Tolerance is not necessarily a good thing. It can happen that people come to tolerate unjust and harmful things, often because they just can’t see any alternatives. Or the alternatives may appear unreachable. Whatever the reason, it seems to me that we have come to tolerate an institutionalised scam that is at its best right at the very top.
Take Silvio Parnis. When he’s not doing the coffee-morning rounds or making a spectacle of himself dishing out sweets to the ‘poorest of the poor’ in Kenya, Parnis heads what is known as the ‘consultative council for the south’. Given the profound pointlessness of the idea I can’t imagine this council is much more than a talking shop.
Only it’s one where talk doesn’t come cheap. As reported in last Thursday’s Times of Malta, Parnis is paid over €10,000 a year for his pains. He also gets free telephone and mobile services, and the use of a car. All of which add up to several thousand euros a year. Most of the people I know who hold full-time clerical jobs at University don’t earn half that amount.
Things get worse when one considers two things. First, the case of Parnis is by no means exceptional. There are legions of functionaries, agents, fixers, and hangers-on who enjoy similar privileges. I’ve lost count of the number of recognisable faces I’ve spotted chasing about the place in rented cars and chatting away on their mobiles at the taxpayer’s expense. And I’m not talking about the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. I can understand why a very few people in the highest posts might need such trappings.
Second, it’s not as if the habit is endemic to the present government. On the contrary, I’d say the current incumbents have quickly and effectively learned from the previous ones. As someone once said, poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. The one who does, on the other hand, is rich. Only we’re the ones paying for it.
The point is that the rip-off is both widespread and commonly accepted as part of normal government business. It’s a kleptocracy, and one which is immune to the periodic transfer of power at that. In other words, we can expect whoever we vote in to help themselves, and then some more.
They even have a word for it: perks. That means free telephone and mobile services, car use, entertainment allowances, and heaven knows what else. I’m uneasy about perks in the best of circumstances. Most of the time they’re simply a means of hiding obscene overall earnings from shareholders. Still, in the case of private companies, it’s their money and let them spend it as they will.
Government, and especially political appointees, are a different ballpark. First, it’s not their money they throw around. Second, the argument that perks serve to attract the best people to a job (a fairly flimsy one in any case) doesn’t quite work.
Parnis was not, as far as I know, head-hunted from a top research post at Nasa. He was handed his job because someone liked him. With political appointees like Parnis, perks are simply gifts that are creamed off public funds and given to close associates.
That is just one tiny part of the scam. Another thing that has mushroomed in recent years, and which we have come to tolerate as an acceptable part of government business, is ‘information’. Once again, we’re the ones paying for it.
Blessed are the meek, for we will rip them off at every turn
I have in mind the kind of triumphalist messages plastered all over our faces (or rather on billboards, in print and online, and on radio and television) which tell us that government is doing something rather than nothing. Call it an existential crisis if you will, the point is that it is vile on at least two counts.
First, sloganism and spectacles of government performance are best left for totalitarian states. I’ve a bit of a side interest in Chinese posters from the Mao period. They’re mostly about the chairman’s benevolence and the incalculable benefits of his rule. The protagonists include healthy-looking babies, smiling peasants at the helm of ultra-modern tractors, couples looking at the rising sun, and such. These days, every billboard I drive past on my way to work rings a bell.
Second, what masquerades as information is actually shameless propaganda. It seems to me that the slogans are getting more and more partisan. We even have a radio and television campaign that reminds us every five minutes that ‘illum l-affarijiet differenti’ (‘things are different now’ – as opposed to what they were under chairman Lawrence Gonzi, that is).
Coupled with the armies of PR people employed by ministries, secretariats, agencies, councils, and so on, we’re looking at a partisan propaganda industry of breathtaking proportions.
I find it incredible that we should tolerate such a systematic plunder of public funds. The state had no money available to house the parents of children undergoing medical treatment in British hospitals, nor did it find the means to cater for people with eating disorders. It had to be the good work of Puttinu Cares and then President George Abela to see to those.
On the other hand, there is no shortage of funds for gifts to political appointees and for government to tell us it’s better than the previous one. Blessed are the meek, for we will rip them off at every turn.
mafalzon@hotmail.com