The new bus service has had an awful start with more than teething troubles. I tried to forgo my car and go to Valletta using the bus service one day last week. I had no alternative but to give up. Waiting for half an hour in Naxxar trying to catch one of two buses that should be passing every 10 minutes was to no avail.

When a bus turned up, there was only space for one passenger. A friend gave me a lift to St Julian’s, where the frequency of buses to Valletta is theoretically every seven minutes. In another half-hour, only one bus passed by.

It did not even stop as it was full. Eventually, I somehow managed to get another lift. In both these routes, the service was running at less than 25 per cent of the announced schedule, even though only some 10 per cent of drivers did not turn up for work.

This has been, of course, the proverbial spanner in the works: the majority of the ‘no-show drivers’ were either drivers or owners who used to work for the old bus service.

Yet one is justified to question whether the service would have been up and running with just a few hitches without the disruption caused by the absent drivers. It does seem Arriva did not give due importance to local conditions and that its schedule is hardly feasible.

The public is now suffering the result of the country having tolerated the old bus system for so long. The 60 odd drivers who contributed to this mess cannot hold the country hostage to their whims.

They managed to confuse Arriva’s arrival but the country lives in the hope that their ‘victory’ will be short-lived.

Yet there is a limit to how much the public can tolerate going through these sorts of travails, making allowances for the fact that the service was not yet in place – arriving for work two hours late every day and taking 90 minutes to return home is a very serious concern.

Like anyone who believes he had a ‘safe and permanent’ monopoly, Maltese bus owners and drivers used to believe they could run the show on their own terms. They never felt the danger of extinction through competition and they used to think they could bully the government by threatening to bring the country to a stand-still.

Instead of a well-designed, efficient public transport system, in Malta we had one designed for the ‘convenience’ of the bus-owners rather than according to the needs of the public.

The majority shunned the public transport system and we ended up the smallest country in Europe and the one with the most congested roads.

The people who used to run the old system were always at the very lower end of the popularity stakes. So much so, that even when the public’s mood and attitude towards the current administration is as negative as it could be, there is no empathy with those who want to upset the Arriva applecart.

Perhaps, these arrogant, tactless bullies have found their match in Austin Gatt.

Malta has experienced too many instances of this sort of bullying. For a long time, we had the same sort of attitude among many workers at the Drydocks: they too felt they had a ‘safe and permanent’ job and believed that they could run the show on their own terms, never fearing the danger of extinction and thinking they could keep on bullying the government all their life.

Getting rid of this problem cost the country millions of euros – but in the end the country did get rid of it.

A similar situation, it seems, is prevalent in the loaders section of the much beleaguered Air Malta.

People who got jobs in that section as a result of political patronage of either the Labour or the Nationalist ilk (whichever one does not really matter) also adopted the attitude of having a ‘safe and permanent’ job that they could run on their own terms, as can be seen in the way they substituted one of their own who would be on sick leave – mostly suffering from sham syndrome, of course.

All other airlines flying to Malta have a more efficient and more trustworthy loading and unloading service for a fraction of the personnel and an even a smaller fraction of the expenses, while Air Malta trudged along suffering so many iniquities because of a few bullies.

Again, this sort of nonsense is costing the country dearly – although, admittedly, it is not the only problem with the Air Malta set-up and practices that have to be completely changed if the airline is to survive.

The lesson is for all to understand: no one has a right to a living that unscrupulously drains employers dry and traps them in a situation where they have to pay good money for a bad service – or even for nothing at all.

The acid test of this lesson depends on the success of the new bus service.

micfal@maltanet.net