As the National Assembly resumes its sittings, it is often ignored what Private Parliamentary Secretaries do and how much of a recent addition to the Mauritian parliamentary system they actually are.

The rise of the PPS system

As the National Assembly has just resumed its sittings coming back from a recess, the role of Private Parliamentary Secretaries (PPS) is often ignored. What is it that they do, and how the PPS system itself is such a recent addition to the Mauritian parliament? At Independence, Mauritius got a constitution that originally outlined that a government would be made up of a cabinet of 14 ministers and five Parliamentary Secretaries (PS).

The role of the PS was to “assist ministers in the performance of their duties”. However, following the establishment of the 1969 coalition between the Labour Party and the PMSD, the cabinet was expanded to 20 ministers and the number of PS rose to ten. That meant that nearly half of all the MPs were actually members of the executive and part of the government. This state of affairs continued until the entry of the MMM-PSM government in 1982. What the new government did was to cut down the size of the executive within parliament by reducing the number of ministers in cabinet down to 18 and amending the constitution to abolish the post of PS.

Today’s PPS trace their origin back to the aftermath of the 1987 election. In September that year, the government announced that it was starting a policy of appointing PPS in parliament – ten in January 1988. The curious thing was that this was not done through amending the constitution or even coming up with a new law. The only legal existence of a PPS was through a simple 1987 amendment to the Legislative Assembly Allowances Act for special allowances to be paid to any MP nominated by the government as a PPS. “Each PPS is supposed to oversee development projects such as road and drain construction on an average of two constituencies,” says former president and ex-speaker of the National Assembly Kailash Purryag. “That is their role.”

There was a clear political logic behind the introduction of the PPS system in 1987. That election was won by a large MSMLabour- PMSD coalition that ended up winning 44 seats against an MMM-MTDFTS coalition that won 24 seats. On the one hand, creating new executive positions in parliament was one way of satisfying coalition partners: “There is always a fierce competition for posts, and you have to accommodate people who have not got ministries,” explains Dr. Rajen Narsinghen, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Mauritius. “The PPS system was designed as one way to satisfy the maximum number of people.”

On the other hand, the political problems that the MSM led by Sir Anerood Jugnauth had faced from its own backbenchers and internal party dissidents in the run-up to the 1987 election had convinced him that idle backbenchers were a problem. One way to resolve it was to bring them into the executive itself: “Since PPS are not allowed to ask questions, the more PPS you appoint, the more you reduce the number of backbenchers. This is a way to tame your own side and exercise internal control on the government side,” adds Narsinghen.

How the PPS system is different

While the opposition MMM pointed to the system of PPS as simply a subtle way of re-introducing the old PPS they had abolished in 1982, with the MSM able to counter that the UK parliament too had private parliamentary secretaries, the reality was that the PPS in Mauritius is quite a different thing from both. While it may share a name with the post in the UK parliament, the fact is that PPS in the UK and in Mauritius are quite different. In the UK parliament, a PPS is an MP that simply acts as an assistant to a minister without getting any extra allowances for that. MPs in the UK choose to do that because a PPS post is seen as a stepping stone to eventually securing a ministerial portfolio. A PPS in the UK has little role to play in directing development projects. In Mauritius, it’s the exact opposite; a PPS is paid more than a normal MP and oversees development projects in constituencies assigned to him.

How the PPS system was different from the older system of PS was that the old PS were attached to specific ministries overlooking the implementation of policies and projects at a national level. A PPS, on the other hand, is not attached to any ministry and works only to coordinate projects of the government’s National Development Unit (NDU) at the level of a constituency. “The role of the PPS is much more political,” says constitutional lawyer Milan Meetarbhan.

After the MSM lost power in 1995, a Labour-MMM government tried to roll back the PPS system. In a 1996 constitutional amendment, they introduced the notion of a ‘junior minister’. Unlike the PPS, a junior minister would work directly with ministries at the national level. It was a return to the system of pre-1982 PS. The job description was also identical, like the PS of old, the junior ministers were there “to assist ministers in the performance of their duties”. This rollback did not last. In 2000, the MSM-MMM government stopped hiring junior ministers and instead went back to the 1987-1995 system of nominating government MPs as PPS instead. The strange situation today is that although section 66 of the constitution still talks about junior ministers, “but instead of junior ministers, the government appoints PPS as part of the executive,” says Purryag. As Narsinghen says, “In Mauritius there has been this back and forth over this.”

The PPS system was initially started after the 1987 elections to deal with a specific political context.

