When I first saw Konrad Mizzi, now the Honourable Dr K. Mizzi, Minister for Enemalta, Mater Dei Hospital and whatever else he does to earn less than half his family’s income from public funds, I wasn’t particularly impressed at his grasp on life.
I don’t mean he is less than well endowed in the grey matter department, his multiple degrees speak to that aspect of his attributes. It’s just that, well, how to put this, his multiple slides into English, his naive “shame on you, minister” and his categorical “if the new power station isn’t up and running by March 2015, I’ll resign” without even an inkling of wiggle-room, all went to giving the impression of a schoolboy in the playground, the brainy one scared of being bullied, at that.
His obvious youth went some way to cementing the impression I had formed, and truth be told, it would have been childish of me, in my turn, to hold the young man’s youth against him. After all, I’ve reached the age when most people are younger than me.
Mizzi’s performance in the real world, however, hasn’t actually been such as to inspire any rethinking of my initial assessment: this is a young man who is pretty out of touch with the realities of his, and therefore our, world.
For instance, he let himself be used by his boss, the Prime Amongst Equals (I almost wrote Primates, but it would have been misunderstood), to appear at that ludicrous press conference when a reduction in the price of petrol in the order of, what was it, 2.32c, was announced, in tones that used to be reserved for announcing that Moses was about to come down off the mountain bearing tablets.
Konrad Mizzi’s youth and inexperience showed itself in an even brighter hue when the country was plunged into darkness last week
Incidentally, tablets, remember them? Minister Evarist ‘MM’ Bartolo has fallen a bit behind on that one, don’t you think? Perhaps rejigging that attempt to break data protection law legally took up too much of his time, along with appearing along with Minister ‘Monkey’ Edward Scicluna with matching smirks for the signature of the University Collective Agreement. The University is autonomous, at least so the law seems to say, so the ministers should have kept away.
Let me hasten to be clear about the monkey thing, lest he reaches for his brief: it’s not me that’s calling Scicluna a monkey, it’s he himself in the context of his ministerial colleague’s remarks about paying peanuts and getting monkeys. Scicluna had lamented about the nutty flavour of his stipend for being part of the Cabinet and George ‘Ukraine’ Vella (the one who called Libya fluid when everyone else was hightailing it out of Dodge) recently made liberal, if less than original, use of the time-honoured peanuts and monkeys crack.
Price reductions of the order of magnitude announced so breathlessly by Joseph Muscat and Mizzi can happen, as anyone who drives outside our shores knows, between Sainsbury and Tesco filling stations, or 100 clicks up the A1 between Salerno and Firenze, and no one holds press conferences to announce them.
Mizzi’s youth and inexperience showed itself in an even brighter hue when the country was plunged into darkness last week. It’s not entirely clear whether in making himself scarce as soon as the blades (of the fans that should have been hit) stopped turning he was merely emulating his Prime Minister or whether it was just a coincidence that both the people who are hoping that we’ll forget that they have put their political futures on the line to get that power station up and running, were both conspicuous by their absence.
That being as may be, Mizzi was nowhere to be seen, not even when the lights came back on, the head man at Enemalta being left to explain, as best he could, exactly what happened to put out the lights.
And stop the A/Cs from working.
And also put refrigerators and freezers into ‘Off’ mode.
As always, Muscat’s government went into prestidigitation mode: the Prime Minister’s bosom buddy did a bit of light smoke and mirrors by getting all hoity-toity about demanding reports, as if it wasn’t as obvious as the nose on his face that no one was going to let things go by without finding out what had happened.
I suppose Edward Zammit Lewis should be forgiven because it seems to be a reflex for the Facebook generation to state the flipping obvious all the time. Still, it’s about time that people would bear in mind that one is supposed to be a grown-up if one expects to run the country, not a flipping Tweeter or Facebooker.
The biscuit for diversion and spin was won, hands down, however, not by Zammit Lewis and the airline pilots’ association, Alpa, and such-like sideshows but by the way Mizzi lapped up the little morsel of bait that was chucked his way by her worship the lady mayor of Qormi.
There are those, and I certainly couldn’t be one of them, who might want to say that when the mayor of that village (or is Qormi a town?) raised her hackles and announced that she was going to demand compensation, the deal was already done, but that’s hardly the point.
The point is that Konrad ‘Shame On You’ Mizzi, having been nowhere to be seen when the going was less than great, suddenly popped up, for all the world as if he’d come back from visiting Alice, to announce that the government was going to compensate people (‘femilees’ in Labour-speak) who had been deprived of the fruits of Edison and Tesla’s inventiveness for more than 12 hours.
Why 12 hours?
Don’t ask me, ask the minister. Maybe it’s the point at which you start doubting whether you should remain a Labour voter.
Why only families?
Again, don’t ask me, ask the minister, he was the one mumbling about the government being all-caring (rather than all-seeing, as Bartolo would love it to be) and warm and fuzzy towards its supplicants.
Am I the only one who thinks that referring to us, the great unwashed, as “customers”, as the government did when announcing its munificence with our own money, is itch-making?
Why €25, not €15 or €30 or €4.32?
Again, don’t ask me, ask the minister, he was the one who made it so darn obvious that he was simply chucking a tiny crumb in the general direction of the gullible and adoring, so tiny that he knew that businessmen, the real losers (according to them, anyway) would chuck it back at him, after having blown their noses on it.
Who is going to pay for all this, anyway? I know that in the greater scheme of things, the total sum of €200,000 (which is all that this piece of PR is going to cost the government) is a mere sliver of a shaving off a molecule off a drop in the water but the minister, bless’im, thinks it’s important enough for him to get in front of a camera, kitted out in a high-vis vest and a hard hat, so come on, minister, is this going to come out of your pocket, or what?
Obviously not, why should it, he’s only the minister, and he earns peanuts, according to the guy who knows about these things, so the bottom line is that this particular bag of monkey nuts is going to be paid for, as usual, by you and me.
And then you get people lighting candles for Muscat and Mizzi because they’re giving them the equivalent of a couple of pizzas and a soft-drink.
Hopefully, the pizzas will be out of a wood-burning stove because, if it’s electric, there’s a darn good chance it won’t be working and Mizzi will have to fade away for a short while.
Again.
imbocca@gmail.com
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20