Howard Beale screamed: “I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore.” This strong cri-de-coeur, repeated by many people all over the United States in some of the scenes of the film Network, reflects the way many people in Malta are feeling today.  People are sad but most of all they are angry after the horrible assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Honest citizens are angry because the State has miserably and most obscenely failed Daphne Caruana Galizia and her family. Saying that Caruana Galizia did not ask for or want protection because she did not trust the police is a pathetic excuse.

The state was nonetheless obliged to protect her. It did not.

People are angry because it is now clear that what the State let happen to Caruana Galizia can happen to them. People have just been told by the loudest and deadliest of bangs that they are not safe to freely express themselves. People feel that the articles on free speech in our Constitution are dead letters.

Common folk are angry because they are afraid that this country will slide down a route that they believed no longer existed. Last Tuesday the Times of Malta quite rightly lead with a banner heading that it had used 28 years ago: Black Monday.

It reminded us that on October 15, 1979, a group of Labour Party thugs ransacked and burnt the building housing Allied Newspapers and their printing press. Then they went on a rampage attacking the house of the then Leader of the Opposition and a couple of PN clubs. Prime Minister Dom Mintoff said in Parliament how sorry he was and wrote a letter of apology to Mabel Strickland. Although the perpetrators were known, no one was brought to court.

Today we do not know who the perpetrators are. Whether they will be brought to justice or not is a moot point.

The people are angry because adding insult to injury, the top brass of this State which failed them are trying to abscond from their responsibility by trying to alienate us from the real issues. On analysis their appeals for “national unity” look like nothing more than an attempt to paper over the cracks; an attempt to buy time.

The way forward is the transformation of anger into a positive force

This is not the time for facile and stereotypical calls for national unity. This is the time for facing the demon that has been unjustifiably forced upon us and to throw it back to the nethermost part of hell where it belongs.

This is the time for facing the fundamental question:

Is the State an accomplice or is it just incompetent? We cannot think of national unity without first answering a very important question and working through the answer.

I believe it is incompetence not active complicity; but I also believe it is incompetence of the culpable type.

The Prime Minister condemned what had happened in the strongest possible terms. I am certain that he meant what he said. I have no doubt that he is shocked and that he would really like the police to leave no stone unturned to bring the perpetrators to justice.

But the Prime Minister should also know that Malta did not reach the abyss it reached last Monday by mere coincidence.

We are where we are today because systematically, the institutions that should be there to defend the people were perverted into servants, not to say slaves, of the powerful. The police force has repeatedly gloated in incompetence whenever political figures were concerned. The Office of the Attorney General seems like a club of hermits who bound themselves by a vow of silence. The FIAU is a thing of the past.

The pattern was the same in these or other institutions: whenever possible place at the helm incompetent people who become puppets; when this is not possible somehow silence the incumbents.

The Times of Malta last Tuesday titled its editorial ‘The day the music died’. This evokes Don McLean’s song about the death in a plane crash of rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson and their pilot Roger Peterson.

The music must not stop.

After the burning of the Progress Press, the Times of Malta rose Phoenix-like out of the flames.

The way forward is therefore the transformation of anger into a positive force.

Journalists need to find new strength to continue the investigative work of Daphne Caruana Galizia. What she can do no longer, we journalists must do with more passion and intensity. Non-journalists have the duty to keep on being reliable and truthful sources. There are undoubtedly many scandals that only a tandem of courageous citizens and good journalists can unearth.

The blood of the journalist/martyr should be the seed of more investigative journalists and more sources.

Only this will guarantee that the music does not stop.