Appointment in Senior Positions Should be Merit-based, King Tells Interior Minister

King Mohammed VI instructed the Interior Minister to ensure that appointments in senior positions should be merit-based in order to boost efficiency and rationalize human resources.

The King reiterated that the constitutional principles of equal opportunities and accountability should be upheld.

In a message in February to participants in the National Forum on the Senior Civil Service, the King reaffirmed the need for putting the public service at the heart of Morocco’s new development model with a view to keeping up with the changes taking place domestically and internationally.

In December 2017, Morocco’s court of auditors issued a scathing report drawing a diagnosis of the dysfunctions of the civil service.

The report showed that the civil service is plagued by multiple hindrances that compromise its performance, and noted that salary hikes are neither commensurate with performance nor with Morocco’s GDP growth.

The report notes that the public sector in Morocco employs 860,253 people of whom 583,071 people work in the civil service, 94.4% of them work in the ministry of education followed by the ministries of health (8.9%), higher education (4%) and the interior (2.5%).

The report notes that civil servants remain disproportionately distributed over the national territory with a national coverage rate of 17 employees for 1000 citizens.