Politics and our politicians

My dear Billy, Henry Kissinger, the former American Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, once remarked that “Ninety per cent of politicians give the other ten per cent a bad reputation.” General de Gaulle is reported to have observed that “Politics is too serious a matter to be left in the hands of politicians.” Naturally de Gaulle was speaking more as a statesman than a mere politician, but unfortunately he didn’t say in whose hands politics should be entrusted. Politics is the systematic organisation of hatred, said some wise person. If you look at it closely in our country, although it would appear that the whole population is concerned, yet you would find that politics isn’t worrying the population one-tenth as much as where to park the car. Those who are elected, or selected to do the job – to create the policies, make the decisions, and superintend their execution – are extremely unlikely to be the ones best qualified and equipped with the right skills for the tasks. And here I am not particularly thinking of the guy who goes by the name of Roshi Bhadain, my dear Billy. The constant threat to the very foundations of a democracy like ours is that the wrong people are often voted for the wrong reasons. It is only the stabilizing effect of the division of powers between the legislative, the judiciary and the executive that keeps politicians in line. But it would appear that this division of powers is now being destabilized by a greedy legislative that is seeking to hijack some of the powers of the judiciary. This is likely to lead to the breakdown of democracy. In Mauritius, it is an open secret that politicians have always sought to interfere in domains which are alien to their fields of operation or competency, my dear Billy. Theoretically, in democracies, the will of more than half the population is supposed to be expressed in the political process, through the election of candidates, leaving aside the question of whether the man in the street, with his relative lack of information and his native prejudices, is the one who is best qualified to decide how, and by whom, the country should be run. The most common trap is to offer direct bribes to the electorate, my dear Billy, but there are also intangible ones in the forms of increased welfare facilities and concessions which the national coffers are later unable to pay for. Election pledges are then either met, at the expense of national bankruptcy, or not met, in which case the elected members have to engage in political manoeuvring to cover up their broken promises. This in turn, results in a gradual loss of credibility for the politicians in question. The electorate turns cynical, loses confidence in its representatives, and finally becomes indifferent to the entire system. And that opens for the door to still further abuses. At the same time, since it is reasonably fashionable to accuse politicians of duplicity and hypocrisy, if not downright corruption, and since there are no apparent remedies for it, it is all too easy to lose sight of the need for non-stop vigilance over the political system, my dear Billy. Equally unfortunately, while this sort of complacency exists, the public is content merely to demand: “What does it matter if politicians are all sanctimonious hypocrites and double-dealers, so long as they run the country properly? Attitudes like this present two key problems of their own. In the first place, when people talk of “running it to MY relative advantage.” Secondly, and this is perhaps the most damning indictment of public complacency, such attitudes do actually encourage politicians to develop the wrong set of skills – skills that help them to get elected, then to manage to stay in office once they have been elected. And these skills, as you well know my dear Billy, are not the skills that are needed to manage a society or an economy. Few people would disagree with Lord Acton’s observation that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” And while it is true to say that no one enters politics at all seriously unless they are seeking power, politicians’ motives for seeking power differ greatly according to the political system and its cultural background, not to mention financial and social benefits. Our Western type democracy allows the most bizarre and dangerous people to rise to power by ostensibly legitimate means. However unless anarchy is to prevail, someone or some group has to run a country’s social and economic affairs. It should not therefore be too much to ask of a civilized society that its leaders be honourable, but most of all, honest. Unfortunately, voters almost always get the politicians they deserve, my dear Billy.