The lack of rules

One obvious problem that dogs the system of PPS, both between 1987-1995 and since its re-introduction in 2000, is that it’s pretty much up to the government to decide how many PPS it chooses to hire and what the PPS are supposed to do. This became clear from the very outset of the PPS system back in 1987. During debates on the introduction of the PPS system back on December 8, 1987, then-Prime Minister Sir Anerood Jugnauth stated, “I can recommend the appointment of 20 if I want.” This problem of the lack of limits has been carried forward since the reintroduction of the system after 2000. “There is this loophole where the constitution talks about junior ministers, but we appoint PPS,” says Narsinghen. “It’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed. When it comes to PPS, we are in a legal no-man’s land.”

While section 66(2) of the constitution says that “the number of junior ministers shall not exceed 10,” there are a couple of obvious issues with treating junior ministers and PPS as interchangeable terms, and assuming that limitations when it comes to junior ministers apply automatically to PPS. For one thing, PPS are not junior ministers. And secondly, the jobs they do are very different: junior ministers were supposed to work with ministries to oversee projects at the national level. PPS work with the NDU to oversee projects in specific political constituencies. “There is no legal text or statutory obligation to set any limit on how many PPS can be appointed by a government. This was created solely by the executive and there is nothing stopping a government from deciding to appoint all of its backbenchers as PPS,” Meetarbhan points out.

The lack of rules governing the role of a PPS also means that the system is often used as a way of keeping civil servants under the thumb of the government. Unlike clearly defined rules that define the relationship between civil servants and a minister, there is nothing clearly outlining what kind of relationship a civil servant at the NDU is supposed to have with a PPS. “In practice what this means is that civil servants working on development projects do so under the general direction of a government-appointed PPS, who is the lead person when it comes to development in a constituency,” says Meetarbhan. “It’s an unhealthy situation. Why can’t civil servants work with all MPs elected in a constituency? That would have more democratic rather than just government MPs and PPS.”

Not only is the PPS system a way for the government to continue its domination of the civil bureaucracy, by allowing government-appointed PPS a say in development projects across the 20 constituencies of the island of Mauritius, but it also breeds frustrations within the civil service and local government bodies. “Every time a project in a constituency is complete, all you see is a PPS showing up and blowing his own trumpet, particularly so in constituencies not controlled by the government where the opposition is squeezed out,” says Narsinghen.

Source: Cost of Parliamentary Politics in Mauritius, co-authored by Roukaya Kasenally and Ramola Ramtohul, September 2020.

Politics and the PPS

The PPS system also works as a political campaigning tool, to try to skew the politics within constituencies away from opposition parties and towards the government of the day. “Already the idea that development is linked to electoral constituencies is a political one,” says Meetarbhan. “Constituencies are for elections and their boundaries have nothing to do with development. The system is designed to extract political capital out of development projects financed by public money.” In the past, Mauritius has had periods where MPs were handpicked by the government. By allowing a government to simply parachute in MPs who have been elected elsewhere to oversee development in constituencies not their own, the PPS system hints at a return to that system. “The objective of the PPS system is political, and it enables the government of the day to ‘infiltrate’ constituencies that do not support or have not elected MPs from the ruling party,” argues Meetarbhan. “And instead of an opposition MP having a say over development in his own constituency, the PPS system allows the government to substitute them with a PPS.”

Just how a PPS can become embroiled in constituency-level politics has been obvious for quite some time. Remember the case of Ashok Jugnauth on electoral bribery during the 2005 election? One of the grounds on which his election was deemed invalid was because he was found to have misrepresented a government decision to expand the Muslim section of Circonstance cemetery. What is often forgotten is that the ball got rolling with the PPS overseeing constituency No8 at the time, Deven Nagalingum. In February 2005, he wrote to then-Prime Minister Paul Bérenger about expanding the cemetery by buying two arpents of land from Mon-Désert- Alma Sugar Estate. Nagalingum stated that associations in No8 did not have the money to finance the expansion of the cemetery and urged the then Prime Minister to “kindly consider intervening personally to expedite matters given that the project has been lingering on for so long and that there are ethnic susceptibilities at stake”. It was this letter from the PPS that led the government at the time to note that it had received a proposal from the housing ministry to expand the cemetery by buying land from the sugar estate for Rs2 million. This was the decision that was misrepresented by Ashok Jugnauth as one that had already been taken by the government and that helped eventually nail him for electoral bribery.

So, now the question becomes how PPS as the exclusive creations of governments since 2000 operating in parliament and in constituencies without any law or rules have been allowed to go on unchallenged thus far? Certainly, a case can be made that opposition MPs suffer because having a government MP appointed as a PPS and operating in an opposition-dominated constituency interferes with the work of opposition MPs supposed to represent and oversee that constituency. But, says Meetarbhan, “for some reason, opposition MPs have lived with this for 20 years now.” While Narsinghen is not in favour of doing away with the PPS system outright, “at the very least, we need to come up with some rules of how the PPS system deals with civil servants, local government bodies and the opposition in their constituencies.”