In an attempt at showing us all how dynamic and proactive they are and how they leap about running the country, certain members of the government have taken to springing themselves unannounced on various parts of their portfolio.
The Transport Minister has said he has taken rides on public buses “incognito” – because, you know, it’s possible for a government minister to go about incognito when his face is on the news all the time (perhaps he was wearing dark glasses, a big black hat, and a false moustache). Bet he hasn’t done that in a long while, and that if he has done so recently, no bus driver yelled obscenities at him and made goat-like noises as was done to an elderly woman passenger the other day.
The Police Minister likes to pop into the prisons unannounced from time to time, not to meet and greet his former clients – cocaine traffickers, murderers and such – but to try to catch prison guards and other officials napping on the job or playing truant. Now he’s going to give them impromptu urine tests, too.
The Health Minister, however, isn’t springing himself on the general hospital (far too busy giggling and throwing buckets of water over his boss’s head in between taking long distance flights to China to visit the wife) because it is he who would be besieged immediately with protest and complaint, and not the other way around. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, that we should have a proper health minister but the only person we ever see talking about health-related matters is his underling, Health Secretary Chris Fearne, now the self-appointed Vanquisher of Bottles. It strikes me that Fearne is being used as a decoy: they’ve shoved him out there into the middle of the field (and he has cooperated enthusiastically) so that all the rifles of the press are trained on him and not on the real prey, Konrad Mizzi. Yet the buck does not stop with Chris Fearne. He answers to Mizzi.
The latest member of government to leap with relish into this business of treating staff members and management of various entities like a bunch of children at boarding school whose dormitories must be patrolled is the very loud Justyne Caruana, the Elderly Secretary (that sounds wrong, doesn’t it). She has taken to dropping in unannounced on old people’s homes – and no, she does not arrive by army helicopter or by bus with her colleague Joe Mizzi, but by chauffeur-driven car like the rest of them. Laughably, she has described these visits as “raids”, using the terminology of police action and law enforcement and revealing a highly dysfunctional attitude towards people who are not even her own employees. She is probably the sort who scatters loose coins around the house to check whether her cleaner picks them up and takes them.
“We have made specific raids on food quality,” she told a newspaper. I hate to say it, but it’s an attitude typical of her background, like those people who suddenly acquire a servant or two and proceed to spy on them, set traps for them, seek to catch them out, boss them around and speak to them rudely and aggressively. If the Elderly Secretary has reason to believe that the quality of food being served in old people’s homes is not what it should be, then pouncing on kitchen staff and saying ‘Aha, caught you!’ is not the way to go about it. By far the better way, the proper management way, the adult way, is to call the people in charge to her office and have a thorough discussion about it, with minutes taken and tasks listed. But I have the strangest feeling that this way of thinking is beyond Justyne Caruana and that it is not part of her culture anyway.
The interesting thing is that the newspaper to which the Elderly Secretary has spoken about all this has presented her behaviour to its readers as admirable, proactive and virtuous, when it is nothing of the sort. It is just plain inefficiency and poor management. You get nowhere by springing surprises on people; you just make them detest you, wish to undermine you and refuse to cooperate with you if they can help it. Caruana needs to learn that you can only get good results by bringing people on board and not by making them feel that they are the problem and that they are disliked for it. There’s certainly a lot of growing up to be done.
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