supposedly gives orders to NATO, surely the owner of a private security firm could rise to be a Prime Minister in a country where all the mainstream parties are in disarray and the working class is not yet mobilized behind its own party?
When Laurette made his surprise alliance with Sherry Singh in their “One Moris”, this provoked half his supporters to abandon him. A previous half had abandoned him, unfairly, because of the drugs charges. Before that, half had left (on the grounds of BZTD instead of BLD) when he cast off his “apolitical” mask and allied with leaders of Labour, the MMM and PMSD. But, this does not mean he won’t be able, under perhaps unexpected circumstances, to make a comeback.
In fact, Laurette’s political credibility should have come under closer scrutiny earlier. Unfortunately, the Press had accorded him a full “press pardon” ever since it pumped him up in 2020. Many in the petty-bourgeoisie had rallied behind him blindly. But, precisely because we live in times when it is important to get the present MSM alliance out of Government, it is equally important, because of the seriousness of the problems in the MSM government, to know exactly who the challenger is – or exactly who the challengers are. What does Laurette represent? In class terms? In programmatic terms? It is not just a question of whether Laurette can help win an election or not, but whether he and his allies represent anything better at all than the MSM.
Sources of Money
Since he claims he will “sanz sistem” and clean things up, Laurette’s sources of finance are relevant.
At and around his bail hearings, Laurette came up with some provisional explanations of where he got his livelihood from, and this had already dented his reputation, even before his new alliance with Singh. He had previously said in interviews that a single “contract” for his security company made him enough money – whether as trainer of police, or as maritime guard – to live on for a year or two. Most people probably gave him the benefit of the doubt on this claim. Anyway, in Court he produced a character witness, presumably the best he could muster, called Eshan Patel, who used to be a Jugnauth Ambassador in Malaysia, who announced, presumably to cover for Laurette’s possible “unexplained wealth”, that he had given Laurette Rs30,000 a month for two years because of their shared views on “ecology”. Outside the Court, Patel explained to the Press that he had a lot of money to give away like this because, inter alia, he had taught at Le Bocage private high school and this brought in a big sum, and he also made money from private tuition. This is clearly weak talk. What makes matters worse is that the witness worked at Le Bocage some 20 years ago, for only a short period, did not then earn a huge amount compared with Rs30,000 a month donations to Laurette, and Le Bocage teachers undertake, rightly, not to give private lessons. This kind of witness is bad for whatever credibility Laurette had.
At the same time, in his own rambling Press session with Nawaaz Noorbux on the day he was bailed out, Laurette said he makes money from, inter alia, gambling on English football. Twice, he says, he won over Rs100,000. But, anyone who claims gambling as a source of revenue immediately discredits himself. Over time, the truth is gamblers lose money. That is a statistical fact. Before that the public did not know he was into gambling. Laurette adds, to make matters worse, that he won a third time but that the SST stole the receipt when they came to arrest him. Mondye! But, perhaps the worst is that people who do launder money inevitably use gambling as their shield against “unexplained wealth” allegations. So, someone as street-wise as Laurette ought to know to avoid this kind of claim. Anyway, all this makes Laurette, unfortunately, look politically more unreliable than ever. He has also said two other people – so far unnamed, to our knowledge – have been giving him Rs20,000 a month each. Presumably they are not witnesses up to the standard of Eshan Patel.
Laurette also says he gets money from the “diaspora”. After Guy Ollivry in 1994-5 sank the country to an all-time low for corruption of the electorate during the by-election in Rose Hill, the very idea of being “financed by the diaspora” got a bad reputation, as it should. Ollivry used money from the “diaspora” to buy food and drinks for his baz all over the constituency, at a level of corruption never seen before. It became current, and is now worse. It turned out the “diaspora” was Teeren Appasamy, the notorious businessman who was a protagonist in the MCB scandal.
The Press had previously reported that a house of Laurette’s had been seized and sold to creditors. Laurette said he had used the family house he had inherited as collateral for a loan, and dismissed the loss as inconsequential. That was, at the time, odd. Not many people think losing a house of so little significance. We should have been thoughtful about that.
Laurette has also conceded that Franklin, arrested and charged with money-laundering and being exposed as central to a huge web of illegal dealings, also on the bedrock of hashish, gave him donations for his populist projects. For example, Franklin gave him a few dozen baby cots, amongst other things, that Laurette then gave away to get political kudos from donating to the needy. We ought to have been warned by this.
