'Sound requires atmosphere, and there is yet no atmosphere in the public mind in which this voice can be heard'. I found this sentence in an old book I am reading at the moment, and I was struck by its relevance to Malta's present predicament. It seems to explain the overall reaction to the Panama Papers scandal.

Of course, many people feel genuinely betrayed. The undersigned is one of them. Yet there are other people who cannot actually grasp the significance of the Panama Papers scandal, because they feel it does not affect them directly.

This is probably because we lack a sound theory of government. We are not sure what it means collectively to own a State. We even do not clearly distinguish between the Government of Malta and the State of Malta.

Who is to blame? Many, if not everybody. But pointing fingers is not the point.

The point is what is to be done?

I think the intellectuals and academics should go behind microphones and in front of cameras and talk to the people, without playing linguistic hide-and-seek and using plain language instead. Interviewers should refrain from interrupting, but patiently wait for their interlocutor to finish. A good interviewer is like a dancing partner; they have to follow the lead. Otherwise, it is just stepping on each other's toes, and the end result is tragi-comic.

But more importantly, the intellectuals need to devise an autochthonous theory of government, expressed in the vernacular. By which I do not mean just the Maltese language but also the Maltese mentality (which are probably the two faces of the same coin). We need a theory of government thought in Maltese for the Maltese. We cannot simply transplant foreign concepts, conceived and delivered in different circumstances. In his 1990 book on the Common Heritage of Mankind, Ġużeppi Schembri quotes a Russian scientist, Vernadsky, who said that a people which only imports ideas is culturally dead. Vernadsky was right, and Schembri even more so to quote him in the Maltese context. Twenty-seven years later, it seems that either nothing or else not enough have been done.

Why does it matter that a senior government Minister and the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff have opened companies in a secretive, non-cooperative jurisdiction? We now have the Finance Minister's confirmation that the jurisdiction in question, Panama, will not cooperate with the Maltese State in its investigations. We can expect the same from New Zealand, which - despite being a democracy - does not cooperate in matters concerning trusts. Why should all of this matter?

The Protestants have inherited the idea that a Prince could not rule if he were in a state of mortal sin, and 'thus if one fell from grace then he might be legitimately deposed by his subjects and replaced with a more godly Prince', as one author put it. Though they are now mostly post-Christian, these nations have internalised this notion, even forgetting its religious origins, and, in their theory of government, a Minister who does something which even remotely stinks of "sin" (in the political rather than the religious sense of the word), that Minister has to go. Just consider the recent example of the Australian Minister who had to resign because she acquired a flat (out of her own money) while on a trip to carry out government business. Many Maltese disagreed with the Australian theory of government, considering it draconian. Fine. But what is the Maltese theory of government?

We need to have our own theory of government instead of the present state of affairs in which we clearly do not have any theory. Our understanding of government has been developing organically rather than according to a design. We most urgently need to design a theoretical framework rather than experience one knee-jerk reaction after another, one improvised rationalisation after the other.

We have to answer the important question: is something wrong because it affects our everyday lives or is it wrong because it is inherently wrong?

Should we tolerate what is inherently wrong but does not affect our everyday lives?

As a matter of fact, that a Minister and the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff organise offshore structures hidden behind trusts - both in jurisdictions which do not cooperate with foreign authorities - is something which, once discovered, affects our everyday lives.

It legitimises dubious behaviour, pollutes the moral environment, and sends signals to scoundrels that their time has finally come: if the leaders are not scrupulous, why should the followers?

But even this is still somewhat abstract. Medieval peasants were told that God's Saints are in heaven, and yet they still needed to touch their statues and kiss their terracotta feet. Similarly, we do not believe the moral pollution unless we can feel it with our own hands. This is an expensive way to deal with political misdeeds. It seems we all need to get political cancer before we realise that moral pollution kills an entire country.

We need a sound theory of government, tailor-made for our micro-State lying on the periphery of Europe and aspiring to attract big business without having ever trained its workforce to meet the challenge; a micro-nation-state which speaks a funny Arabic language and an even funnier pidgin English and believes that the world takes it very seriously, when in reality the world merely smiles, at times benevolently, at it. 

We are so small and so isolated from the rest of the world by that blue, mesmerising physical barrier we all deeply and sincerely love; we depend so much on the only natural resource we have (our reputation), that we desperately need a theory of government designed appositely for our almost-unique situation. Otherwise, we risk losing our reputation while living in the Republic of Slumberland, hypnotised by the translucence of the waves and hushed by their lullaby as they caress the shore.

Only when we wake up and agree on such a theory will we really understand the devastating implications of retaining a government Minister and a Prime Minister's Chief of Staff who were caught red-handed trying to create highly suspicious offshore structures requiring a minimum yearly input of almost a million dollars.

Only then shall we understand why they cannot remain in office, and why one day their obstinate refusal to step down will have a real, quantifiable effect on our everyday lives.

 

Dr Sammut is the author of the best-selling book L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa. Il-Panama Papers u l-Poter.