Deepa BHOOKHUN
29 October 2007
column
Port Louis — Here is a little Monday morning story for you. This is the story of a little country that has the ambition to climb out of mediocrity and how it fails. I don't take credit for the story because it wasn't born out of my vivid imagination and, to tell you the truth, even I with my warped sense of the ridicule couldn't have achieved such an epitome of bad taste.
Once upon a time, there was a government and there were a few prisons with a lot of detainees. This government decided to appoint a commissioner of prisons because it had decided that the previous one was not good enough. Not that he didn't know his job - in fact he knew it very well - but he had to face the terrible fact that, in this little country, everybody knew his job better than him.
So a new commissioner was appointed despite opposition from relevant quarters. And the new man thus got to work. But alas, as fate would have it, he soon realised that most of his efforts were in vain. Now this didn't surprise people who knew enough about prisons because they knew that the right things weren't being done and because those things weren't done, the situation was bound to be volatile.
So, when trouble started pointing its ugly nose, it was decided by the Prime minister's office that the best way to deal with the situation was to undermine the head of the Prisons service. So, some commission that nobody had ever heard of was granted permission to visit the prisons and, on the basis of what it saw, recommended the closing down of the maximum-security prison better known as La Bastille.
That recommendation was treated as an order given by God Almighty himself and, without a thought for the consequences of that decision, somebody at the PMO decided to order that La Bastille be shut down. And what was bound to happen, happened. Let's say, it wasn't pretty.
And because undermining someone is such a good sport, PMO's SCE Raj Mudhoo announced in great pomp that he would hire a woman to run the women's prisons. Somebody must have a played a dirty trick on him and forgot to tell him that this has been the case for the last fifteen or more years. He also happily and with gusto told whoever was listening - the commissioner of prisons being one of them - about his other plans for the prisons.
The SCE who likes to lecture on management, you see, forgot the part where it says that if one wants an organisation to work, one shouldn't undermine the boss! So, because of this defect in the SCE's memory, the commissioner of prisons is to continue his figurative role as commissioner while the SCE who has absolutely no experience in prison management continues to pat his gigantic ego!
This is the secret of the little country's success! The end.
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