We have just dropped the year 2004 into the silent limbo of the past. It was, for many, a hard year, and thank Heavens that it can go.

Yet, on reflection, Time has no divisions to mark its passage. There is no blaze of trumpets and no roll of drums to announce the beginning of a new year

Looking forward into an empty year, brimful with challenges, strikes one with awe because, hard as the year 2004 has been, 2005 is going to be harder still

The root cause of our present predicament goes back to the years of sustained profligacy, characteristic of the Fenech Adami years,. and the money no problem syndrome that saddled Malta with a structural deficit and amassed an unprecedented debt burden, that has to be serviced with a king’s ransom every year.

This situation developed in spite of repeated local and international warnings. It was only after Malta’s formal accession to the EU that Brussels read the riot act to Dr. Lawrence Gonzi, and insisted that the kissing had to stop

Tip of the Iceberg

What followed was a Convergence Programme hastily put together by Dr.Gonzi, and the hardest budget ever launched by a PN administration. Even so, what’s now visible is the tip of the iceberg. There is much more to come which is already on the cards. involving a restructuring of the social services framework and a reform of the pensions system ,to begin with.

That the Maltese economy needed a strong doze of medicine, as well as surgery, had been predicted at a time when the PN administration was in no mood to listen, and when those who made these predictions were classified as latter-day Jeremiahs.

It is useless as well as pointless to cry over spilt milk. But it is not too late to identify the pitfalls that led to the present predicament.

Under our system of government, Parliament monitors the Executive but, for an

inordinately long time, monitoring has been neither thorough nor adequately effective.

In practice, things have not been working as smoothly as they look on paper

Only a few months ago, a knowledgeable local commentator, Frans Camilleri, was lamenting that “over the years, we have witnessed the unchecked decline, denigration and emasculation of Parliament, its powers relentlessly usurped by the Executive and its agencies, and an increasingly overbearing Prime Minister, whichever Party he hailed from”

Mr.Camilleri made three legitimate observations:

The Prime Minister’s powers of appointment to boards, agencies, commissions and the courts should be severely circumscribed and made subject to parliamentary approval. Citizen participation in our democratic institutions remains limited to elections, with too little recourse to referenda and other direct consultations with the electorate. Thirdly, government has to be made far more accountable than it has been so far.

“If there were good and accountable government” he held, “there would not have been so many cases where abuse of power , political favouritism , breaches of ethics and corruption have either not been investigated or where investigations have gone nowhere”

Democratic Vacuum

There is as much substance as there is punch in these observations. In Malta, there is a democratic vacuum that cries loud for reform. Reform cannot be imposed unilaterally by whichever Party is in office.

This is a matter suitable for a shared initiative – but, although it takes two to tango, it is the governing party that must call the music.

The tune must strike a note of frugality, of administrative prudence and of parsimony in the exercise of patronage.

Patronage has been abused and led to a proliferation of quangos which, in turn, opened the floodgates. It is incredible but true, that, in a few short years, the number of public entities have come to include seven ‘foundations”, sixteen “authorities”, twenty-two “commissions”, nine “tribunals”, seventy-two “boards” and forty “committees”, besides other odds and ends .

Cat’s Cradle

This is a veritable cat’s cradle of political favoritism and potential abuse. Some of these entities ran amok, competing between them in unseemly shows of prodigality with no apparent check. Others have elevated their level of mismanagement to that of a fine art and saddled the administration with heavy commitments. (Mater Dei Hospital, the Freeport, Enemalta).

It would take more than a Public Accounts Committee, an Ombudsman and the paraphernalia of parliamentary monitoring to oversee the activities of this proliferation of quangos and of an administrative machine that thrives in terms of Parkinson’s Law. It was this machine that involved the government in the capricious Brussels property deal and which incurred unlimited expense on plans, (which never came to fruition) to rebuild the Opera House in Valletta

All of this brings into sharp relief the cost of an administration that exercised power without scrutiny, that abused, without adequate democratic control , its powers of patronage, and preferred ,on various occasions, to operate without all due transparency, when the odour of irregularity demanded independent judicial investigations.

Did all this come to pass by sheer accident, or was a good part of it spurred by opportunities arising from the money no problem situation that prevailed under the PN administration for so many years? Or was it vice-versa?

The reader can make up his or her own mind in the light of the economic situation

In which we now find ourselves. .

The point is not just to look back. It is to learn from the past and to look forward.

The object of the exercise is to resolve to avoid the pitfalls and remedy the shortcomings.

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