Means-Testing Pensions -- Beware Another Ramgoolam “Plan B”
23.06.2026
Exactly a year ago, everyone in the working class was enraged about the raising of the “universal pension” age qualification from 60 to 65 years, and the Government suspended it. Then Ramgoolam came up with his no-doubt pre-prepared “Plan B”: getting a thin end of the wedge into the door of “means testing” for those from 60 to 65. And they got away with this. Or thought they had.
On Friday, Ramgoolam got his Plan A through the First and Second Readings of the Budget at about 7 o’clock at night.
The Bill is a wrecking ball. It introduces “means testing” for the whole of old-age pensions. To get the pension, you would have to get through the bureaucratic hoop of proving you have less than “x” other income. Pensions, the Bill adds, can begin as late as when you turn 70 years old!
All the Government-side politicians went home pleased as punch on Friday, generally just as satisfied as the smugly smiling, sold-out since 2004, disgraced ex-member of LALIT turned first trade union caudillo then Ramgoolam Social Security Minister Ashok Subron said in public that he is.
The Ministers and all their political agents then met the wall of reality: People are furious.
The working class, in its broadest sense, detests, utterly loathes “means-tests” like this one being introduced. It used to be called the “poor law” and it was the cause of the mass uprisings of 1937 and 1943 that won the universal pensions long before Independence.
More recently, when the 2000-2005 MSM-MMM Government (with Aneerood Jugnauth and then Bérenger, each as Prime Minister) introduced “means tests” for old-age pensions, LALIT ran a nation-wide campaign, our regional committees meeting with Village Councils in most of the over 130 or so villages. This caused the Labour Party to have to campaign on the issues. And this is how Labour ended up ousting the “invincible” MSM-MMM Government, when the 2005 General Elections came up. The Labour Party platform was to do away with the “means tests” already being implemented for old-age pensions. They were elected, and did away with the means-testing.
Anyway, Ramgoolam has a short memory.
And so, Friday the Budget legislation Bill sailed through First and Second Readings.
And by 9:30 am Monday morning, there was already a Cabinet meeting at the Treasury Building. Ramgoolam went straight to the National Assembly and by noon, the “means test” was “frozen”.
LALIT is now warning all in the trade union movement – leaders and members – to BEWARE of some other new, already pre-prepared “Plan B”.
We need, as Deepak Benydin put it, to go back to universal pensions at 60 years of age, and institute a “claw-back” to get the money to pay for this by taxing both high earners, and those who own capital, and from private companies profits and wealth.
And, in addition, as former Labour MP Nita Deerpalsing rightly says, by stimulating production, in particular agriculture and fishing and industries allied to these two, as well as renewable energy production – on a vast scale. This move away from the thievery of “finance capital” (money lost in the labyrinths of secretive banking, off-shore investments, futures, real-estate deals, insurance rip-offs, and other forms of parasitic investment into making money from money, just like the gambling industry itself does) and move into “productive capital” will solve the problem in the medium and long term. The way to do it is for the Government to, firstly, force the sugar estate bosses, who once were honest enough to call themselves “Oligarchs”, to invest in agriculture – putting one-third, say, of their land under basic food crops, and dedicating one-third of their infra-structure to industries allied to agriculture. And secondly for the Government to force the hotel bosses to invest in fishing, again a proportion of their capital. And to do this at once. If the capitalists refuse, or “zwe mor”, then the Government must raise Bonds and invest itself, taking over the land and infrastructure. At the same time, all permits to parcel up agricultural land, sell it to millionaires from abroad, and convert it to malls and mansions, golf-courses, and gated communities must be not just frozen, but prohibited by the Constitution.
The advisors to the Ministers must learn a bit of proper economics, starting with four realities they seem too dim-witted to recognize when they advise the Prime Minister and his colleagues:
1. In accounting there are two columns you can alter when you have a growing deficit. You can cut spending, for example on the working classes’ pensions OR you can increase taxes on the lazy and rich classes’ income and wealth instead. It is so obvious. There is always this choice. Either you make the poorish poorer, or you make the rich poorer. You get to choose.
2. The percentage of the total budget spent on, say, pensions depends on two things, not just on the one thing of how much the pensions cost. It is one figure over another figure. It also depends on the other figure, i.e. how much the economy actually produces, tangible things, and real services. If the entire budget produces more, and if these are more useful things, then the percentage of the budget spent on pensions, for example, decreases. Hooray! It is a no-brainer that the advisors to Government just cannot seem to understand. Is everyone in power getting the Trump syndrome, or what? (The increased production will at the same time benefit the balance of payments, which is the real test. It will reduce imports, and may, if it is well-planned, help exports – both of which, in any case, will increase foreign currency reserves.)
3. With the advent of the much-vaunted AI (which is, by the way, ruinous in terms of energy-and-water usage and ruinous in terms of freedom from surveillance), there will be much less work to be done in society. AI will replace most factory and transport workers, as well as most accountants, economists, actuaries and lawyers for a start. So, we should be pleased that there is an ageing population. All the youngsters, if there were so many, would not get jobs in the AI-planned future, anyway, according to the predictions of the AI people, themselves.
4. The costly bureaucracy of “means-testing – which is added to the insult to human dignity of being forced to go prove to some office building that you are poor enough to merit a pension – is much higher if you take the choice of “targeting” the working classes (in the broad sense) whose families make up at least 90% of the population in order to dole out the pension to, instead of “targeting” the owning classes, in particular the oligarchs and finance capitalist parasites, that together make up at the very most 10% of the population. It is arithmetically speaking 9 times cheaper to “target” the well-off and tax them, than to target the working masses for their pensions.
The aim of all social policy should be towards more human equality – in terms of earnings, and in terms of what people own. It is simple as that. The Ramgoolam wanted to increase the inequality! And they thought the masses would not realize that was what they were doing. They soon found out they were wrong. But they won’t give up easily. They are, remember, in the sway of and in the pay of the minority of the super-rich.
Conclusion
LALIT advises that we all need to “watch out” for the Government’s “Plan B” that is lying in wait to trap the working class leaders. We need to watch out that any new plan respects these four criteria, instead of the mysterious, secret arguments of the Government’s advisors, who all seem to be “éminences grises” of the private sector.
The only way we can win is by each federation ensuring all its member trade unions are understanding the issues enough to mobilize successfully. And each union has to spend time making sure all its members are able to put forward arguments to the whole of the non-unionized broader masses. This process of meeting in person, on and near the work-site, and discussing issues is what in LALIT we call mobilization.
Our aim must be:
Short-term: To mobilize enough for force Government to target the rich and tax them to pay for budget spending on the welfare state.
Medium and Long Term: To mobilize enough to force the Government to force the land owners and owners of capital to invest in production, and mobilize enough to force the Government, itself, to invest in production, if the bosses refuse.
The relative independence the country will gain from more equality and from new production will help with the external factors that are impoverishing the working class. We cannot ignore the external nature of the increase in the price of energy and food. We must produce them. Then we do not have to beg for “blood money” from genocidal States like the USA and UK over Chagos. The UK and USA already owe reparations for past illegal occupation.
The entire working class needs to understand all these related things much better than the Government’s own advisors do.
