Our country is at a crossroads. The doomsayers, those who predicted that rampant corruption was taking over, are being proved right and we seem to be on the edge. Just a little push will send us into freefall.

The world’s eyes are on us yet all carries on with no consequences, no resignations. Is this common sense?

All of us who love democracy, unbridled democracy, would in a normal world be expected to declare vehemently that no, this is not common sense.

Common decency should see many heads roll. Many police investigations should have already been concluded and many others should have been launched. Yet in Malta we deal with accountability in an interesting way: nobody is held accountable.

The Daphne Project – and Daphne Caruana Galizia alone before she was so brutally assassinated – has revealed enough to shake the foundations of our country. Yet nobody is shaking or at least nobody does so in public. And nobody has done so these last years.

The problem is far from confined to the government of Joseph Muscat. It also lies with the Opposition. After the election, nobody expected the PN  to regroup too quickly. But their problem lies beyond regrouping, refocusing or reenergising.

Malta is at this crucial time never seen before when we have a government mired in the worst corruption imaginable and a leader of the Opposition who is himself hampered in the way he can operate. His past actions and history hardly single him out as the one to be leading the Opposition, the one to fight any obvious, perceived and potential misdeeds, the one to project the vision of a different, better Malta.

Caruana Galizia had uncovered several terrible truths, and several worrying long-term problems in our system. Today we are seeing more of these truths surfacing and given even more credibility, because a small army of national and international investigative journalists moved on and explored what Caruana Galizia herself had worked on. We keep seeing how the government headed by Joseph Muscat acts with impunity.

The way out is to formulate a different method of running the country

We should face and solve these problems immediately before more irreversible harm is done to this country and its institutions. And before our reputation suffers further irreparable damage worldwide.

This should be obvious to all. Just a small dose of common sense would demand instant correcting of this terrible state of affairs. Beyond what Caruana Galizia and the Daphne Project have made public, we should look at our country’s institutions in a more detached way, using just a bit more common sense.

Our malaise, our gangrene, the near total collapse of the rule of law, is not entirely the creation of Muscat and his cronies. It is a situation which has been gathering momentum since independence. There has obviously been a tacit agreement by the two major parties to entrench themsleves in power without proper insitutional guarantees and safeguards which are set in motion with no deference to the government in power.

Thus, these two political groupings have kept to themselves alone the power to reign supreme over all of us. They have done it and are doing it with no fear of repercussions.

In theory we are a democracy and enjoy freedom of speech. And we do, to a certain extent, have a conscience regarding our environment and our various civic rights.

These are, however, all at the discretion of the two major parties which practically take it in turn to rule and administer our “freedoms” and “rights” according to their whims. Those in power, who have always been the PN or MLP since independence, are the ones to appoint the Police Commissioner, the Chief Justice, the President, the head of the Broadcasting Authority, the State media and the judges and magistrates. The list is endless.

It is true that, on studying our political history, the worst abusers of these political strengths have always originated from the Labour camp. But it is not enough to hope for a different Labour mindset or a return to the lesser evil represented by the PN. What we need is an overhaul of all that is easily manipulated and sadly corrupted. We cannot just depend on the vain hope that decent people will always be at the helm. In an increasingly troubled world it is easy to end up with undesirables in power — as we are witnessing right now.

What we need are strong constitutional frameworks for all that we hold sacred. That is the only way out of this morass into which our country has sunk so deeply.

The way out is to move away from the two groupings in our political arena and formulate a different method of running the country, of finding people who will not be shackled to the strings of building developers and businessmen, who are genuinely competent in their fields, have been successful in their respective fields and who are ready to offer their time for the good of our nation. We need to move away from career politicians obsessed with their little kingdoms and think differently, think real democracy and work for a quantum leap in quality of life.

We have to move on and seek common sense as our main source of inspiration for all we do and all we will see done to this country. Only then can we truly call ourselves independent, free and a stable European democracy.

#CommonSense was established by a group of like-minded people who have come to believe that meaningful change truly benefitting the nation cannot emerge from those who benefit from the status quo or those who mimic them. #CommonSense believes that we, the people, have the power to lay the building blocks of that change, a change grounded in fairness, decency, equality and respect, with a genuine vision and ambition for our nation as a normal and reputable European democracy. It is #CommonSense after all!   

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