Photo: Jason BorgPhoto: Jason Borg

This country is going ballistic, literally and metaphorically. The government should pull down those ridiculous billboards on the Budget and stop funding those useless public meetings because propaganda does not work anymore. It’s game over in less than two years: the Prime Minister is not up to the job.

It was a mistake for the Nationalist Party to accuse Joseph Muscat of weakness in the face of that disaster-ridden Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia.

Muscat is anything but weak within his party and his government. He is the one who brought them unimagined success and power, and they know they will go down with him when he does.

The issue is not whether Muscat is weak or not, but if he is up to being a prime minister or not. Muscat still thinks and takes decisions like he is just a party leader. Every decision is based on a single consideration – votes. There has been no transition from party to government.

The Labour Party simply took over the government and the result is an astounding mess.

That Castro-style, eternal Budget speech by the Finance Minister does not reflect a government with a heavy programme to implement, but a chaotic government that’s unable to pull its act together, that’s all over the place and going absolutely nowhere because there never was a programme in the first place.

That hotchpotch speech needed heavy editing, and so does Labour.

The shooting incident involving the Home Affairs Minister’s armed driver saw Labour using the government’s Department of Information to make the whole matter sound like there was some hit-and-run drunkard driving dangerously and had to be stopped with warning shots. Evidently it was nothing of the sort.

The Prime Minister, as we call him, tried to play down the whole affair saying that the government statement contained just one detail that was wrong: that Mallia’s driver shot at the car, not in the air. There was much more that was wrong in that statement.

The PN portal last weekend uploaded an eyewitness report saying there was an altercation in the street between the minister’s driver and the Scottish driver. Which gives a second lie to the DOI statement issued under the heading ‘Hit and run’.

The Prime Minister claims there was no cover-up attempt and said he would move against Mallia if the magisterial inquiry found he was “on site and giving instructions”.

Does Muscat not have any advisors to stop him from saying such rubbish?

Soon after, he had to retract and call a separate inquiry because the evidence and reports in the media were far too much to handle, or deny.

Yes, there are all the signs of an attempted cover-up; it’s just that the people involved blundered badly.

In a civilised, democratic western (not Wild West) country, a minister who rubs his country the wrong way all the time would have long been sent back to the profession he was so very good at, defending criminals. Not in Labour Malta. Muscat wants to keep the ship together, but leading a party and being Prime Minister for the whole country is an entirely different thing. Muscat clearly doesn’t see that. He only thinks votes.

That astute PN leader Simon Busuttil could not have put it better when Muscat invited him to appoint a retired judge to head the second inquiry. Busuttil simply told the Prime Minister to: “Stop shooting from the hip and stand up to be counted. It’s your mess, now deal with it. Be a prime minister for once.” He may have as well have told Muscat to grow up.

Busuttil’s stand is the perfect way to deal with a scheming bully, clearly too big for his boots. If the Prime Minister won’t take the decision to sack a failing minister, then Busuttil should not volunteer to do the dirty work for him.

Busuttil has just outwitted Muscat and as this government starts to fall apart and Busuttil grows stronger, there is more of this to come.

It is a matter of Muscat’s cleverness versus Busuttil’s intelligence and, as always, intelligence wins in the end because cleverness is only short term. Muscat would realise that if he got off his high horse.

There is a high price that this country will have to pay for a populist prime minister, who has his eyes on an even bigger victory come the next election.

That’s how deluded he is, and that is his biggest weakness.

Being a good showman and salesman, he knows how to put on a humble face in public and so far he has been getting away with it: but his wife’s antics betray him. Michelle Muscat thinks she’s a celebrity, and her husband thinks he is the smartest kid on the block.

That’s a bad combination.

Without clear policies and with no real programme except for ridiculous Dubai pipedreams, nothing is getting off the ground under Muscat’s tight helm.

The Prime Minister is too busy selling to see what a terrible responsibility he will bear when this joy ride is over

The latest pie in the sky is the billion euro Malta-Gozo bridge proposal by the China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), a company black listed by the World Bank and which the Muscat government has no problem doing business with.

This friendly and generous Chinese company is asking for a minimum traffic volume guarantee and if that is not met, that government would make up for the shortfall. As an alternative, CCCC is suggesting it gets paid in “land of equivalent value”.

While Muscat was in China, he wanted us to believe that the communist dictatorship would be building a breakwater in Marsamxett Harbour out of the generosity of its own heart.

The new power station project fell apart for similar reasons because the investors, again including the Chinese, want to ensure a return for their money before they move ahead.

The tender for the much-needed public transport reform is also stalled in the courts, not surprising considering how Scottish bus operator McGill’s pulled out early in the tender process saying it foresaw excessive State interference.

The fact that Joe Mizzi is transport minister does not help. He told a government-sponsored post-budget propaganda meeting that no bus driver shall lose his job, even though some need to improve their manners to the same level as “foreign drivers”.

And if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, he even said that there was an open invitation to anyone who wants to apply to become a bus driver.

Talk about low standards.

The Prime Minister’s insistence on keeping the likes of Mizzi, and his pathetic defence of Equal Opportunities Minister Helena Dalli over illegal development on property she owns, just shows how the cost in votes, should he remove them, bothers him much more than the cost to the country.

He even avoided moving against a smaller fish, Luciano Busuttil, despite a damning court sentence. Busuttil’s situation is now compounded by new evidence published in this newspaper, contradicting his claims that he had no conflict of interest in a tender he advised on.

What is the Prime Minister going to do about that now? This inertia is reducing the country to chaos.

Like the typical schoolyard bully that he is, Muscat is trying to make noise over measures to cut down abuse in government social services.

He wants to create a new middle class, he said (what’s wrong with the one there already is other than he does not belong to it?). He thinks such moves will attract the increasingly doubting middle class voter that shot him to power at the last election.

But he ignores the fact that many of those he will be hitting hard, with his clampdown on ‘lazy’ youths and single moms, are at the heart of his electoral base.

That is why they voted for him in droves and why there were endless queues outside the Social Services ministry the moment Labour came into office. They want more, not less.

The Prime Minister is deluded by a sense of invincibility but, in actual fact, the castle he built around him is crumbling.

Gimmicks and buzzwords do not work any longer because people expect him to govern and he just won’t do that.

He prefers to kick the can down the road and leave tomorrow to tomorrow, hoping people will forget. This laid back attitude is dangerous because those problems will return to haunt him in future, as will the PN leader’s immortal words: “It’s your mess, now deal with it.”

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