For a small largely rural constituency Ayre & Michael had already thrown up seven candidates before the announcement of Dr Sosthene Boussougou on the very last day to register and declare. Since then Dr Boussougou has, amongst other things, gone on to demand reparations from the Chinese Government for the economic damage and the alleged murder of Manx citizens via COVID-19. We suppose that as an election pledge its an interesting one which could certainly square off the current IOM Government budget deficit and Steam Packet borrowings all in one go - although the chances of its ultimate success may well raise a degree of scepticism amongst Ayre & Michael voters.
Dr Sosthene Boussougou's video clip demanding reparations from China on Facebook:
The self proclaimed sporadic teacher, and passionate devotee of Jesus, also lists his other pledges as being to boost education and build a railway network that the people of the north can use for TT and MGP. All entirely sensible stuff as we are sure readers will agree. Why bother with getting the buses in Jurby running right when we could be spending fifty million or so building a railway network for the north for people to use for three weeks a year.
The COVID-19 compensation demand against the Chinese Government whilst a rather left-field and speculative way of trying to address our fragile post covid economy is fairly unsurprising given that almost the entire internet activity of Dr Boussougou seems to consist of overly optimistic fundraising campaigns and cash demands on various platforms such as Just Giving and Kickstarter for such matters as erecting a life-sized bronze statute to his wife (which raised £64 of a pledged goal of £5,000), to paying for his nephews school fees, to raising money for a rather bizarre X-Factor like Education Academy which was punted on Kickstarter a few years back and which raised the princely sum of £0.00.
A link to Dr Boussougou's Kickstarter page:
Therefore it does seem to be that whatever problem exists in life Dr Boussougou believes that getting other people to pay for it is most certainly the best way to go and we suppose if nothing else highlighting these failed historic attempts at crowdfunding might result in a few of Gods children throwing a couple of extra quid his way.
The above observations aside its nice to see a highly motivated and enthusiastic candidate for Keys come forward at the last minute - although rather like another Ayre & Michael candidate we suspect that a lot of his enthusiasm does appear to come from being tapped by the Jesus stick a little bit too hard. But he does have a lot of ground to cover being the very last candidate to declare and so we wish him all the very best on the campaign trail. The record all time low turn out in Ayre & Michael is 39 votes set by Liberal Vannin candidate Pat Ayres in 2016 and so we trust that Dr Boussougou might beat this despite the late start - and perhaps with enough similarly enthused Jesus devotees behind him he might not actually end up bottom of the poll. Equally assuming the Chinese Communist Party might ultimately cough up a few billion in corona-virus reparations we also look forward to there being more than enough money left over for his proposed northern commuter train network.
Pictured: Some of the numerous fund raising campaigns of Dr Sosthene Boussougou.
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