Prestressed

The falseness of the exercise dripped through every minute of its duration. We were supposed to believe that, finally, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi had latched on to the truth. His former rival for the premiership, John Dalli, had really been framed and it was time to make amends.

I had not been alone to wonder at Mr Dalli's fate. Given what the Prime Minister tolerated by way of publicly-known antics from other Nationalist Party ministers in recent years, the former Finance Minister would feature in the lower percentile of scandalous bumps. Still, some government members (that is, Nationalist MPs) kept busy briefing opposition members (that is, Labour MPs) about how the exile of Mr Dalli did their image a lot of good; Dr Gonzi had shown his mettle by engineering the man's political exile.

No matter what the internal calculations were, the public rationale for Mr Dalli's misfortune, at least as presented by the Prime Minister himself, always remained hazy. Had he been forced to resign due to the fake report about some direct involvement in corruption over Tal-Qroqq hospital contracts? Or was it about air tickets purchased by his ministry?

The Prime Minister and the PN's secretary general Joe Saliba, a virulent Dalli adversary, spoke with forked tongues to justify the situation. They contradicted themselves repeatedly. The Prime Minister's latest wheeze to further fudge the issue by saying matters had dragged on because the Auditor General finished his term and has no replacement yet is political mumbo jumbo. More than three years back, Dr Gonzi asked the Auditor General to urgently investigate air ticket purchases at Mr Dalli's ministry... and started to press about its conclusions two-and-a-half years later...

The former Finance Minister publicly declared he had been subjected to institutionalised political blackmail and was a victim of vicious backstabbing by his PN colleagues. He criticised heavily the Prime Minister, among others, for having renegotiated with Skanska the overall contract to build and set up the Tal-Qroqq hospital, giving the Swedish constructor lots of financial leeway. And he has gone against current government dogma, arguing that the lira was being overvalued in terms of the euro.

Mr Dalli's rehabilitation reflects the same kind of mechanisms that guided the Communist Party politburo, back in the USSR, when they brought into the fold some of their ostracised colleagues. Reasons of political expediency are paramount in such an exercise. And who cares about the crocodile tears that must be shed? An election looms. The PN's inner power elite, including the Prime Minister, is in a crumble. They believe they are doing less well than expected at this stage of the game... vide the Prime Minister's shying away at the last moment from calling an election in November.

The need to maximise political momentum, such as it is for the PN as of now, won over all other considerations. Hanging to power at all costs is the strongest value within the PN, like the strengthening rods that bind prestressed concrete blocks together. It overwrites all the ruling party's other action programmes, emphasising the stand of "all for one, and one for all". Which explains why Josie Muscat, by contrast, was treated so badly by his former colleagues. His exile to the PN gulag has been permanent.

Mr Dalli concluded it made best sense to take part in the charade organised for "his" benefit at Castille last week. The original consideration apparently was that, with Michael Frendo promoted to Commonwealth Secretary General, a vacancy would again open for the post of Foreign Minister. That option, alas, did not materialise.

Mention of prestressed concrete inevitably reminds one of the shenanigans at Manwel Dimech bridge. We were told that the concrete or whatever that it is built of had aged and softened. The whole structure needed to be dismantled and rebuilt.

Now, we have accumulated a huge experience in laying out big public works projects and implementing them. That most such projects go over budget and their set timelines by huge margins, plus that they very frequently deliver bad quality, is well known to all. The Gonzi Administration, not least the Prime Minister and his minister responsible for public works, the latter an architect to boot, should have taken extra precautions with the project, which is bang in the centre of Malta's major arterial network.

Yet, once again, the rehabilitation of Manwel Dimech Bridge has gotten bogged down in huge delays, cost overruns and bad quality delivery. What excuses can be acceptable? The Prime Minister and his government are trying to commit themselves to end-of-project datelines this side of a general election. Their forecasts have contradicted what the contractor's architects had to say about project completion.

Worse: the architectural firm which has the task of supervising the project is one in which the minister concerned has a direct, personal shareholding. Even if its name is changed when covering the work it does on Manwel Dimech Bridge, the resources and facilities, physical and human, are identical, including their address, to those of the partnership in which the minister is involved.

We have been given lots of reasons for the disaster, among which that it was found how the concrete or whatever that bound the bridge together was much stronger than originally thought...

As people, including yours truly, started saying that there was more than a whiff of corruption in the whole saga, the minister concerned asked for a "public" inquiry. He referred the whole matter to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee where a Labour MP chairs. But the absolute majority on the committee is made up of serving Cabinet ministers!

Not even the Politburo of the Communist Party in the USSR could manage that. Dr Gonzi once promised he would be launching a new style of doing politics... It comes in old formats and pre-stressed.