Transport Minister Joe Mizzi wants everyone to believe that the bus service in Malta is improving, although he readily admits there is still a way to go.

Twice in Parliament in less than a month, he used an adjournment speech to lay out his plans and tell commuters how the public transport service operated by Autobuses de León is getting better with new routes and new buses and new timetables. The word out on the street is quite different.

Last month, Mr Mizzi finally laid on the table of the House the extensive contract the government signed with the Spanish operators. He had been procrastinating for over a year, waiting “for the right moment”. In mid-February he finally found that moment, saying he first wanted the people to “learn how public transport would improve”.

Meanwhile, according to the minister, the Opposition has only been putting spokes in wheels with the sole objective of “sowings doubts inpeople’s minds”.

Unlike Arriva, Autobuses de León made a soft start, introducing the changes and the new buses slowly, building up to a revision of routes towards the end of last year. The minister said the original plan had been to stagger the route changes but industrial disputes had upset the timetable and the changes were introduced all at one go.

Mr Mizzi claims the new routes were well received and that they only required a bit of tinkering, starting with the Mater Dei Hospital interchange. However, the recent protest by Valletta residents indicated other problems in the system.

In his first adjournment speech, Mr Mizzi spoke not just about buses but also drivers. He did not mention foreign ones who can barely speak English but those who, he claimed, put up the ‘Not in service’ sign on their buses to avoid picking people up at bus stops. He also said someone was organising the drivers to do so.

“I have my suspicions who he is but he is hiding,” Mr Mizzi said.

The inevitable happened. Drivers whose buses were genuinely not in service started to get shouted down by people waiting on bus stops because they were looked upon as saboteurs, according to the Opposition.

But the issue does not stop there. Mr Mizzi said it was his duty as a minister to see that such things did not happen and that he had verified the facts himself. That is not his job. These are employees of a private company and any contention the minister may have should be directed towards the company. Instead, he spoke of people deployed “in plain clothes” to find out what was going on.

The Prime Minister does not seem to agree with Mr Mizzi’s micromanagement of his sector. In fact, he said his government needed a mentality change to start acting as a regulator of public transport.

“We are the regulator and we tell the operator what to change… even our mentality as a government needs to change,” the Prime Minister was reported saying.

And, yet, only a few days later the Transport Minister was again in Parliament, talking of how fire engines used to chase burning bendy buses and then, incredibly, listing in detail route changes, new routes and even the frequency of buses, like all the changes were his own doing.

This is a grave mistake. Mr Mizzi is pegging his political fortunes with that of a private company, when it is evident that their interests are not, and cannot be, the same.