Before that, when Bruneau Laurette was a close associate of another populist, Ivan Bibi, the two fell out over an issue to do with Laurette’s source of finance. Ivan Bibi, who said he knew for sure, accused Laurette of being financed by a big Mauritian conglomerate that he named. Laurette sued him for defamation for Rs 50 million. And the two have, since then, become friends again and the case has been withdrawn without explanation, to our knowledge, of whether the original accusation was true or false. Even this fails to dent his reputation.
Politics
Anyway, now Laurette, a previous Jugnauth political agent, is leader of the political party One Moris, alongside Sherry Singh, Jugnauth’s former political right-hand man and Telecom boss.
Before that, Laurette was founder and joint leader in 2022 of Linion Pep Morisien (LPM), the political party of Rama Valayden, Dev Sunnassee, Jean-Claude Barbier, Ivor Tan Yan. But he upped and left almost immediately after founding the party, for reasons left somewhat obscure. He left in a way that was designed to be most hurtful to his colleagues in LPM: he walked out of an LPM public gathering at La Tour Koenig. No programmatic issues were ever mentioned. Laurette’s reputation continued to shine. Most in the petty bourgeoisie were not warned.
So, from populist apolitical leader of the “petty bourgeoisie run amok” – between the two lockdowns and after the Wakashio oil-spill – he has, since then, meandered around, politically-speaking. But he has consistently returned to Ramgoolam and Boolell, to the Labour party. Maybe that is where he and Singh are still heading. Who knows?
And, politically speaking, who cares? What does Laurette represent anyway?
Bruneau Laurette, who announces most of the time, when not trying to ally momentarily with the PMSD and MMM, that he is out to gobble up their electoral bases. So Bérenger and Duval can’t stand him. He is thus a man on course to split the electorates of these two fairly big mainstream opposition parties by grabbing half, and thus to play directly, it follows, into the hands of Prime Minister Jugnauth. Jugnauth’s MSM won the 2019 elections because of the same kind of 3-way split. In this sense, Laurette is Jugnauth’s objective ally. We, in LALIT, are not the first to say so. But, we need to hold two tendencies – even though sometimes apparently opposite – in our heads at the same time. Reality is not always simple. There is electoral victory and defeat. And there has for some 30 years, world-wide, also been the victory (and often defeat soon after) of huge crowds – in most cases with at least tacit, if not real, US support – standing in city squares to get rid of an incumbent repressive government. Laurette is this spectre to Jugnauth, as well as being an objective ally.
So, Bruneau Laurette is also the sworn enemy of Pravind Jugnauth, because he may again bring people to the streets. Pravind Jugnauth, throwing separation of powers to the wind, openly says he wants Laurette locked up pre-trial on the drugs charges, and not given bail. Laurette is, after all, the protagonist of the infamous “BLD” slogan that brought the 100,000 people down into the streets between the two Covid lockdowns and after the Wakashio shipwreck spill, people mainly from those parts of the petty bourgeoisie hurled out of their comfort zones by the pandemic and its public health measures and into a cruel limbo. The date for that event was 29 August 2020. During the day time.
That very night, we saw more of the man Laurette’s murky political side. He was not so apolitical after all.
Not that this had been hidden before. It was just masked by press and others. He was known to be an MSM agent in both 2014 and 2019. He was frustrated about not getting contracts and tenders. And everyone knows about the “disgruntled agent” syndrome. The tragic murder of the embittered MSM agent Soopramanien Kistnen against a backdrop of tenders and contracts has highlighted the syndrome. In fact, Kistnen left a legacy of his “papers” to Bruneau Laurette, a co-disgruntled-agent. People ought to have been warned.
Laurette had, and this is politically important, also already posted any number of photos of himself toting this kind of big gun and that kind of big gun, quite the glorification of the might of hand-weapons. This is not a reassuring advertisement for himself on the political front. We should all have been warned. His photos of himself are more like photos that your political enemy might post against you, if you are, like Laurette, an aspiring politician.
Perhaps even more damning, Laurette publicly advertised the fact that he had, himself, been trained by men from the special forces of the Israeli military apparatus, and he thinks this a good thing to put on his CV. That gives an idea of his role. Were people not warned?
The US Embassy, Israel’s bank-roller, openly supported him – which should have been a warning, too, given that the USA is an illegal occupier of part of Mauritius.
