When will they see the light?

Other countries have scandals that are far more entertaining than ours. Over in Italy, the talk is all about whether the weirdly orange Silvio Berlusconi has a purely platonic interest in the barely-adult Noemi Letizia. That was superseded by the hilarity over photographs showing Berlusconi's nude house guests published in the Spanish El Pais.

In Britain, the ridiculous expense claims made by MPs have the electorate swinging from outrage to incredulity at the cheek of their elected representatives. Considering there had been claims and requests for the dredging of moats, a floating duck island, horse manure, ginger biscuits, a vacuum cleaner, and more, this is quite justified. Perhaps it's the lack of similar entertainment value which makes reports of maladministration in Malta pass by without comment.

I got to thinking about this after reading a newspaper report about the conclusions of the Auditor General after his office carried out an inquiry into some road construction projects partly financed through the fifth Italo-Maltese financial protocol.

The report is long and does not make for the most exciting of reading materials; however, it highlights some disturbing findings. Although the roads project was completed in good time, it went way over budget. From the €30 million originally allocated, it ended up costing €38.4 million. So far, so normal, you might say. Practically every road maintenance or construction exercise has come in way over budget.

But there's more. It transpired the ADT delegated project management to external supervisors who had been nominated by the contractors carrying out the works. Basically, the contractors were being assessed by persons of their own choosing - their agents. Should we be surprised if cost over-runs have been approved? It was also revealed that the ADT had adopted an unorthodox payment system whereby contractors were in credit despite not having completed the works. What's more many of the issued bills were full of errors, some of which were not adjusted until much later, and one time, not at all.

Add to this, the way these projects were treated as a departmental tender and Public Procurement Regulations were replaced by new, untested systems. The whole affair smacks of a careless, slapdash approach to the utilisation of funds destined for a public purpose. There was an over-run of nearly €8 million (which will no doubt be blamed on the horrific quality of roads built by a Labour government when it was in power more than 22 years ago), a madly unaccountable system and one which gives rise to grave suspicions about how transparent the whole process is.

And yet, nobody batted an eye lid. The Auditor General's findings were tabled in Parliament, something which was duly reported by the press and then the whole matter sank away into oblivion. Granted, it's not as titillating as whether the Italian Prime Minister was romping around with an 18-year-old or not, but I dare say the state of our roads has more of an impact on our daily lives. Shoddy roadworks and the constant repairs required to patch them up will be the bane of our daily commute for many years to come. And if the payments made to contractors responsible were inflated, it would mean there is less money available to do up other roads or for other worthy projects.

Despite this direct relevance to our daily lives, we still find it difficult to make a connection between questionable administrative practices and how they will affect us. For many, the only form of corruption worth commenting about is a politician trousering bribes or ministers requesting silver teapots in exchange for permits. The more mundane forms of maladministration slip through unnoticed, simply because they happen so frequently they have become part of our everyday lives. That doesn't make them any less harmful or scandalous.

• When the power failure wrought havoc across the country last Tuesday, the reactions to the outage fell roughly into two categories. There were people who were justifiably irked at the disruption and the expenses incurred because of it. They had to shell out employees' wages or to pay for fuel to run their generators and were not at all pleased to be doing so after the electricity rates had been hiked up.

Then there was a second group of people who bobbed around cheerfully, twittering about how the power cut was an opportunity to saunter down to the beach, that these things happened everywhere and that in any case, the going wasn't as bad as it was 30 years ago, when power cuts were a daily occurrence. At least we were only deprived of light for 11 hours - and we still had running water in our taps and we didn't have to lug sea water to flush our toilets. Their crowning argument was that the outage was caused by the thousands of airconditioners which were blasting away to dispel the heat. We had become so well-off, we had caused the power cut.

The people dismissing the discomfort felt by everybody else, are mostly the ones who would have been banging away on pans in protest if the power failure had taken place under another administration. It all goes to show how our perception of events may be linked to our political loyalties and we can't put the blinkers aside to admit such a power failure is not acceptable in a country which is competing for investment, that it shouldn't have taken so long to repair and that, once again, the government has made a total balls-up of the energy situation in Malta.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt