Mauritius has always had a problem when it comes to merit within the public bureaucracy, riddled as it is with clientelism. Now matters seem to have only gotten worse with family members and yes-men being appointed at the head of the Bank of Mauritius (BoM). So why does Mauritius have a meritocracy problem in the state bureaucracy? 

This in large part is because of two key features. The first is why politics revolves around the mere distribution of state jobs and contracts. Most critics label this as a pre-modern facet of Mauritian democracy, or dismiss it as simple tribalism with a modern face. This, however, is not quite true. This is a very modern phenomenon. After all, you need to buy votes only in systems where votes actually matter. In the case of Mauritius, this has everything to do with the lack of a deep democratic tradition – the first elections under universal suffrage were conducted only as recently as 1959 and the general level of illiteracy when democracy took root here. Politicians at the time found that the only way to get people interested in voting was not programmes or manifestoes, but rather through buying their votes through promising direct individual benefits, state jobs and public works contracts. This is not unique to Mauritius: before the great depression era in the US, recent immigrants from Italy and Ireland were similarly enticed by corrupt party machines to participate in politics. 

This, however, only explains why politicians in Mauritius wanted to corrupt and pack the public service with their followers, and not why they succeeded in doing so. Here, the second key feature comes in: in patronage-ridden countries like Italy and Greece, their democracies were corrupt because democracy came before the establishment of strong, modern state bureaucracies that could resist being taken over by a corrupt political class. In Germany, on the other hand, it was exactly the opposite. It’s not that German politicians were more honest, but simply that the strong state bureaucracy in Germany was already well-established there before democracy took root and could push back against the politicians’ blandishments.  That is why Greece is Greece and Germany is Germany. 

Within Mauritius, independence came with a shake-up of the bureaucracy as well. The British colonial government after the Second World War did not need to buy votes and so inched towards greater meritocratic hiring in the public services in Mauritius by introducing a Public Services Commission, examinations for the civil cadre or the expansion of the state machinery into rural areas and so on. The idea was to prise public services out of the domination of the oligarchy and open it up to more talent. Independence however was met by the exit of British officials and large scale emigration of civil servants who had run Mauritius’ public services until then. What this meant is that when Mauritius fell into the hands of local political parties who wanted to attract voters by giving them state jobs, the state bureaucracy itself was largely headless and in no position to resist this encroachment. 

The result was a great irony: the meritocracy encouraged by the British allowed the rise of a new political-administrative class, but when they got power, they kicked the ladder away. They decided who got into the public services. They made key appointments. They reduced the civil service to a mere gaggle of yes-men and little Eichmanns devoid of any sense of civic responsibility so long as they got a pay cheque and a duty free car. Predictably, this has led to a degeneration in standards within the public services over time. Taken across generations, this degeneration is now accepted as normal, even now when it’s family.