One of the most if not the most important bureaucratic tasks of a government head of entity is a yearly form that needs to be filled out and sent to the Ministry of Finances. It involves many other related documents which need to be written in detail and this is the yearly budget estimates form. Every year, heads of entities have to act as salesmen to the mandarins at the Ministry of Finances to tap the funds for their proposed projects.
Why is Police Commissioner Angelo Gafa pointing out the obvious that the police need more resources to combat domestic violence? I’m not convinced by the idea that Angelo Gafa would have been rejected by the MFIN if he asked for more resources from the Ministry of Finance on such a critical and important problem of our society that is preventing the violent deaths of women. Yet, such a proposal would have been accompanied by a new recruitment drive with the police corps, a campaign to boost morale,e and also a plan to increase their salaries. CEOs could call it a total strategic overhaul and give it big names or whatever, but the point is that the chief of the head entity is always first and foremost responsible to acquire the resources he or she needs to run the entity efficiently. In order to spend these resources, one has to have a plan.
Maybe, and then again, I know what the problem may be. Angelo Gafa may be a typical robot bureaucrat and doesn’t even understand what his role entails. He may expect that the government is there to approach him and throw money at the police simply because it is the right thing to do, but that’s not how the government machinery works. Unless you are a corrupt minister or an entity that needs money for corruption and nepotism such as the Malta Tourism Authority, the only way the Ministry of Finances will allocate money to your entity is if you fight for it and prove that the money will be used efficiently in a detailed and a thoroughly planned project. There is no other way. As I said, the mandarins at the Ministry of Finances don’t just allocate money simply because of the inherent values or morality of your needs.
I am a very skeptical person but I rarely come to conclusions very quickly. I have followed the police commissioner’s work and his statements regularly. With the current political and legal backdrop, I am more than ever convinced that the Office of the Prime Minister chose Angelo Gafa, a trusted Muscatian, because they knew in advance that he was going to fail. And the constant negative events which keep being inflicted upon the police are surely and squarely the responsibility, first and foremost of the chief.
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