Manuel Delia has achieved the seemingly impossible task of making Austin Gatt appear meek, unassuming, soft-spoken and pleasant. After coming across a flurry of interviews and television appearances made by Modern Malta Man (In Delia’s own words, “We modernised Malta”), I can’t figure out what the Nationalist Party is hoping to achieve by fielding him as a candidate.

What you don’t do is shrug off their complaints as a figment of their over-active imagination, which is precisely what Delia does- Claire Bonello

Apart from the ‘Let’s spite Franco’ factor, I find it very puzzling to see why a political party which is burdened with the tag of being arrogant and cut off from the electorate should approve of a candidate who seems to make it a point to show how completely detached he is from the electorate’s reality.

Take his interview in The Sunday Times last week. It followed, after a slew of complaints about the Arriva bus service – Delia’s baby. It’s now been a year since the so-called public transport revolution. We’ve had the €80,000 inaugural ceremony and the obligatory ribbon-cutting.

Let’s say the initial chaos was just teething trouble – albeit teething troubles which caused total gridlock on our roads. Let’s assume that the routes being changed some three times over – are also par for the course in Delia-style revolutions.

And let’s assume that the Prime Minister having to form and head a special public transport task force to see that the nation doesn’t grind to a halt, is a perfectly normal process after the Transport Minister and his minions have brought about this ‘revolution’. Even if we had to dismiss the first four months of unsatisfactory bus service as initial hiccups due to bad roads, what do we make of the never-ending complaints about the service at present?

Hardly a week goes by without disappointed commuters writing in about being left stranded as another bus fails to show up or having had to miss appointments because the bus did not arrive on time. It’s hard to believe that the people complaining are all rabid Labour supporters or just plain old moaners. There are too many of them and the complaints have been being aired for far too long.

Now the first rule of customer care is to acknowledge the complaints – to show customers that you’re listening and that you believe their version of events. That done, maybe you can go about finding a solution or at least pacifying them in some way. What you don’t do is shrug off their complaints as a figment of their over-active imagination, which is precisely what Delia does.

Delia the Moderniser seems to have ripped up the customer care rule book and is reaching new heights in customer aggravation by insisting that complaints about the Arriva bus system are simply a matter of perception. That’s right. For Delia, there are no problems, but issues which passengers perceive to be problems.

When Simone Cini told him that scores of television viewers had told her they were dissatisfied with the service and that she herself had seen buses blocking narrow roads, Delia told her that all was due to her perception – that of a private car driver who did not opt for public transport.

On another discussion programme this week, Delia sat sumo-style on the panel and informed us all that the critical view of bendy buses was an issue of perception. According to Delia there had been no squeaks of protest until London mayor Boris Johnson quipped about having offloaded them onto us. When interviewed by this paper, he was told that surveys showed that people prefer the old buses. Manuel’s reply? “I disagree. It depends on who you ask.”

Well, presumably if you asked those commuters who would put up with the old jalopies if it meant being able to get to work on time. But for Delia, these complaints are mere trifles, the kvetching of the glass half-empty types or what they imagine is wrong with the system. There isn’t much wrong with the system, just with people’sperception of it.

The thing is, perception is important. If people perceive that the public transport system is not efficient or uncomfortable, then politicians like Delia are advised to find ways to address that perception and the underlying problem instead of bellowing away about how mistaken they are.

People are complaining because they were promised an over-hyped, super-efficient transport system and the reality falls short of the PR puffery. If Delia can’t get his head around that, he is even more far-removed from the man on the street than he thinks.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt