It is a fact that the older one becomes the more one realises how little one knows. This fact has now become reality as things happen and disconcert me with their unexpected illogicalness but that is life, I suppose, and if at the venerable age of 54 and six months I am not used to it then I smell trouble ahead. This sense of illogicalness (the spellcheck is taking the word so I presume it exists) was totally absent when faced with the present Air Malta crisis we are facing.
Nobody in his right mind could have failed to see this coming and, believe you me, it was not easyJet and Ryanair that caused it. Air Malta was a gravy train. The perks for employees consisted of free flights and, as for the free travel for parliamentarians etc., it is surprising it made any money at all at any time despite the fact that even a seat in steerage, which is what I can afford on occasion, was way above the prices of other airlines for the same leg. To add insult to injury, the food is at most times indifferent and the legroom inexistent.
The crisis has been looming forever. Now we are in a crisis management situation and heads are starting to roll, mostly innocent ones like those in the Reign of Terror but, then, there is and never will be any justice in the world.
This Legislature has been dogged by ill luck. I am beginning to believe that, when in pre-electoral mode in 2008, the Nationalist Party genuinely did not believe it would make it and all those electoral promises were made because they thought the possibility of being re-elected was genuinely remote. The Alfred Sant alternative was so dire that even an electorate sick to the teeth of the same old thing (which underscores the unfairness of electoral swings) voted the PN back in by a whisker.
Despite the apparent jubilation, I am sure there were quite a few realists at Dar Ċentrali who were shaking their heads in disbelief if not despair as the first of the political storms broke over their heads while the flags waved and the cars honked outside. The Mistra debacle almost destroyed the party and the same MP who, elected from two districts and touted for future Minister for the Environment, was backbenched in no uncertain terms.
This same MP, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, played Iris in this troubled Olympus and threw an apple of discord with divorce engraved on it, much to the dismay of the Prime Minister who, since that day, has shown us that he could have coped with any crisis but this one. Divorce has thrown Lawrence Gonzi and made him vacillate and dither to the extent that even people who hitherto had been largely indifferent as to whether divorce happens or not, lost patience and became rabidly pro divorce, which is the only explanation I can come up with as to why the referendum result was what it was.
I had initially thought the Prime Minister had put Dr Pullicino Orlando up to it to flip the carpet from under the feet of the Leader of the Opposition who had promised to do precisely what Dr Pullicino Orlando did but when Prime Minister. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was being a little too Machiavellian for my own good but I was not the only one.
So where do we go to from here? With another energy crisis looming I really cannot see how this government can hike up electricity bills by another 20 per cent without riots. It makes me think that there is some humongous cover-up somewhere and, contrary to what we have been given to understand, we have not survived the recession unscathed, far from it. Life has become too expensive. Add the utility bills to what one pays in VAT every time one goes shopping and on all counts the government should be rolling in money. What on earth are they doing with it?
When you take the mere cosmetic stuff into consideration and realise that most of it is derived from EU funds there remain two great voracious whirlpools that no amount of money can satiate: social services and our health service.
No government in its right mind can touch these without wishing to self-destruct. Look at the UK. David Cameron merely mentioned the P word and there were demonstrations and strikes! I can well understand why too. When you have spent your entire working life paying national insurance in addition to VAT and income tax, being denied a pension is criminal. Therefore, Dr Gonzi and Joseph Muscat, do not even think of mentioning the P word wherever, however and whenever.
That leaves the Department of Health with our wonderful new hospital. I say wonderful not in jest nor to be sarcastic but in all sincerity. Mater Dei Hospital must be the best state hospital in the world and we should all be proud of it, however, when you think that it was built in the middle of an energy crisis and nobody had the common sense to render it ecological from its inception, one cannot but wonder how common common sense actually is! But that is another story.
kzt@onvol.net