It was not a surprise to me that the government has failed to deliver on its pre-election promise that Malta would have a new gas-fired power station up and running by March 2015.

I am not an engineer, nor an expert in the field, but logic told me that it was humanly impossible to start and finish the project within a 24-month timeframe as the Labour Party would have us believe before the last election.

Many took Joseph Muscat's bait. Labour won the election on many counts, but this was their golden card, the one that swayed many to vote red.

As time passed, it became increasingly clear that Labour would not have been capable of fulfilling its promise.

Three weeks ago, that is six months before the March 2015 cut-off date, The Malta Independent started an investigation on the project. We were cautious in our approach, but we strongly hinted that the lack of activity on the site in question led us to understand that it was unrealistic that the new power station would have been completed on time. We sent questions to the government on the matter and, in spite of their being ignored, we kept on investigating and published more reports. No other media picked up on our story.

Until Friday, the government kept on dodging us. During a visit to De La Rue factory, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was asked by our journalist Neil Camilleri about the power station. To a specific question about the looming deadline, Dr Muscat chose to reply with an answer that had nothing to do with the subject. He said that the water and electricity tariffs for businesses would still be reduced in March. Well and good; but that was not the question he was asked and his body language was explicitly clear that he was feeling uncomfortable.

Suddenly, the rest of the media woke up and took our question and the PM's non-answer as their punch-line. Suddenly, there was an interest on the subject and, on Sunday, Minister Konrad Mizzi admitted that Labour will not be able to finish the project in time.

There was no press conference to announce this failure, as there had been when Dr Muscat and Dr Mizzi called up the media urgently to announce a two cent reduction on the price of fuel. The announcement came all the way from Beijing to a section of the media, incidentally the same media that had been selected to accompany the PM on his trip to the Chinese capital. At least we did not have a line about the minister having tears in his eyes.

Now we have it directly from the government that it has failed on its pre-election pledge. Yet the Prime Minister is insisting that the energy rates will be reduced for businesses as promised. We must remember however that this reduction was directly linked to the new power station being in operation by March. With this target being declared unreachable, how is the government going to 'fund' the price reductions?

Dr Muscat has also put his prime ministerial head on the line by saying, before the election and repeating it on a TV programme last March, that he will resign if the deadline is not met. But he is giving no indication that he will be doing that. And it's useless expecting him to stick to his word. You know politicians and how they twist words.

On Monday we will perhaps know more when the House of Representatives debates an Opposition motion to discuss the way forward. We expect the government to explain what went wrong and how it plans to make up for the lost time. We also expect a new deadline to be declared and how the project will proceed to meet the new target.