It looks like those darn chickens are coming home to roost in Premier Joseph Muscat’s belfry and no mistake. The ‘American (not) University (definitely not) of Malta’ (only insofar as it’s here geographically) has had to turn itself into an Institute of Higher Education, presumably in order to avoid the ignominy of having its application to be a university turned down. So, we, the great unwashed, are asking ourselves, precisely why is it that the Sadeem chappie has been given a few rather fetching properties, given that he’s not, in truth, going to be giving “the South” a shiny new university but just yet another commercial educational establishment, of which many were established in days gone by?
Were we lied to in order to try to deflect the bucketloads of disapproval that should, and mostly did, shower themselves onto Premier Muscat’s hapless pate when it was made known that Sadeem and Co. would be getting some prime property for less than a dime?
The more charitable among us might say that the poor sods that surround Premier Muscat and advise him how to couch things for consumption by “we, the people” jumped the gun a tiny, weeny bit and looked more than a few years into the future, at a time when Sadeem’s bunch would have established their academic credentials and been able to call themselves a university.
The less charitable might say that this sorry episode is yet another example of how Premier Muscat thinks he can fool all of the people all of the time having already fooled a goodly chunk of them into slaking his gasping thirst for power and influence by voting him up the steps to Castille.
Joseph Muscat isn’t smelling of roses very much and that is putting it very mildly
One of the ones who was fooled, quite clearly, was that Franco Debono character, who had made such a fuss about the way the Nationalists ran the country, thereby adding to the mix of reasons why people chose to believe wannabe-Premier Muscat’s yarn-spins about how he was going to make this a country governed by the best, most transparent, most replete with skill and integrity Cabinet ever seen.
Debono is now starting to fulminate against the current bunch, as you can see, if you have the energy, on assorted other media outlets.
Now, forgive me for stating the obvious, but the fact is that Debono, not having a vote in the House any more, is not exactly relevant in real terms. On the other hand, his pretty obvious distaste for Premier Muscat and - in particular - his Minister of Justice sidekick, Owen Bonnici, makes Debono relevant, to a limited degree, in the sense that he is symptomatic of the way many, many people, feel betrayed by the way Premier Muscat’s bit of Labour has jumped with two feet and a gaping mouth into the trough, and no mistake.
Rapidly catching up with Emy Bezzina in the “OMG what is he up to now?” stakes, Debono temporarily rescues himself from political oblivion by giving a voice to the duped, highlighting the abysmal standards of governance to which we are being subjected.
Even worse for Premier Muscat’s ratings has been the Gaffarena scandal that is unfolding in front of an electorate that is starting to wake up to the fact that having voted Labour, they got Labour. It’s all very well for Premier Muscat to slide a sword unobtrusively in Michael Falzon’s general direction and then do “I come to praise Caesar not to bury him” bit of stand-up at the Orpheum, that sort of thing only fools people like Pullicino Orlando, which isn’t the highest of high bars, by any stretch of any fevered imagination.
The fact is, especially when you look at the Gaffarena scandal side by side with the earlier one concerning the Cafe’ Premier bailout, Premier Muscat isn’t smelling of roses very much and that is putting it very mildly. He can stand in front of the faithful, new and old (Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando among them, with a cheesy grin on his face) and spout inanities on the lines of how the Nationalists really, really would like to have stalwarts and fine upstanding soldiers of steel like Michael Falzon and Manuel Mallia and receive rapturous applause, but you can see, in the haunted look that lives just behind his rictus grin, that Premier Muscat is smelling something and it sure ain’t the coffee.
I’ve mentioned it before, there’s something about the way Premier Muscat does things that reminds me so much of that Peppone character in the Don Camillo stories. There is one particularly fine passage where Peppone is in the village square, shaking his fist and screaming imprecations at the mayor until, at one point, he remembers that - erm - he’s the mayor, so he charges up to the balcony and starts waving munificently at the crowd.
Premier Peppino Muscat (Peppone is too grand a name) has done pretty much the reverse. Having had a scandal or two of pretty awesome proportions cooked up in his ministry, he’s suddenly taken it upon himself to become a valiant fighter for the good and true and sued - in effect - himself to reverse the Gaffarena deals, a bit like Peppone the citizen running back down into the village square to screech at Peppone the mayor.
Nothing was said about going to court to reverse the Premier deal, though, that one, it seems, will have to go by the wayside. And to add even more brass to the amount of brass that his neck already sports, Premier Peppino’s spinners simply lied brazenly about the leader of the Opposition’s criticism of the “too-little-too-late” court case, trying to show Busuttil up as not respecting the institutions.
If anyone doesn’t respect the institutions, it’s this bunch of clowns. Just as a few random examples, take the army, the police, the civil service and heaven knows how many other constitutional and parliamentary organs and have a quick think about the extent to which Premier Peppino’s boys and girls have shown any respect at all to them.
Or to the electorate, for that matter, but that’s really another sad story.
As sad, but in a different way, as the depths of governance to which we’ve been dragged is the way we, and here I include the Denmarks and Swedens of this world, have dragged ourselves dangerously down the road of racist bigotry and intolerance.
It would have been funny, had it not been tragic, the way some so-called “patriots” (if these are patriots, style me a traitor, please) worked themselves up into a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy at the sight of a group of Somalis having a religious procession. Reading their rabid posts, you’d have thought that Isis were rampaging down Republic Street, beheading every Christian they could get their hands on.
The snag was, and the “patriots” were too thick to notice, that the Somalis were Christians, meaning that their only sin, in the eyes of the racist scum, actually was to be black. Not that it would have made a difference had they been Muslim or Buddhist or whatever, they would have had just as much of a right to profess their faith in public as anyone else but the fact that they were Christian demonstrates perfectly why bigoted racist scum should be banished from polite society.
Nothing much on the nourishment front to mention, except an excellent riso cacio e pepe at Zero Sei, but we did go to a couple of performances of the Baroque Festival.
One was at the superb, but acoustically dire, St John’s Co-Cathedral, where the performers were perfectly acceptable but the programme boring - that’s my fault, of course, no one else’s, but the lousy acoustics didn’t help. At St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, the programme was more fun (again, that’s a purely personal take) and the performers excellent, but the chugging generator didn’t add to the quality of the evening. Nor did the enormous lights shining into the audience’s eyes, for that matter.