A friend asked me the other day at which point did I think do people give up on the system. The subject of our conversation was the Gaffarena case, and it is easy to make the connection. The matter is so outrageous that it tempts one to give up on the details and lapse into philosophy. Or go fishing.

Marco Gaffarena makes Calogero Sedara seem like a Buddhist world renouncer. I imagine his father will have sat him on the Mdina bastion as a little boy and told him: “One day son, all this will be yours”.

This man was handed, in one deal alone, as much property and cash as an average person on a decent salary would put together in several lifetimes of scrimping. What makes the whole thing so utterly disgusting is that the windfall came directly out of the public purse.

To put things in perspective, the keepers of that public purse like to tell us that their hounds are fast closing in on single mothers who milk the system. The pack will be made to nose through the dirty linen if necessary, just to reassure us that single is single is spotless. Those same keepers also like to spend Boxing Day doing silly things on television for charity, the logic apparently being that there isn’t enough in the purse to provide for children who are critically ill.

Make no mistake then, the Gaffarena case is a big one. I trust the government inquiry will land the people who are behind it into some serious trouble. If it turns out that those people hold positions of trust, the ones who trusted them should be fired, preferably from the 100-ton gun at Rinella.

The latter is important, because positions of trust come with a heavy baggage. The apologetic argument that the Pope cannot be held responsible for the behaviour of all his priests is as rubbish as it is ubiquitous.

Indeed he can’t, but that’s only because the Pope doesn’t appoint priests personally, on trust. He is, however, extremely responsible for the behaviour of the prelates he appoints to key positions in the Church. Their power is a direct extension of his, and their misbehaviour a serious indictment of his judgement and therefore of his capacity to rule.

A government that unleashes a potlatch of positions of trust – and our present one is no minnow in this department – thus renders itself extremely vulnerable to political scandal. By definition and for government’s own good, positions of trust should be awarded as sparingly as possible, and only to individuals who are tried and tested in the long term.

Make no mistake then, the Gaffarena case is a big one. I trust the government inquiry will land the people who are behind it into some serious trouble

But I digress, and for good reason. Hand on heart, I found it very hard to convince myself that to write a column about any other topic this week would be a crime against readers. Even as I type, the temptation to bin it all and replace it with an ode to oleander flowers just won’t go away.

Which brings me to my friend’s question, which I shall now answer directly. People can be said to have given up on the system when they begin to see it as something which is beyond their control. In totalitarian states, for example, democracy is often such a pipe dream that people refuse to think it altogether. They concentrate instead on their oleander flowers, or go fishing.

Malta is not remotely a totalitarian state. In principle, citizens should feel that they have control over the system. Only that sense of control has two enemies, both of which are doing very well in the case of the Gaffarena swindle.

The first is the feeling of plus ça change, in other words, a sense that power has always corrupted and always will. Governments will come and go but some things never change. On a grand level, the argument invites one to drop names like Nixon, Macchiavelli, possibly even Lucifer.

Closer to home, the Pavlovian response to cock-ups is “mhux anke l-oħrajn?” (‘the others did exactly the same’). So Gaffarena will find himself in bed with the Mater Dei concrete (not a bad idea actually), Żonqor with Smart City, and so on. The point is that what appears to be a masterclass of political critique turns out to be a recipe for doing absolutely nothing.

The second enemy of meaningful politi­cal action is actually a term: il-klassi politika (‘the political class’). The argument, apparently, is that cases like Gaffarena’s tell us something about il-klassi politika, in a generic sense. I loathe the term and its implications so much that I get homicidal every time I hear it. Which sort of means that I’ve become a mass murderer in principle, but never mind.

Assuming I thought there were such a thing as il-klassi politika, which I don’t, I still wouldn’t care much about it. What matters is that the people who are responsible for gilding Marco Gaffarena specifically, get their due.

Arguments from timelessness and the endemic faults of a generic political class are nothing but a thinly-veiled rhetorical ploy to get real-life people off the hook. If missing the wood for the trees is not exactly a good idea, the other way round is a sure way of ending up with a very sore nose.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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