The ICJ, in a case politically represented by Aneerood and then Pravind Jugnauth, has during these same past few years made clear that the UK-USA should withdraw “unconditionally” from “the whole of Chagos, including Diego Garcia.” So, when the USA interferes in Mauritian politics, a red warning flag should fly.
Yet, the petty bourgeoisie – egged on by many in the bourgeois press and at the middle level of the Catholic Church – turned a blind eye to his being a disgruntled agent, a gun-totter, trained by the worst elements of the Israeli state, and egged on by the Embassy of the US occupier of the Republic of Mauritius. The petty bourgeoisie wanted a leader tough enough to take on Pravind Jugnauth. They wanted a leader to mask their own political cowardice. And they got one. They don’t care who he is – a frustrated MSM agent, a mercenary with guns, someone trained by the Israeli state, someone backed by the US Embassy.
We, in LALIT, by contrast, challenge Jugnauth and will continue to challenge him but on the basis of an ongoing political program.
Anyway, then Bruneau Laurette, on the very night of his wildly “successful” march, held a long, lugubrious press conference with his three other “co-organizers”, so people should have been warned about him at this point. One Trishna Balgobin, an importer of whisky, raged on about Jugnauth not being thankful to him. Laurette added a similar grudge, after all he had done for Jugnauth in Constituency No. 8 in 2014 and for Jugnauth’s colleagues Kavi Ramano in No. 14, Joe Lejongard and Subashnee Roy, who he names, in No. 4 in 2019. The third man on the press conference was called Sebastien Lenette and he was in charge of preparing Laurette’s hypnotic little power-point show, with its arrows pointing here and then there and then everywhere, all over a big screen in the most garbled account for the gullible middle classes of how the Wakashio was supposedly either wrecked on purpose as an act of war and Jugnauth was responsible for allowing this invasion, or a was the result of a drug-dealing mission somehow linked to Jugnauth and gone all wrong, or it was all negligence of the Jugnauth Coast Guard, or some immense world-wide naval conspiracy – but any which way, the spill was not the responsibility of the ship-owners, ship assurers, ship’s captain, or even the Japanese State that allows such a vessel free range of the seas, but was the fault of Pravind Jugnauth, therefore the slogan “BLD” that the petty-bourgeoisie-run-amok was chanting in the streets, the very day of this press conference. The fourth person was somewhat more helpless: a woman whose claim to fame was that she had organized the visit to Mauritius of the Pope. The team of four promised to open a “quartier général” in Port-Louis where “nous recevrons tout le monde”. It never materialized. No-one reminded Laurette either. For the next six months Laurette said he would submit his garbled petition to the authorities but never, to our knowledge, did (which is fortunate because it could have been positively dangerous for any of the tens of thousands of signatories.) Again, this omission to submit a petition, without due explanation, is truly politically unforgiveable.
The next day, after the press conference, Malen Oodiah – petty bourgeois opinion leader who has worked for the oligarchs, like Beachcomber and on the Médine “master plan” – threatened to dissociate himself from Laurette if he persisted in keeping company with the likes of the press conference team. The team then evaporated as if it never were. And Laurette’s support from the press and the petty bourgeoisie went ahead full steam. The support from the church, however, at a certain point began to wane.
Bruneau Laurette battled on – firing on all cylinders, pulling all political triggers, on all social fronts – supported, with a straight face by the private radios and bourgeois press, day after unabashed day. Laurette’s remaining links with the leadership of some trade unions wore thinner and thinner and broke. And, though without much support left from the church, itself, on his release on bail, he and his supporters nevertheless thanked mainly God, pointing upwards, for his being released on bail.
To confront the growing theocracy of the Jugnauth regime, we do not need more theocrats. To confront the repression of the Jugnauth regime, we do not need gun-totters. To confront the opaque finances of the Jugnauth MSM, we do not need more murky explanations of finances.
We call on all the opposition parties to publish at least a monthly newspaper or magazine, and to put it on line, too, so that the public can know what their political programs are. Right now, only LALIT has a regular publication. We have had since our inception in 1976. That is the ongoing process of our “program”. A program is not a list of 21 points or 80 points that a party publishes and forgets about. No. It is an ongoing struggle on specific points that everyone gets to understand.
Recent history of real political programs
In fairly recent times, all political parties had their regular publications.
