For the past two-and-a-half years, this country has witnessed the fastest degeneration of standards exhibited by the governing class since Independence. Of course, the days of Dom Mintoff were notorious; people died – literally. However, Mintoff was not elected on the platform of ‘good governance, transparency and meritocracy’.
Mintoff did not stand there in front of the cameras pretending to be the standard bearer of all that was correct. Mintoff did not woo 36,000 voters on the basis that if elected he would revolutionise the country by virtue of having ‘the best Cabinet this country has ever seen’.
We all understood immediately what was coming when a couple of days after the election we found out that the Prime Minister had rented out his own car to the government for his own personal use. It’s just been very seriously downhill ever since, and the gradient just keeps getting steeper and steeper.
We have seen the Prime Minister approve a backroom deal payout of €4.2 million to a tenant of Café Premier who refused to pay his rent – an absolute no-brainer, which in any other civilised country would have led to the immediate resignation of the premier concerned.
We have seen him as Prime Minister withdrawing an action against his own party for the return to the Maltese taxpayer of Australia Hall, leading to the Labour Party’s immediate enrichment by millions.
We have for the past eight months been witnessing the shambolic Gaffarena saga, which has now been confirmed by a scathing Auditor General’s report confirming the corruption involved in the government’s purchase of half a house it did not need in Valletta in exchange for 43 tumoli of public land and cash. Nobody believes that the Prime Minister, who is responsible for the department, did not know each and every single detail in this sordid affair, because now we know it was very much in the vein of how he goes about doing things.
Off with parliamentary secretary Michael Falzon’s head, yet he remains firmly in situ. Now the cherry on the cake is that the Prime Minister and the Attorney General have sued Gaffarena and the Land Department, for which Joseph Muscat himself is responsible – another howler.
Dozens flock to his Sunday sermons to hear Muscat lie, idolise the corrupt, and defend the indefensible
This sickening behaviour has led to double-digit millions being gifted by our Prime Minister to suspect individuals at taxpayers’ expense… taxpayers who then have to go on bended knee before the President pleading for money from the Malta Community Chest Fund to finance cancer treatment.
To my mind, all this is not the worst thing that has happened. The worst thing is that the Prime Minister of my country, by leading in this diabolical manner – sanctioning and endorsing this unacceptable modus operandi – is effectively saying it’s OK to lie, it’s OK to cheat, it’s OK for a government to partake in the most serious corrupt practices our country has ever seen.
So when young people, and not so young people, look at our Prime Minister as a source of inspiration and observe this form of governance, surely they must say: if it’s OK for him to behave like this, then it’s fine for me. Evidence of this are the dozens who flock to his Sunday sermons to hear him lie, idolise the corrupt and defend the indefensible, and they stand there and clap. Incredible! To hell with good governance, to hell with correct behaviour and to hell with leading by example. All this in just two-and-a-half years.
Honest law-abiding citizens from every side of the political spectrum do not like this at all. They are as appalled as I am. They ask why the Prime Minister continues to act in this manner and why it is that when we feel he cannot stoop lower he sinks even further.
Surely, it’s not because he likes to be called a liar, or losing face or votes. It is more likely that his forma mentis is such that he believes he can actually continue to hoodwink the Maltese population and get away with it; that he can continue to give handouts to the chosen few in the hope it would be sufficient to shroud the unacceptable howlers and atrocities taking place on a daily basis, and which have been going on since the day after the last general election.
As accurately put by Opposition leader Simon Busuttil, Labour is in ‘free fall’ and at the moment it just looks like a race to the bottom. Isn’t it about time we give this country a dose of good governance? Well, Busuttil’s plan for good governance is in place. He’s just waiting to be given the chance to implement it.
Ann Fenech is president of the Nationalist Party executive committee.