Biography

After the Higher School Certificate, Nando Bodha went on to higher education in the French system. He began with the humanities at the Centre universitaire de La Réunion, before moving in 1977 to Université Rennes 2, in Brittany.

In Rennes he specialised in geography and regional planning. In 1981 he defended a dissertation on urban development and public consultation in the Cleunay district of Rennes, supervised by the geographer Michel Phlipponneau. The subject was no academic exercise: how do you transform a city while involving the people who live in it?

That question of planning with the community, of roads, housing and mobility in the service of residents, would return to him more than thirty years later, at the head of the Ministry of Public Infrastructure.

He later added law to his training: a law graduate (LLB) of the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom, he was called to the Mauritian Bar at the turn of the 2000s. Hence the title "Maître" (Me) that accompanies his name today.

Returning to Mauritius in 1981, Nando Bodha taught French at the Lycée La Bourdonnais. The following year he joined the Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation, where he worked as a journalist and television newsreader from 1982 to 1985. His face and voice became familiar in Mauritian homes.

In 1986, at the request of Sir Anerood Jugnauth, he joined the Prime Minister's Office as press attaché. It was the beginning of a relationship of trust, lasting several decades, with the man he regards as his political mentor. He came to see from the inside how the affairs of State are conducted, and how exacting government communication can be.

In 1991 he was appointed Director General of the MBC, a post he held until 1995, leading the public radio and television service of a country in the midst of economic transformation.

At the general election of 20 December 1995, Nando Bodha stood before the voters for the first time, in Constituency No. 6, Grand Baie and Poudre d'Or, for the MSM-RMM alliance. The election ended in a clean sweep for the opposing alliance, which won all 60 seats on the island of Mauritius. He was not elected.

This formative defeat did not drive him away from politics. Within the Mouvement Socialiste Militant he became one of Sir Anerood Jugnauth's closest lieutenants, and would serve for many years as the party's Secretary General, until February 2021.

At the same time, he obtained a law degree (LLB) from the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom and became a barrister. In 1999 he published his first novel, Beaux songes, with Éditions Bénarès, a portrait of rural life in Mauritius.

On 11 September 2000, Nando Bodha was elected Member of Parliament for Constituency No. 16, Vacoas and Floréal, under the banner of the MSM-MMM alliance. This Plaines Wilhems constituency would renew its confidence in him four more times.

A few days later, Sir Anerood Jugnauth entrusted him with the Ministry of Tourism and Leisure. The context was difficult: after the attacks of 11 September 2001, global air travel was plunged into deep crisis. Yet Mauritius as a destination kept growing: tourist arrivals rose from 656,453 in 2000 to 702,018 in 2003, and tourism receipts from Rs 14.2 billion to Rs 19.4 billion, according to official statistics, although no direct link to any specific ministerial measure can be established.

In 2003, under the government of Paul Bérenger, he took over the Ministry of Agriculture. There he faced an issue of vital importance to the country: the reform of the European sugar regime, which threatened the Sugar Protocol from which Mauritius benefited. On 24 January 2005, at an informal meeting of European Agriculture Ministers with the ACP countries and the least developed countries, he spoke, together with Sudan, for the ACP sugar producers, pleading for a sustainable adjustment timetable for vulnerable economies.

Re-elected in No. 16 at the election of 3 July 2005, Nando Bodha sat on the opposition benches. From April 2006 to September 2007 he served as Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly, a constitutional office that made him the government's formal counterpart on behalf of the parliamentary minority.

On 5 May 2010 he was once again re-elected in Vacoas and Floréal, this time as part of the Alliance de l'Avenir. On 11 May he returned to the Ministry of Tourism and Leisure, which he led until 26 July 2011, when the MSM ministers left the government. In 2010 the destination welcomed 934,827 visitors.

These years in opposition and in government gave him a thorough grasp of both sides of parliamentary work: holding public action to account, and carrying it out.

At the election of 10 December 2014, Nando Bodha topped the poll in Constituency No. 16 with 20,201 votes. On 15 December he was appointed Minister of Public Infrastructure and Land Transport in the Alliance Lepep government.

His name remains closely linked to the Metro Express. Under his responsibility the project was approved, Metro Express Ltd was incorporated in 2016, and the design-and-build contract was signed with Larsen & Toubro on 31 July 2017 for Rs 18.8 billion, of which Rs 9.9 billion was financed by a grant from India. The foundation stone was laid in September 2017; the Light Rail Act was passed in 2019; and the first phase, between Port Louis and Rose Hill, was inaugurated on 3 October 2019 by Prime Ministers Pravind Jugnauth and Narendra Modi, with commercial service beginning on 10 January 2020. Mauritius thus regained passenger rail transport, which had disappeared in 1956.

