Every great organisation is driven by a set of core values that helps keep it aligned and true to its mission. Core values are like guard rails. They help avoid departures from the set course and major accidents. They give us directions. The stronger and better built the guard rail, the more effective it is at its core purpose.
This is also true for every great person who has walked this earth. Often times, behind the success, or the principled approach of great people is a set of core values that they seldom, if ever diverge from. This gives the person a personal compass and makes them more predictable. This is how trust is built between people. The stronger the core values of that person, the more we feel we can trust that person.
A country is a very complex organisation. Millions of people are working together towards a common set of goals, be it personal, organisational or national. Unlike an organisation, where development and enforcement of a certain type of behaviour is easier, countries, especially multicultural ones, find it much harder to inspire its people to all work towards and for the common good. If countries are much harder to manage than organisations, should countries not consider having a set of core national values that will help its citizens and their actions in check and ensure that they are not straying away from the common good?
Not many countries can easily present their national core values. Singapore made an attempt at a set of governance values with it’s MPH values of Meritocracy, Pragmatism and Honesty. Australia, a country I know has values loosely tied around fairness, taking it easy and resilience. I was asking myself what were Mauritian values? What are some defining values we all ascribe to? Do we have a set of national core values that we could say is deeply engrained in every Mauritian? My search led me to the conclusion that we don’t yet have a guiding set of values as a country. Respect, for one another and for the different communities that make up our island, a respect built from shared pain, used to be a cornerstone value of our island but it seems to be eroding. And the diminished presence of this important value as a deeply engrained, strategically taught and transmitted, a value that cuts across generations and communities is now making itself felt.
Mauritius has not been immune to what is happening around the world, with the increased intolerance and the deterioration of collaboration, with the increase in extremism and the corresponding decrease in togetherness. We are also facing significant headwinds to our national identity and face a deteriorating national psyche. I believe that it is time that we ask ourselves what should be our core national values, very long term, ‘constitutional’ type values that will transport us into the future in a way that will help us come together once more, as one people, as one nation, in peace, justice and liberty.
If I had to nominate 3 national core values that Mauritius should look to embrace, they would be
Respect – We must learn to respect ourselves, one another, diverging opinions, other faiths, other religious beliefs, once more. This respect was what made Mauritius incredibly beautiful and allowed us to develop a very strong interdependence that would ultimately lead us from the brink of collapse to a thriving society. This respect must start for ourselves. We beat ourselves up too much. This may come from generational abuse, from being told over centuries that we are objects, that we are sub-human, that we are unworthy. Our forefathers suffered this and we still carry some of this trauma. Letting go of this low sense of self-worth, the one that has allowed us to be ruled over by people who have only their own self-interest at heart, would be a good way to unlock the significant potential that our island and its people has, a potential to be a world leading island. Respecting one another and by extension our different religious beliefs and cultures must be a core value we never stray from. We can see what’s happening in India, with the severe degradation of relationships between people who have shared that land for centuries and would not want us to take the same path.
Another core value for me would be Empowerment. It is only through empowerment, personal and of one another, that we have been able to come to where we are. Formal and free education has helped greatly in building empowerment but we are not yet a nation that has designed a system that empowers others. ‘Gro poumon’ is still prevalent on one end of the spectrum while greed and an inability to share and collaborate for the greater good balances the other end of the spectrum. We have a section of our population that has remained enslaved to economic poverty for centuries with only cosmetic attempts made at breaking that cycle. When we begin empowering one another and those stuck at the bottom of the ladder, we will increase our country’s engine capacity and continue to prosper as a nation.
My third and final value would be national unity – The weaknesses in our national identity have for too long been used against us as a people. For too long, those who are smarter than us but with devious thoughts have used our surface differences to divide us and keep us fighting one another. This has been overused by both the economic and the political elite and unless we can learn and understand the modus operandi, we cannot rise above it. If we do understand it, we will be able to rise in a way that will bring those who have for too long ignorantly believed themselves to be part of an elite into the fray and build true national unity. When our kids are taught national unity, Mauritianism, the Mauritian way, from a very early age and grow up with an unshakable belief in that ‘way’, and pass them on in private as in public, we will become a generation that has truly handed something better to the next and the many after that.
I strongly believe that a set of core national, ‘constitutional’ type values will greatly help us reassess our current course and decide if change to the course is required. When in place, they become the sieves that help us understand if decisions we make at national or at personal level empower or disempower, one, part or all.
If you had to nominate 3 core values for Mauritius and it’s people, what would they be?