Malta is facing an existential choice. What kind of country do we want to be? A country governed by men and women of integrity who want to serve the people, think long term, and try to do what is right, or a country where mediocre people who are not able to earn their keep on merit in the private sector enter politics to raid the public coffers? Do we want to be European in values, or just in geography?
For anyone caring to take the broadest sweep of what has been happening in the past four years, the chasm in values has never been wider between those who have always seen Malta as part of the continent’s true modern spirit of public life as service, even though they might and do have their defects, and those who so obviously and cynically seek power for the huge income they manage to draw from our hard-earned taxes.
Leaving out the potential pitfalls of Brexit and the implications for Malta, if we confine our analysis to factors within our realm, that is the stewardship of this country, one will quickly come to the conclusion that we are living in a fool’s paradise and that another five years of corruption and cronyism will not only damage Malta’s potential but also bury for good any notion of politics as public-spirited leadership.
Take the appalling governance we are witnessing, commented upon only too recently and forcefully by the Chamber of Commerce’s president in the presence of the Prime Minister. The incompetence of governing party cronies given plum public jobs as a ‘thank you’ for their support of the governing party.
The corruption attested by the daily news and by the sheer 10-place drop in the internationally respected index published yearly by Transparency International. The wholesale politicisation and emasculation of all our institutions, whether the judiciary, the police, the military, our regulatory bodies, public inquiries, government departments, even a government-owned bank.
The utter destruction of our environment passing off as ‘development’ and ‘economic growth’. The pollution coming from our traffic-jammed roads. Our dreadful road infrastructure with useful projects only financed by the European Union. The total lack of transparency in huge contracts and land giveaways, from Żonqor to ITS.
Another five years of corruption and cronyism will not only damage Malta’s potential but also bury for good any notion of politics as public-spirited leadership
The total lack of accountability of people who enter public office but who seem more intent on getting family, friends and cronies onto the public payroll. The decline in the quality of essential services provision that comes with the rampant cronyism. Health and energy privatisation by stealth in hugely shady contracts. A governing party beholden, even from opposition, to places like Azerbaijan in all kinds of contracts. And the list goes on.
Add to that a major secret contract with a private power station through which government will buy virtually all the electricity we need at inflated prices nearly double those it is now obtaining through the previous government’s investment in the interconnector, with government now committing itself to switch off that interconnector and buy all the electricity the private power station will produce for all of 18 years.
And then of course Panama and a full year now of the Prime Minister resisting the obvious course of action to take if we really had a normal government. In France, which our Prime Minister gave us the impression he would model Malta on, a minister who was caught with a secret bank account abroad has just been sentenced to three years in jail; and he could perfectly explain where he got the money.
A presidential candidate is being formally investigated for embezzlement of public funds and will face the inquiring magistrates on March 15 for a fake job given to his wife.
Yet, in Malta, the closest associates of the Prime Minister are still running the country and signing secret contracts after being caught with secret companies in a complex financial web spanning half the world while the wife of one of them is given a super-salaried job for which the slightest appraisal does not exist.
What kind of benefit can our major economic pillars – among which financial services and gaming, so wisely set up by the previous government and now making up a full 25 per cent of our economy – draw from corruption and the cynical lack of even the slightest shred of transparency and accountability?
We get MEPs trying to save us from ourselves only to publicly say that what they see in the Panama scandal is money-laundering.
Quite apart from the serious perils of continuing along this road, we need to remind ourselves of the transformation brought about by true leadership and our votes in 1987 and 2003 when we literally rescued ourselves from the brink and faced the enormous job of rebuilding all our institutions to become a European state in spirit, physically rebuilding our infrastructure then lacking even the most basic of services in water, electricity and telecommunications, opening our university to all, rebuilding our international reputation, introducing European standards and securing EU membership.
Corruption, secrecy and cronyism are not inevitable, just as lack of democracy was not inevitable and ‘partnership’ was not inevitable. Today, Simon Busuttil is the only leader who can lead us to a true European spirit just as he was there in 2003 giving his all for EU membership facing the present Prime Minister’s untruth game.
Corruption, secrecy and cronyism are inevitable only when the corrupt manage to engender in us a spirit of resignation or defeatism. We cannot lie down and allow corruption to eat away at the very basic of what type of country we really want to be. This is why we are facing an existential choice.