In parallel, he launched the Road Decongestion Programme, presenting its four components to the National Assembly in May 2016: the A1-M1 link and its bridge over the Grand River North West, the Jumbo, Phoenix and Dowlut interchanges, the Ring Road and the Quay D junction. The programme, initially estimated at Rs 34 billion, was scaled back to Rs 15 billion; Korea Expressway Corporation then carried out its technical and financial audit, formalised by a memorandum of understanding on 5 April 2016. Work on Phoenix and the A1-M1 began in March and April 2018.

He also had the Terre Rouge–Verdun road repaired after it was cut by a landslide in 2015, with the support of French experts; it reopened in July 2019. Finally, he reformed road safety, with a new penalty system in 2015 and the Road Traffic (Amendment) Act 2018, and modernised public transport: 328 buses renewed, new-generation bus shelters and online payment of road tax.

In 2016 the Republic made him a Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean (GCSK) for his contribution in the political and social fields.

On 22 March 2019, Nando Bodha was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and International Trade, while retaining Public Infrastructure until the general election. Re-elected in No. 16 on 7 November 2019, he was reappointed to lead the country's diplomacy on 12 November.

His term coincided with a historic sequence for Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. On 12 July 2019, before the National Assembly, he recounted the uprooting of the Chagossians, recalled the Rs 50 million provision made in the Budget to prepare for resettlement, and referred to the Mauritian motion tabled at the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. In January 2021, a Special Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea found that Mauritius's sovereignty over the Chagos can be inferred from the determinations of the International Court of Justice.

On trade, Mauritius ratified the Agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area on 30 September 2019. The Mauritius–China Free Trade Agreement, the first concluded by Beijing with an African country and negotiated under his predecessor, was signed in October 2019 and came into force on 1 January 2021.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, his ministry organised the repatriation of Mauritians stranded abroad, some two thousand of whom were working on cruise ships. After the grounding of the Wakashio and the oil spill that followed, on 13 December 2020 he received Japan's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Toshimitsu Motegi, in Mauritius for talks on maritime safety, environmental restoration and support for fishermen.

On 6 February 2021, Nando Bodha resigned as Minister of Foreign Affairs, as Secretary General of the MSM and from all party bodies. He explained that the culture of power and the way the MSM was being run no longer reflected the values and principles that had always defined his political career, and that the ideals which had guided him since he first stood alongside Sir Anerood Jugnauth were no longer there. He kept his seat as Member for Vacoas and Floréal and crossed to the opposition benches.

On 30 April 2021 he formed the Alliance de l'Espoir, a joint opposition platform, with Paul Bérenger, Xavier-Luc Duval and Roshi Bhadain. On 23 July 2021, at the Caudan Arts Centre in Port Louis, he launched the Rassemblement Mauricien, surrounded by twenty-five founding members. The party made "bringing people together" its cardinal value; its symbol is a flame, its colours terracotta and blue.

In Parliament and in the press he championed the themes at the heart of his commitment: good governance, the independence of institutions, term limits for the Prime Minister, the fight against drugs, and purchasing power. In November 2023 he launched, with Rama Valayden, the Linion Moris coalition, which brings together four extra-parliamentary parties, and then, on 12 October 2024, the Linion Reform alliance with Roshi Bhadain's Reform Party, which named him its candidate for Prime Minister for the first half of the term.

At the general election of 10 November 2024 he stood again in No. 16. The election was won by the Alliance du Changement, which took 60 of the 62 seats; Nando Bodha was not re-elected.

Since November 2024, Nando Bodha has led the Rassemblement Mauricien outside Parliament with the same steadfastness. He speaks out on the major national debates: sovereignty over the Chagos, which he considers incomplete for as long as Diego Garcia remains a foreign military base; pension reform, on which he calls for national consultation and for the pensionable age to remain at 60; and the cost of living, with a proposed quality-price shield covering at least forty essential products.

He advocates electoral reform guaranteeing fairer representation, term limits for the Prime Minister and the independence of institutions. In 2026 he put forward a strategy, the "One Trillion Rupee Economy", to grow the Mauritian economy to one trillion rupees within five years, and called on opposition forces to unite around an alternative model of governance.

In September 2026, alongside Me Kailash Trilochun, he challenged the National Crime Agency Bill in the name of the separation of powers and civil liberties. Forty years after he first entered public life, his line has not changed: to serve Mauritius with values.

A politician, Nando Bodha is also a French-language novelist. In 1999 he published Beaux songes with Éditions Bénarès, a novel of rural Mauritian life that captures the precarity and dignity of modest families in the face of hardship, such as the passing of a cyclone.

In 2018 he published L'Archipel du Sagrin with Immedia, a novel about the uprooting of the Chagossian people. The book interweaves two narratives: the exile of families driven from their islands to Mauritius, and the establishment of the American base on Diego Garcia. It appeared just as the International Court of Justice was examining the Chagos question.

In both books, the writer meets the public figure: giving a voice to those whom history has left behind.