For a moment last week, it appeared that the Prime Minister had done something right. It looked like such a momentous event for Malta that Joseph Muscat would finally get it straight, that it deserved considering giving school children a day off to celebrate. But that couldn’t be done.

Schoolchildren are already on holiday and they’re getting a day off anyway for the CHOGM summit in November, although that’s actually because the government doesn’t want the Queen to get caught in a traffic jam, compliments of Transport Minister Joe Mizzi. There’s really no reason to celebrate a Commonwealth summit. It is only being held here because another country refused to host it on grounds of human rights.

Labour has no such qualms. Its record in human rights and tolerance is atrocious. It tolerates gays because some of them voted for it and not because it remotely believes in minorities. Ask that black man with spit dripping down his face what a mature, tolerant, gay-loving and democratic country we are.

People cheered at the Valletta terminus as policemen handcuffed a black man in front of his 15-month daughter. Some onlookers knew full well he had done nothing wrong. The lot of them should have been arrested for inciting racism.

And yet, despite the chaos that has engulfed the country in practically all areas of government, the Prime Minister managed to look like he had gotten something right last week.

When Minister Mizzi hurriedly turned up in Parliament in a T-shirt, the hope was that he had been fired and had come to collect his stuff before disappearing into oblivion. It was the eve of the much-vaunted launch of the bus card, Labour’s answer to the Nationalists’ Arriva.

Already then, it was clear that chaos was about to be unleashed. There was hope that maybe, just maybe, the Prime Minister had moved first and told Mizzi to pack up. Sadly, Muscat did no such thing. What a delusion. I’m really starting not to like the Prime Minister.

Unfortunately, it was a personal family situation that led Mizzi to go to parliament in that attire. It was not as funny as it initially looked. We all hope all ends well because, for his many political faults, Mizzi is an amiable man.

But he’s a lucky man too. A black man saved his neck by taking all the attention away from the transport chaos that was, after all, the indirect cause of his momentary arrest.

Any parent of a teenager too young to hold a driving licence or to afford a car dreads weekends because he just doesn’t know when or if his child will ever make it back home. Mizzi’s buses have a tendency not to turn up. It is so common that no one complains anymore.

This regular weekend worry for parents is topped up, just like a functioning Tallinja card, by a hefty government subsidy paid from their own taxes to support a public transport system that fails them again and again. This Spanish bus operator with whom Mizzi seems to get on so well, both here and on the Iberian peninsula, is so slow-moving that it is still to introduce its summer schedule. Airlines, who run much more complicated routes, did that months ago. But that is not a surprise. The new operator hasn’t even managed to spray paint the run-down Arriva buses it inherited, let alone replace them.

He’s a lucky man, Minister Mizzi. A black man saved his neck by taking all the attention away from the public transport chaos

That we have ended up with a mediocre public transport service is no surprise. The warning bells were sounded last year when McGill’s, Scotland’s fourth-largest bus operator, scrapped its bid to run our bus service. Its chief executive had said he had a gut feeling that excessive state interference would prevent McGill’s from running a profitable service. Ralph Roberts said the Maltese government lacked openness.

Surely he didn’t read Labour’s electoral programme because so open is this government that Mizzi is still to publish the deal he reached with his competitor. Last February Mizzi said he wanted to explain the contract to the people before publishing it. The result of that contract is now self-explanatory.

That should spare us Mizzi’s explanation because although he is loud and articulate, he is difficult to follow. Mizzi should publish it now because we need to see if there is an escape clause, fast.

Having found no oil, Mizzi really lost his shirt over those buses but he’s trying to put on a brave face, possibly because he knows how strongly the Prime Minister’s wife feels about the poor descamisado. She’s just crossed a channel for them. A second round won’t raise so much publicity, or maybe funds.

Unlike the Prime Minister, State-owned TVM did something good last week, very good in fact, when it carried footage of policemen arresting that black man at the bus terminus after attempting the incredible – to get people to stand in a queue to top up their Tallinja card. That low are basic manners in Malta, that uncivilised is this country, that people need to be told how to stand in line.

Then TVM went on to spoil it all when on its news portal it described the man as “Hungarian, but black”. Being Hungarian makes him a member of the European Union and being black a member of a human race, so what was the point of that incredible description?

Tactics apart, those three policemen may have been misled by a racist crowd. They let the Hungarian-but-black man free the moment they found out their mistake. One of them apologised.

And then suddenly, taking the cue from a queue, out stepped Civil Liberties Minister Helena Dalli to apologise to the Hungarian-but-black “on behalf of the Maltese” for his terrible ordeal. She had no mandate to do so, because she does not represent a country but a party that has institutionalised discrimination, that promoted the push-backed of black immigrants and that that still finds a place for the likes of Ronnie Pellegrini at her secretariat.

The Hungarian-but-black man was not impressed by Dalli’s stunt. He said: “I want action, not words.” He has seen enough of this country to know the sheer hypocrisy of a government that claims to be a world leader in gay rights, while blacks have to ask whites to hail a bus for them because otherwise the driver will not stop. The immensely aloof Prime Minister’s answer to the transport chaos last week was more pipedream promises of monorails, underground systems and, yet again, an underwater link to Gozo.

He just fails to understand that mega projects do not impress people but scare them because he is in charge.

The idea of a bridge to Gozo “does not excite me”, the Prime Minister also told us. That’s curious because until a while ago he was giving the impression that the Chinese will be building that bridge out of the kindness of their hearts.

Now the idea doesn’t excite the Prime Minister any longer. Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg similarly does not get easily excited, as he so eloquently told us in Parliament. It must be either a contagion in the Labour Party or it comes with the burden of office – reality.

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