Education Minister Owen Bonnici has spent the morning posing as a 14-year-old secondary school student to make sure children are following Covid-19 guidelines.
Bonnici joined a Form 4 class at San Ġorġ Preca College in Ħamrun. He documented his experience live on Facebook with a camera concealed in the badge of his school blazer.
The minister’s day started at 7am, when he was picked up by the school minibus from his parents’ home in Żejtun.
Putting on an eastern European accent, Bonnici told his fellow passengers that his name was István Erdős, whose family had moved to Malta from Hungary over the summer, “because they had heard that it was the best country in Europe with the best government, especially the education minister.”
The 40-year-old’s cover story also attributed his precociously large build and facial hair to a growth spurt caused by eating copious amounts of goulash.
Once the van arrived at school, Bonnici was placed into Form 4B. The minister-cum-student almost immediately set about enforcing Covid guidelines, taking a tape measure out of his backpack and using it ensure the desks of his nearest classmates were 1.5 metres away.
Over the course of the school day, the minister also rebuked several classmates for momentarily removing their masks to drink water.
However, Bonnici was himself reprimanded, when teachers noticed he had brought his Joseph Muscat lunchbox to school. Guidelines set out by the education and health authorities stipulate that students must bring their lunch to school in plastic bags. Much to his dismay, the lunchbox and the ftira biz-żejt within it were confiscated and subsequently destroyed.
At times, the minister seemed to disappear too far into his role. At one point during the Maths lesson, the teacher asked the class for the answer to a quadratic equation, to which Bonnici loudly replied, ‘Erbgħin elf!’. And during History, he repeatedly interrupted the teacher to ask why she was not teaching the class about Dom Mintoff.
Bonnici’s attempts to ingratiate himself with his classmates also failed. During break time, he attempted to impress them by playing guitar, but one student who seemingly could not bear to listen to yet another Bon Jovi song grabbed the instrument and threw it over a fence.
Things only got worse for the minister when, upon returning to class, another of his peers said he looked like animated character Noddy, prompting Bonnici to burst into tears and storm out of the classroom. He was later picked up by his parents.
The school’s administration said they had not been given prior notice that the minister would be going undercover.
“To be honest, if we sent a 14-year-old boy to act as an undercover Education Minister, he’d probably do a better job that Bonnici,” school head Anya Aquilina told Bis-Serjetà.
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