One of the most shocking things about this government and its choices is the way it has deliberately chosen the wrong people for important positions and for those not so important. In the first two years I really believed it was deliberate, a way of insulting institutions and having people in position who Muscat and his gang could control and influence. But after the last year or so I have begun to think that the reason is very different, that it is actually the result of ignorance and of the belief that anyone can do any job and that no particular skills, gifts, training or attitude are required. And if you spend some time thinking about it, you will see that this is actually a manifestation of everything Muscat and his gang said in the years 2008 to 2013, when he was Opposition leader. They criticised appointments and nominations constantly – except for, tellingly, the one appointment that definitely should have been criticised to death, that of John Dalli as European Commissioner – and the running theme was that anybody else could have done the job but the person who was appointed was only appointed because he was an ‘insider’ or ‘party favourite’. The training, skills, abilities and technical qualities of the individuals concerned were completely overlooked and disregarded.

The government is totally oblivious to the consequences of its actions and choices in this regard, precisely because it believes that anybody can do any job and it doesn’t matter if they have baggage or really bad personalities and no integrity. And because of this it has created a mass of problems for itself – it clearly doesn’t care about the problems it creates for the country – because the bad people it chooses then turn out to be a problem. There have been so many examples of this, but the most recent is Alfred Mifsud, deputy governor of the Central Bank, who has been the subject of a transfixing scandal over the past few days, leading to his elimination, voluntary or otherwise, from the running for the post of governor.

If you appoint to high or low office an unsuitable person of little to no integrity, it is inevitable that at some point they are going to let you down or create problems, or their baggage will come to the fore to haunt you. What for set yourself up for that kind of fall? Why take the risk? There are plenty of good people of integrity in this country, who are skilled and trained. Some of them are even Labour supporters, if this government must insist, unlike the one before it, on engaging the services only of the kind of people who vote for it. So why pick the people with baggage, the people who are not the best available? Again, Alfred Mifsud is a case in point. We seem to have accepted that a post like that of governor of the Central Bank is somehow in the political gift of the government of the day, rather than it being open to interview by invitation or by open call, so that the best person for the job is selected in a dispassionate and apolitical manner. Can anybody say in all seriousness that Mifsud was the best person for the job of governor of the Central Bank, even without the big scandal that blew up some days ago? Of course he isn’t. There is nothing to mark him out as being above the rest, and plenty to mark him down as being below par.

The problems that the government has created for itself by appointing all these rubbish people to important posts are unquantifiable, and the negative consequences are increasing exponentially. Even where nothing is actually expected of the appointee, where he has been given a post to keep him quiet and as a reward – as with Franco Debono and his Law Commission  - the fall-out is very bad for the government. Debono behaves badly in public and is clearly doing little to nothing in return for what he is paid, and this reflects disastrously on Muscat who chose him. Good appointees are the public relations front and image for the government. Bad appointees are the opposite, and this government’s large army of poor choices in appointing people will eventually turn out to be its undoing.

 

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