Feasting in the jungle

One particular problem with Maltese politics is that, far too often, the parties behave as if they were warring tribes, competing for the privilege of running to the best of their ability. The wars are fought on the winner-takes-all principle. People are encouraged to believe that when their party is in office, whichever it might be, it will look after them.

This is one reason why ideology has all but died in the Maltese political arena. Talk about principle and commitment is easy and airy, but with little substance in it. The parties are expected to, and give the impression, that they will look after their own. In addition to ideology one other major victim of this malady is efficiency.

We talk about human resources being plentiful on our island, relative to our size. We do have a preponderance of workers skilled in trades that require good hands and fine brains. Members of the professions can hold their own with international counterparts. Our doctors and specialists, to take the most significant groups, can migrate to better jobs and incomes at the bat of an eyelid. In the public sector, particularly since formal independence in 1964 allowed Maltese individuals to rise through every layer of office, some very able managers have come through.

That said, the right human resources are scarce relative to the evolving needs of our polity and society. We have top-grade individuals, but there are not enough of them to accomplish the multitude of tasks that the country requires. That is not to suggest any inferiority complex. It is a question of numbers relative to what must be done, of supply relative to demand.

Which makes the winner-takes-all nature of our politics so insane, as well as, far too often, replete with injustice. An incoming administration following a change of political fortunes immediately faces two problems. One is that a number of its supporters expect preferential treatment. That is not a reference to any who suffered unfair or unjust treatment by the previous government.

The position of such real victims of politics deserves rectifying without fail. My reference is to those who, without being able to claim, with justification, past unfair or unjust treatment, expect to advance simply because now it is "their" government that calls the shots. Real victims abound.

Drawing on my years in politics, I find it easy to recall how Labour supporters suffered when Church sanctions put the Nationalists in office 40 years ago. Nowadays few of the current Labour stalwarts refer to April 28, 1958, to subsequent shameful court sentences by some of the judiciary, to the institutionalised vindictiveness, to such petty recourse to tribalism on the basis of which paper you read.

Nationalists will draw on their own side of the picture. They will say that the years of Labour government were hell for them, and quote examples. Nationalists are in fact far better at recollecting their hurts and pains than the Labour side. Some of today`s Labourites prefer to be orphans without a history than to honestly acknowledge their side`s wrongdoings, but to offer a wide perspective of the years. One that does not justify misdeeds, but that neither does it allow the false theory that black sheep, wolves and hyenas were somehow part of the Labour side of the jungle, with the other side a model of Eden before the Fall.

The second early problem facing a new administration following an electoral mood swing is a perceived reluctance in supporters of the previous government to pull their weight. The reluctance is not necessarily as widespread as the perception of it. But neither is the perception always the result of acute paranoia.

The two problems feed each other as well as on themselves. They accentuate the first impact of a change of government, the unsettled air, the queasy uncertainty. With human resources already scarce relative to ongoing tasks, and to the ideas that a new administration would wish to implement, having half of those resources effectively rendered sterile by the change is bad for the new administration, and worse for the country as a whole.

Many admit this. Few bother to remember that one man who bucked the tribal system at least to some extent was Dom Mintoff, when he again became prime minister in June 1971. Within weeks he mobilised public servants of Nationalist conviction who were the real inner cabinet of the previous PM, George Borg Olivier. Not before long either he turned to leading businessmen, not known for political activism but who were certainly not Labourites, to assist him in the economic sector.

His style of public management and the mixed results are outside this column`s argument on a major exception to the liberalised Maltese politics. Nationalists who prefer not to see things in the round choose to forget that their reaction was less than a contribution to this exception. Years before the election result of 1981 fired them with a moral conclusion that they should be governing, they heaped public abuse on a prominent retired judge who had accepted to chair a public corporation under the then totally legitimate, and not just legal, Labour government.

He was hounded into resigning. Other non-Labourites who served at the time were pressurised less publicly, though not less cruelly.

There was another clear exception to tribalism when Labour returned to office in October 1996. As finance minister. one of the first files placed before me reflected the exercise that civil service prepares for a new administration. Myriad appointees are required to offer their resignation, ranging from pensioner members of innocuous boards, to chairpersons of the public corporations.

I did make changes, including some regarding which I should have thought more deeply. I also kept in place a considerable number of persons who, the tribal system would hold, should have been replaced. Prime Minister Alfred Sant questioned only one of my decisions. Quite agitated, he phoned to ask me if I knew who it was that I had appointed to a particular state-owned company.

He is my brother! he exclaimed. I told the prime minister that that was immaterial, that I had appointed him because I felt he was the best man for the job.

I continue to believe that was one of the best aspects of the 1996-98 Labour government, and of Dr Sant as its prime minister. Which is why I am at a loss to understand vitriolic attacks being currently being made from Labour quarters on Emmanuel Ellul, who currently heads the privatisation unit and is a director on the shipyards` boards.

Manuel is one of my handful of close personal friends. Yet my reaction does not stem from considerations of friendship. It rests on the worrying observation that the jungle that is our politics is becoming so much more savage, as well as blind.

In my brief stay as finance minister after October 1996 I nominated Manuel to the then vacant post of deputy governor of the Central Bank. No one doubted he was eminently suited to the position. A first class economist, he had already served the bank for close to three decades, in the Research Department, which he came to head, and as general manager. Later when the four-year term of Governor Francis Vassallo ended, well after I had left the Cabinet, the Labour government appointed him governor, on a two-year term. In his second year there was a change of government. He served his term out.

The new Nationalist government did not reappoint Mr Ellul, but later invited him to the boards of the shipyards, and then to head the privatisation unit. He was one of the few persons of Labour conviction to be given tasks by the Nationalist government. He seems to have been singled out for vituperative abuse, in the context of the partial privatisation of Maltapost, and now the Malta International Airport company.

Any action or non-action is subject to criticism. The job of the Opposition of the day is to comb through anything related to the government, to criticise it, to examine alternatives, to root out whatever it feels is untoward. The Nationalists used to do that with a vengeance when they were in Opposition. The Labour side has no kindness to return and very obviously is not offering any.

But why, in all this, is Manuel Ellul being branded as a political survivor? His integrity and honesty cannot be impugned. By anyone. He is also more forthright and blunt than anybody I know, and would certainly not bend a knee to curry favour. He has never been anybody`s stooge. If, in his mid-sixties, he is still giving some service in the public sector, he is thereby serving his country. He gets paid for it. Who does not? If anyone feels he is getting too much, he is free to say so. If anyone disagrees with the way he has conducted the privatisation negotiations, he can criticise him on that basis. He can hold his own, and will probably be embarrassed to find I am commenting about him.

The personal abuse is something else. It confirms, as when the Nationalists said that people would spit upon the ground walked upon by the former judge appointed chairman by Labour in the Seventies, that tribalism is not the worst aspect of our politics. We are back to a position where it is becoming a matter of policy that the government is only for half of the people, while the other half must be excluded from the totality of public administration.

Pity not Manuel Ellul. Pity poor Malta, which gets smaller by the day, devouring itself in the jungle of its own being...