Spare a penny for slumdog

MaltaToday’s front-page story on Alan Montanaro elicited the kind of reaction that is usually not reserved for the regular nobodies who fall foul of a publicly-appointed watchdog.

The first reaction from the Drama Outreach charity’s committee and even friends on Facebook was that the anonymous complainant – a whistleblower who spoke to the Commissioner for NGOs – was “malicious”. You could find all sorts of adjectives to ascribe to a whistleblower, but it’s what the result of their complaint that matters here, which the Commissioner found fit to investigate and then rebuke the charity’s president. At law that complainant has every right to remain anonymous.

That we allow our prejudices to blind us to what is important here, a black-on-white rebuke from the Commissioner for NGOs (and one which prompted Drama Outreach to rectify its finances) is only human. Part of the press was aware of the Commissioner’s report, but because Montanaro is a loved personality he was granted a pass on this one. Some may have felt that this was just Alan being who he is.

I understand this feeling: I for one would find it hard to use damning information of otherwise public importance on someone who is a personal friend. On this I’d still owe loyalty to both the readers on whose behalf I must mediate, and my hypothetically malfeasant friend. I would have no choice but to help my friend, as best as possible, to answer to the potentially damaging claims.

But just because Montanaro is a decent chap who makes people laugh, does not mean this excuses his behaviour as the president of a charity assisting Cambodian kids. It’s egregious errors of judgement like these that undermine charities.

This is not about black humour being taken out of context. That it was being said in private was all the more serious to the Commissioner because it betrayed Montanaro’s integrity; as the president of the charity, he may have felt it more appropriate to suspend his sense of humour when talking about the people he is helping. Especially since the potential effects of such comments can damage a charity, the people it helps, and the people who support it. You therefore want to have an idoneous person running the show.

Can you imagine if, a famous humanitarian who heads a charity assisting migrant workers and persecuted minorities and refugees from African countries had to privately whisper, ‘ah well, bloody blacks the lot of them’? It would be curtains. And you can bet your cone-shaped bra that that humanitarian never donned some ball-gown or scripted a jokey-joke to serve as the contextual excuse for such “crude humour”.

And this is what worries me: that friends on Facebook say that Montanaro is “consistently funny”, as if that alone should excuse the leader of a charity from cracking a few on ‘the Other’, the voiceless people he is aiding. What would 'Meng' make of it? Could he understand why the circumstances that turn poverty into the setting for illegal organ harvesting have turned him into a little private joke? Could we then tell him that his welfare exclusively depends on the charitable offshoot of an actor’s performance arts school? ‘Girdle your loins everyone. Your patron has a tsunami of predictable slumdog millionaire jokes: he’s consistently funny.’

A charity leader, a famous one at that, uses his public trust as leverage to solicit money to help people. So a sense of humour cannot be used as a crutch to not to retain integrity even in private moments.

We’ve been equally harsh on those publicly-appointed curmudgeons like Glenn Bedingfield and Mario Philip Azzopardi, whose social media rants against Muslims have been given full vent in the press. Should these people benefit from taxpayers’ money after what they said? No. They should be sacked.

To me, the fact that Alan Montanaro saw it fit to resign allows him to reflect on how the president of a charity should behave and set the example to the rest of his committee. It may well be that he is invited to reconsider the post in time. Everyone deserves second chances.

But God forbid that it should be a formidable sense of humour and national adulation that would grant us the licence to solicit charity while seemingly enjoying a pass to privately take the piss out of the people we are supposed to help.

The last word is about the Commissioner for NGOs, an academic and philosopher whose reputation I need not defend.

When the religious leader Gordon John Manché failed to submit his church’s accounts three years in a row, this front-page story failed to elicit controversy in Malta because Manché is not a loved personality or actor, and his sermons on the end-times are not what people want to hear.

Here was a charismatic person who could leverage his public trust to solicit ‘tithes’ that would, allegedly, finance his own lifestyle as an evangelical pastor. Enter the Commissioner for Voluntary Organisations: a regulator who is actually also there to defend the people who part with their money for such charities and NGOs.