- Trendy again - 14th March 2025
- Jobs for the boys (and girls…) - 13th March 2025
- Pinball wizard - 12th March 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), a mainstay of journalism for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry has always been exposing ineptitude when friends and family were appointed to senior positions, and now this is underlined by disturbing news of how exactly this may be happening in Syria.
With no knowledge of what is really going on, I invariably start thinking the best of a person appointed to an important job.
Then as the evidence grows, it becomes clear that he or she is not up to it, so you then look in more detail at the individual’s background, because often the person is a relation or good friend of the man (and it usually IS a man) in charge.
Regrettably it appears that this is occurring now in Syria, where it seems that loyalty to the regime matters more than ability.
In the ravaged country, there is a weakness for nepotism.
New leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has made his older brother, Maher, the health minister, and assigned him a former general’s five-storey home in Damascus’s swanky West Mezzeh district.
He is said to have appointed another brother, Hazem, who previously ran a Pepsi bottling franchise, to head the investment authority.
A brother-in-law is the new governor of Damascus.
Many functionaries from Idlib, the province Mr Sharaa previously ran as head of an Islamist militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have been shoehorned into senior jobs, from Damascus’s new chief of police to the head of the department of antiquities.
The new manager of all Syria’s industrial zones previously ran a tiny one in Idlib.
The new dean of political science at Damascus University used to be dean of Idlib University.
Typically the new arrivals sport flashy watches and lots of hair gel—like Mr Sharaa himself.
None of this may matter (although not having an open competition could be of concern to some, but since they have just ousted a brutal dictator we can let them off that one!).
But are they any good?!
The memories of Phil’s, astonishing award-winning career in journalism (during which exposing incompetence and nepotism was paramount), while he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Tomorrow – how during his long career, Phil has always tried to keep up with the latest trends, and now this is put centre stage by the extraordinary response online to the fake AI video of Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu sitting on sun loungers.
