One of the media stories that perturbed me of late was the one about certain examiners colluding and taking payments to ensure people passed their driving tests. First of all it is very worrying because apparently five out of the six examiners are involved in this sorry tale and, when you have that level of intense collusion, it is disgraceful in itself and very hard to uncover.

Sadly though, the public is not even that shocked. After you hear stories of judges being accused, (at this stage at least of adjusting sentences for drug traffickers in exchange for a pittance of a payment when you consider the seriousness of drug trafficking as a crime), very little can disturb and surprise us anymore.

But another cause of concern is the way certain sections of the media are handling this story, and I don’t mean just parts of the political parties’ media, which delight in playing partisan ping pong, but also the few independent(ish!) media we have in this country. The campaign is up and running with calls for CEOs or ministers to resign. And why not you might say. However, we should examine a bit more precisely where this will take us, whether it would reduce levels of corruption if the bosses always had to resign if the juniors did wrong, whether this is remotely fair, and whether this all just makes it even harder to persuade anyone half decent from the private sector to do a stint in the public sector as a CEO or chairman or whatever, when they know that one of the big risks, even if they do absolutely no wrong, is to have your photograph plastered on the newspaper with nasty headlines, your reputation destroyed, and much more?

In essence, should the people who have nothing at all to do with the alleged offences be made to leave because of these staff who serve under them, or perhaps even worse, are unnecessarily lambasted by the media?

Let’s look at what happens in the private sector when there is abuse, or corruption or more, which believe me, does exist too, although the media only ever investigates the public sector, as this information on the private sector is kept away from the media’s tentacles. In the private sector for example, you do get cases of wrongdoings as well, which are pretty similar in essence to what was discovered at ADT, although stories of petty or major abuse in the private sector don’t normally surface in the public domain at all do they.

Are the managers and chief executives of banks say, automatically asked to resign if a clerk is found to be abusing his position? Does the CEO have to resign because it was discovered that a manager had for example presented false claims to beef up a loan, and not actually spent that money on say house improvements as she/he claimed, and perhaps even forging a signature in the process (all just hypothetical stories from here and abroad of course)?

None of this happens. The abuser is dealt with, perhaps by the courts too, but there are no calls for the heads to resign in such cases. All of us who manage people know how important trust is in an organisation. Your eyes have to be open, but there has to be trust too, otherwise paranoia and a hounding atmosphere will set in and destroy any organisation. So what happened at ADT can happen to anyone anywhere.

You really have to pity the people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, managing people who had weaved a web of deceit as thick as a basket of rope around them. Should we really victimise the management as savagely as has happened?

Besides everything else, the real offenders get off scot-free, at least from the harassment. What kind of message does that send out? That whatever wrong you do it is your boss who will face the humiliation if you happen to work, and if the abuse happens, in the public sector? Abusers in the private sector may be charged in court, but I have not seen their photos naming and shaming them anywhere. I see the photographs of the chief executive or a minister. Now I am not saying one has no responsibility for what goes on, but should this public hanging/crucifixion go on? This applies to whatever the political colour of the minister concerned, now and in the future.

Of course people who are in politics, or political animals, are used to this and go in for it with their eyes wide open. They also have an army of people and the party machinery to protect them when things go wrong. Other people who take management jobs in the public sector don’t though, and their reward for working in the public sector and taking on some of the most difficult challenges is to end up being publicly crucified, while the real perpetrators of the wrongdoing escape this public humiliation totally!

Will this kind of media harassment of the management lead to less corruption or more covering up? Will it lead to less or more junior staff taking payments in what I can I think I can justifiably call this commission country. We have a lot of problems sure, but perhaps some of the angry young men and women in the media today need to understand the difference between managing an organisation and reporting on events, and crucify those who do the actual wrong, rather than the much softer target of the bod on top, particularly when this only happens in the public sector, and is emphatically not the way the private sector deals with these problems at all...

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