I’m a little tired of listening to the candidates for the Nationalist Party’s leadership election say what they will do to change the party, how they will run it, how they think it slots in to the needs of electors, how it doesn’t meet expectations, where it went wrong, how they will deal with what went wrong, and so on and so forth. You’d think that they are going to be elected to manage an organisation or corporation, not to run the country. Let’s spell it out to them, shall we? Listen up, chaps. The leaders of the two main political parties are not elected to manage the party or to make it electable. Those are just the means to the end. They are elected to run the country.

I wrote a column about this a few weeks back: that what we want to know from the leadership candidates is how they plan to run Malta, what their views are on the major issues, where they stand in the political spectrum (I know that Frank Portelli, for example, is Far Right and fixated on the Knights Templar and Crusaders for reasons that require no imagination to understand), and what their stance is on the main, pressing issues of the day, like government corruption. I sat back and waited. Nothing. Around a month down the line and they’re still bleating on about party structures, party mechanics and the party machine. That’s talk they should reserve for party councillors, because nobody else gives a damn.

It’s nice to know that Adrian Delia wants to make the Nationalist Party the party of the self-employed again - which shows that he hasn’t understood the major changes in Maltese society, and that the new self-employed are now largely the children of the working-class, raised from birth to be lifelong loyal to Labour no matter how much money they make or how many Sunseekers they buy second-hand from the UK. It’s nice to know, too, that Chris Said intends to commission a major sociological study of Malta, mapping the socio-economic, demographic changes that have taken place over the last couple of decades. I fully approve of that: I’m the one who has been writing for years about those changes and who said that this is exactly what the Nationalist Party needs to do because it does not understand that the Malta it spoke to so strongly 15 years ago is now something else. But that’s not what I or anybody else wants to hear from Dr Said. That’s not a reason to elect him or anybody else. That’s an internal policy and administration matter which is strictly for the party itself. It’s got nothing to do with how he plans on running the Maltese government and the country, which is the entire purpose and ultimate end of being elected Opposition leader: to oppose the government for five years and to then lead it.

I hate to say it, but it’s so obvious that three of the candidates are lawyers (I’m discounting Frank Portelli, as good manners dictate that I should be charitable in his regard, and he hasn’t an ice-cube’s chance in hell anyway) because they are bogged down in the process already. Lawyers tend to be process-oriented by training and inclination, though of course there have been some spectacular and inspiring exceptions in politics, while being process-oriented is actually a professional advantage when practising the law itself. This means that all three of them can’t or won’t see beyond what they plan to do with the party itself, internally, because in their mind that is Step One of The Process. Like many lawyers, they won’t even begin to think about the ultimate goal – running Malta in X fashion – until they have got through steps one to whatever: being elected party leader, sorting out the party, adjusting to the fact that they are Leader of the Opposition, sorting out the party some more, and then when a general election is drawing near, producing piles of policy documents which nobody is going to look at, before approaching the general election like a bout of litigation before a judge or magistrate.

The advantage Joseph Muscat has is that he is not a lawyer. People who are not lawyers, accountants or line managers are not process-oriented but goal-oriented. The process is not dispensed with, not at all, but it is knocked into its proper place as the means to the ultimate end, and all unnecessary rubbish is trimmed off. Process-oriented people think and work in stages. Goal-oriented people think in terms of ultimate aims. It doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you do. It doesn’t matter how the deadline is met as long as it is met. Most journalists and anybody, really, who works in the media, are goal-oriented because we have been programmed and conditioned over many years to work towards a deadline and to meet it come what may. Newspaper printing presses don’t wait. The television news has to be broadcast at 6pm and 8pm. There are no postponements or diferimenti.

I’m quite sure that Dr Delia, for instance, thinks of himself as a goal-oriented person, but from what he has said so far, his goal seems to be becoming Prime Minister for its own sake because he has told us nothing of how he plans to change Malta for the better, only about how he plans to change the political party he aims to get elected to lead. Dr Said, too, has to start talking about what he plans to do with the government, and not what he plans to do with the party.

 

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