Let’s consider three cases: 1) The Franklin drug affair and the judiciary’s extradition order; 2) The criminal handling of Belal’s passage last Monday; 3) The chaotic scenes at the airport.

The way our so-called competent authorities reacted to those three events could fall under what is called inaptocracy elsewhere. The etymology of the word includes the adjective “inapt” and the Greek term “kratos,” meaning force or authority.

Inaptocracy goes beyond the simple incompetence of a government in dealing with issues like drug trafficking and its harmful ramifications, natural disasters, and the management of planes, flights, and passenger flows. The definition in English, according to Oxford, provides an interesting insight: “a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid.”

Before applying to nation-states, inaptocracy, in political science, mainly referred to the absence of a global governance capable of tackling transnational issues. By each continuing to increase their GDP and economic growth, we collectively lose sight of the ecological and environmental problems we cause: climate crisis and its meteorological impacts, pandemics and equitable vaccination, all-around pollution, loss of biodiversity and overexploitation of natural resources, food insecurity, pension systems doomed to fail with an aging population, especially when coupled with a short-termist tax system, in countries like Mauritius, where inaptocracy reigns supreme.

In November 2022, the world population reached 8,000,000,000 (eight billion). While it took humanity hundreds of thousands of years to reach one billion of us, the size increased sevenfold in 200 years; in 2011, the seven billion mark was crossed. Ten years later, we were at 7.9 billion. According to UN projections, we will be 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and 10.9 billion in 2100.

To avoid sinking into collective depression, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs gathers detailed statistics from different continents and countries. Because, firstly, the rise in world population does not mean all populations are increasing. In many cases, as in China, India, and Mauritius, the population is declining because the fertility rate cannot exceed the replacement rate of 2.1. “Having accurate estimates of population trends and forecasts about future changes also help countries to formulate and implement policies. The pace of growth of the global population will continue to decline in the coming decades, with the world population being 20-30 percent larger in 2050 than in 2020,” highlights UNDESA in its latest report.

Jean d’Ormesson, in discussing inaptocracy, criticizes both the welfare model (which he denounced in France in 2012) and the so-called democratic election system: “Inaptocracy is a system of government where the least capable to govern are elected by the least capable of producing and where other members of society least able to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscation of wealth and labor from a continually diminishing number of producers.” He is among those who believe that inaptocracy rests on two principles that govern society: 1) the Peter Principle (“every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence”), with the consequence: “over time, every position will be occupied by an incompetent incapable of assuming responsibility”; 2) the Dilbert Principle (“the least competent are systematically assigned to the positions where they can do the least damage: management”).

The question we then ask ourselves: is it democracy or autocracy with a Mauritian twist, where competence is no longer an ingredient used, while the officials form an oligarchy keen on perpetuating their caste…