There is something about John Dalli. Maybe it is because he just won’t go away and fade into the oblivion he belongs to. Maybe, it is because it is extremely irritating to see that someone, under investigation by the EU anti-fraud agency OLAF, should be telling us about possible abuses in the health sector, a sector for which he was responsible when a government minister under the former administration.
His report, Mater Dei Hospital: A Better Social Return, is offensive. We all thought he would be coming up with ingenious plans to cut down waiting lists, to cut down on over-crowding or to do away with shortages in medical supplies. Instead, we get an accounting exercise on where the money has been spent, how much overtime has been paid, how much waste there has been, and how long it takes to calculate the pay cheques manually. Music to Labour’s ears, now nine months into government and still unable to start addressing, let alone solve, the problems at Mater Dei.
Dalli just fits Labour’s bill. This Labour government is still in opposition, is still too busy trying to score points over the former PN administration’s failings and he is their perfect partner. Nine months into the new government, people don’t give a hoot what the PN did or failed to do. If there is suspicion of abuse, or corruption, call in the police, don’t make a show. Showtime is over, it is time to deliver. But not so, according to our Prime Minister.
His reaction to the Dalli report was – someone has to answer for all of this. No, sir, you have to answer for all of this, nine months on as prime minister. Stop the charade and get cracking. Solve what you promised to solve.
Why on earth our Prime Minister decided to make Dalli his health consultant is anyone’s guess – although the guesses are far and wide. Whatever the reasoning was, this former EU commissioner, so unceremoniously dismissed from his post in Brussels, was absolutely the wrong man for the job. He is divisive, he has an axe to grind and, more importantly, he has a name to clear.
But that does not mean that Dalli does not have his heart in the right place. He is the kind of man who takes a private jet and flies off to the Bahamas to raise money for the starving poor in Africa, and then gets chastised for it by the European Commission.
He is the kind of man who probably sits at the window of his office at Portomaso and ponders on the evils of the world, a world that always seems to contrive against him.
And yet he plods on, working gratuitously to help our own needy in the corridors of Mater Dei Hospital – a true, modern-day St Sebastian who never forgot his humble roots in Qormi.
So it is surprising how accountancy took the better part of him when he drew up the report on Mater Dei. Maybe, it is in his blood to look at numbers, or maybe, he just couldn’t resist taking another swipe at the party he once belonged to, as hospital patients await patiently their turn.
This Labour government is still in opposition, is still too busy trying to score points over the former PN administration’s failings and he is their perfect partner
But then, it takes nerve for a politician like Dalli to tell fellow politicians to keep their hands off Mater Dei. It appears that Dalli nowadays fancies himself a statesman, given his international exposure, and thinks that allows him to tell the health minister to get his office out of Mater Dei Hospital because he shouldn’t be there as a politician. But Dalli is a political animal par excellence, he is anything but above politics.
I don’t know what sadistic trait runs in our Prime Minister so that he would let loose the likes of Dalli in the same pit as his health minister, and expect the latter to survive. Godfrey Farrugia, for all his faults, including the unforgivable one of standing for election on the Labour ticket, comes across as a caring, sensitive man. He is the kind village doctor we would all like to have.
Instead we get Dalli and his promises to save millions. Instead we get a former EU commissioner who tells us that trade unions have been having their way for far too long. Instead we get a former PN minister telling us that what he is suggesting now is exactly what he was stopped from implementing years ago when he was responsible for the very mess he describes.
What Dalli and politicians of his ilk fail to understand is that nobody cares what he would have done under an administration that is now history.
It is not about him. What people care about are waiting lists, waiting time, missing medicines and bed shortages. But we have to wait for that, apparently, because Dalli’s report was only an assessment of a situation. Maybe we have a lifetime to wait, and for some people, literally for the rest of their lives.
Dalli seems to think he was vindictively booted upstairs just to stop the revolution he wanted to undertake at the hospital. It was that evil GonziPN that didn’t like the look on his face and that would have had him arrested and arraigned in court had he not fallen sick in Brussels and been found unfit to travel until the Commissioner of Police in Malta was about to be changed.
Dalli is the sort of man our Prime Minister loves to pander for. Dalli comes from that kind of breed of people that the new Labour Party, if it is still Labour, is now made up of. He represents all that is wrong with Labour today.
Like certain others, Dalli was appointed by Joseph Muscat to spite the PN, to kick his opponent on the ground when it was down and out in the fallout of the landslide defeat in March. The move doesn’t speak well of our Prime Minister, but then, nothing much of what he says or does these days speaks well of him.
A party in government that is shorn of any political principles, values or ethics, may find nothing wrong in appointing the likes of Dalli as health consultant. They tell us, don’t shoot the messenger, look at what he is saying. Wrong, and wrong again. This country deserves a modicum of standards. Our Prime Minister should remember he is no longer at the Mile End, where anything goes, as long as it rakes in votes and money.
This is exactly the one situation where you shoot the messenger because he was never fit for purpose. Yes, I shoot the messenger, and the one who sent him too.