In the hay-day of proper programs, the MMM had a daily called Le Militant. It was distributed at kiosks and also street by street by volunteer MMM members, who sold it door-to-door. When bankrupted by cases, it later appeared as Le Peuple, then again later still as Le Nouveau Militant. The Labour Party had four newspapers in its “giron”. There was Advance, the Ramgoolam tendency, and to its right there was Boolell’s The Nation, and there was Ramlallah’s Fabian-line Mauritius Today, as well as a more left-wing Jagatsing paper for a few years called Mauritius Today. The PMSD had two newspapers supporting it, the bosses’ Le Cerneen, where you could read the capitalists’ political line, and Le Populaire, the Gaetan Duval party newspaper. And Lalit de Klas, was a monthly magazine distributed, like the MMM’s newspaper by Lalit members all over the country, including at the main bus stations, selling on average 1,000 copies a month. This is the only political “organ” that exists today. REVI LALIT now comes out bi-monthly, and the next number is Number 150. For a while, instead of the magazine, there was the Lagazet Lalit de Klas (still our registered name for REVI LALIT) which was a weekly newspaper, or sometimes fortnightly, selling some 2,000 copies up till number 111. At another period, LALIT brought out and distributed an international magazine called News and Views for a few years. Even when it comes to party websites, these, too, other than lalitmauritius.org are non-existant. Labour Party does not seem to have a website at all, just a banal facebook page devoid of program. The MSM has a website and a facebook page, both are devoid of programmatic material or even political positions, unless uttered on video-clips. The MMM, as well as a facebook page, has a website with its political manifesto for the 2019 elections on it. It also has the book L’Histoire d’un Combat, and the party Constitution and a document on the MMM’s fundamental principles. It is better than nothing. But all the statements are vague ones of supposedly principles, and general statements without any political precision. As an example of this vagueness, read this: “(vii) La Defence de l’Integrite Territoriale de notre etat archipel se composant de Maurice, Rodrigues, Agalega et St Brandon, l’archipel de Chagos et Tromelin.” But there is no mention of the ICJ ruling on Chagos and what they intend to do about it, nor even of the UN General Assembly resolution – let alone a word on the US military base. What kinds of a program is that then? The PMSD has a facebook page (without anything programmatic on it) but seems not to have a website. So, even on line, LALIT is the only party with an on-going programme that develops over time.
All this to say, Bruneau Laurette, whether with Sherry Singh, in One Moris, or when he was in LPM, like all the other political parties but LALIT, has no regular publication around which the party’s program evolves, grows, develops, nurtured by party members and responding to the public that follow it.
This kind of populism of Laurette’s is just not useful. Instead of encouraging a conscious struggle for more democracy, for a classless society, for equality and the end of the social hierarchies that divide us, in particular patriarchy and class society, Bruneau Laurette is pure populism. The fact that he raised so much support in the middle classes and in the diaspora is an indication of the mixture of two trends: the corruption of all mainstream political parties that used to represent specific classes and used to be based on specific programs, coupled with peoples’ turning away from politics altogether – from again a mixture of two trends: the rise of cowardice in the middle classes and the turning away from politics towards the vague and undemanding notion of “civil society”.
All this to say, there is no short cut. Political parties must present on-going programs, and the working class must mobilize. We can learn, over recent years, from the working class in Chile, and right now from the working classes of the UK and France. It is because the working class has risen up in strikes over the past few months in the UK that sports reporters like Gary Lineker, and then Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, have been able to stand up against the repression of the Rishi Sunak regime and the BBC bosses, and win. They are working class heroes.
And maybe we can end on the lyrics from prophetic and revolutionary Beatles song, “Working Class Hero”:
“A working class hero is something to be
“A working class hero is something to be“Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.“And you think you're so clever and classless and free“But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see“A working class hero is something to be“A working class hero is something to be“There's room at the top they are telling you still“But first you must learn how to smile as you kill“If you want to be like the folks on the hill“A working class hero is something to be“A working class hero is something to be”
END NOTE
(1) In fact, this is one of the reasons why LALIT has always been favour of the de-criminalization of drug use, whether for medical or social purposes. Getting the police out of the drugs issue is a way to pull the carpet from under the drug mafia’s feet. The mafia thrives in illegality, in functioning in dark spaces, in its symbiosis – if not fusion – with elements of the State apparatus, in its protection money rackets. And, now that cannabis has recently been decriminalized for medical use, and now that all drug users have recently been potentially exempted from criminal charges, it is strange to see this “acharnement” against Bruneau Laurette and others on marijuana charges. It is irrational.
