The people who work for the Broadcasting Authority are paying the price for the Prime Minister’s carefully contrived malice in appointing Tanya Borg Cardona chairman of the Broadcasting Authority. 

Mrs Borg Cardona has no work or education track record to speak of, when that position requires somebody with both, and with specialised knowledge over and above. She hasn’t worked or earned her living in any shape or form since she married in the 1970s, and before that she was a secretary in the days when all you were required to do was type letters and answer the phone. This would be bad enough – shades of the Soviet era when illiterate farm-boys were put in charge of ‘art and culture’ departments. But what is worse that Mrs Borg Cardona is incredibly autocratic, bossy and arrogant with it. Employees can’t take arrogant bosses at the best of times, but when the arrogance is coupled with ignorance, you have a mutiny on your hands. And that is exactly what has happened.

The Broadcasting Authority’s employees have called in their union, started industrial action, and are now escalating it. They gathered outside parliament and handed letters of protest to the Prime Minister, who brushed their complaints aside because he is directly responsible for the mess, and to the Opposition leader, who made the right noises but needs to up the ante on this one. Mrs Borg Cardona, who is not the CEO and does not have executive status at the authority, is calling the shots all the same. By her own admission, she knows nothing about broadcasting or the Constitutional requirements of the authority she chairs, and her main concern appears to be interior decoration and office aesthetics. The tipping-point came when she cleared one woman’s desk by scooping everything into a bin and shouting at her to keep it that way. Apparently, she was the quietest woman in the office and unable to fight back because of her temperament. Then Mrs Borg Cardona emailed everyone else and threatened them with the same treatment if they didn’t keep their desks tidy. Meanwhile, she has made arrangements to move the Broadcasting Authority’s offices to a building in Valletta, which is being done up for the purpose – except that it is too small and staff say it is also unsuitable. The current offices in Hamrun are being vacated to accommodate Christian Cardona, the Minister for the Economy, who is also deputy leader of the Labour Party and will find it very convenient to be next door to the Labour Party’s headquarters now that we are in election mode already.

Anybody else but Konrad Mizzi and Christian Cardona himself would have resigned in Mrs Borg Cardona’s position. The staff hate you and are refusing to cooperate, there is industrial action, work isn’t getting done, there is no clear way ahead, and the authority you are meant to chair has been completely disrupted precisely because of you. So what do you do? You go. You hand in your resignation letter to the Prime Minister, explaining that your presence is now detrimental to the proper functioning of the organisation you chair, and you step down immediately. But not Mrs Borg Cardona. The reasons why she is unfit for that position are the very same reasons that render her unable to see why she should resign at once. She has absolutely no idea that when the chairman becomes a problem and disturbs the organisation, then the chairman must go.

 

This couldn’t have happened at a worse time, which makes me think that the Prime Minister’s actions are deliberate, first in selecting Mrs Borg Cardona and now in refusing to ask for her resignation or so much as talk her down. The Broadcasting Authority comes into its own during election year, when the demands on it increase, its key function being to ensure that the political parties are properly represented on the public service broadcaster and that nobody steps out of line. It also holds its own televised political debates. The Labour Party has said already that it will fire up its campaign engines in three months’ time. If Mrs Borg Cardona is still Broadcasting Authority chairman then, and the employees are still up in arms, it’s going to be a free-for-all, with TVM and Radio Malta firmly in the control of the Labour Party by proxy and directly through appointments made by the government. But that was probably the idea all along.