Patronage appointments to top civil service posts risked politicizing the service permanently

Evidence

It is also evident that no reasonable criteria based on capacity, skillness, experience or educational qualification has been followed in the distribution and appointments for the highest positions in the Civil Service, which have instead been filled only to satisfy immediate political need thus risking to represent a dangerous precedent affecting the stability, independence and guarantee of the Civil Service. It is in fact not to be ignored that if such a system is allowed to be introduced, the Government will always claim the right to transfer or dismiss the Civil Servants regardless of the rights of the latter to a minimum of stability and safeguard in their administrative career. … To this effect the attention of the honourable Members of the National Assembly is called on the spirit of the Law on the Civil Service, of June 7, 1962, which was purposely emanated to guarantee the stability of the civil servants and in order to avoid that the Civil Service should become the passive instrument of political bargaining and interferences with all the imaginable dangerous consequences that can derive to the detriment of the civil servants. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 806

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Somali clan-based patronage politics and the later collapse of state institutions — the seeds of patrimonial rule that undermine the civil service. — connects to: Tammany district bosses ran their wards as personal patronage fiefdoms — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 507; Governors can control merit selection almost as much as direct appointment. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 626; New York patronage civil service produced gross pay inequity and rigged exams — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 301 (+3 more)