IN THE end, the mini-reshuffle of the cabinet turned into farce, with the President and the outgoing Commerce and Industry Minister Praxoulla Antoniadou in dispute over whether she had been sacked or had resigned.
Ms Antoniadou insisted she had never resigned, forcing the government spokesman to release a letter she had been sent on March 14 by the president in which he stated that he had received her resignation in a telephone conversation. He also reprimanded her for failing “after so many days” to submit her resignation “officially and in writing.”
Was the president being economical with the truth, in claiming that she submitted her resignation over the phone? We suspect that Christofias had asked the minister, over the phone, to submit a resignation letter that could be filed and used if and when the president deemed it necessary. Apparently, Christofias has made it a practice to have resignation letters from all his ministers on file.
It is a resoundingly meaningless arrangement considering the president has the constitutional right to sack a minister whenever he decides to do so. What is the point of a resignation letter on file? Is the government afraid that a minister would sue for wrongful dismissal and demand compensation in the courts? Or does the president think the minister’s reputation would be safeguarded if his or her removal from the government was not the result of being fired.
This approach does not exactly promote the notion of transparency. The people should know if a minister was fired because the president was not happy with his/her work, rather than being subjected to this theatre about resignation. Ms Antoniadou, to her credit, refused to take part in this theatre, not sending the president the letter he asked for and insisting that she had not resigned. Why should she?
A resignation would be an admission that she was not doing her job properly, an admission she was not prepared to make. In fact, in her letter to the president, she listed her achievements and accused ministerial colleagues of undermining her despite her pursuing the government policy. It was all rather shabby, the president’s insistence on staging this ‘resignation’ theatre backfiring, and turning a routine replacement of a minister into a joke.
This was preferable, for the president, to admitting making a mistake in appointing Ms Antoniadou last August at such an important ministry. But was she sacked because she was not up to the job or because she behaved like a government minister rather than as an AKEL apparatchik?
