The tempest that has been unleashed around the Foundation for Tomorrow’s Schools (FTS) and the Ministry of Education by the sudden resignation of FTS CEO Phillip Rizzo is yet another example of government’s chickens coming home to roost.
Since the beginning of this legislature, the government has been warned, including by this newspaper, that its all-to-liberal approach to the appointment of positions of trust, especially when compounded with nepotism, would come back to haunt it. Even the least suspicious reading of the FTS debacle would indicate that this was a disaster waiting the happen. Here is a likely scenario:
Edward Caruana, a canvasser of Education Minister Evarist Bartolo, is selected as ‘advisor’, in effect liaising with the contractors that are upgrading State schools and building new ones. He happens to be the brother of the ministry’s Permanent Secretary. The FTS is under extreme pressure to complete its works, with a number of deadlines missed.
Corners are cut, ‘trusted’ persons allowed to proceed on their own initiative to get things done quickly, checks and balances ignored. An allegation of corrupt practice is made with respect to works in the Gozo Sixth Form. The Permanent Secretary cannot bring himself to set the police on his own brother. The alleged whistle-blower ends up sued for slander. Police are now probing the original allegation.
A year later a new CEO is brought in, another ‘person of trust’, who almost immediately identifies what he alleges to be corruption involving the same Edward Caruana. He resigns because he claims the minister and incoming FTS chairman have tried to put obstacles to his taking appropriate action, and says he has evidence of this. They reject his accusations, saying they have evidence of the exact opposite.
Mr Bartolo has been let down and betrayed, by his own admission, by three of his top persons of thrust: his canvasser and FTS technical advisor Edward Caruana, who is accused of corruption; his permanent secretary, who did not pursue corruption allegations against his brother Edward, and now Philip Rizzo, the FTS CEO whose motivation for resigning he has placed squarely on the minister’s shoulders.
Yet, Mr Bartolo’s sense of betrayal and his casting off of Edward Caruana and Mr Rizzo does not absolve him of his responsibilities. The whole point of the minister circumventing an open and transparent recruitment process for top posts by installing people of his own trust is that he is personally carrying the responsibility for that selection. He is telling the public that he is acting as personal guarantor for his selectees.
Thus, Bartolo’s first two selectees here have not only betrayed him – they have betrayed the public who trusted him to make the right choice. No Teflon can protect Minister Bartolo from the stain of the betrayal of his persons of trust. He is guilty by virtue of the failure of the guarantee he provided. He must now pay the price.
At the very least, he is guilty of grave errors of judgement in his choices for these top positions. At the worst, he is being accused of obstruction of justice. Quite apart from the police inquiries on the corruption allegation, given the nature of this tangled web it behoves the Prime Minister to set up a truly independent inquiry to determine how close to home is the scenario described earlier, and the political responsibility of the minister and his Permanent Secretary.
When in 2010 the European Commission suspended the funding of certain programmes due to administrative mismanagement – not corruption – three senior public officials, including the Permanent Secretary at the time, were made to resign because their position was considered untenable. When in the same year the then parliamentary secretary Chris Said was accused of perjury, he resigned until he cleared his name.
What is sauce for the Nationalist goose is sauce for the Labour gander. At the very least, Mr Bartolo and Permanent Secretary Joseph Caruana should step aside to ensure that the independent inquiry not only works serenely, but is seen transparently to do so. In any fully functioning western democracy, they would by now be already considering their position.