The role of a President in a modern democracy is usually expected to provide a level-headedness at times of conflict or dispute, or of extraordinary complexity. Where passionate and subjective views dominate a volatile situation, it is often the President who can be called upon to offer equality, stability, justice and wisdom.
Experience is important to have as a quality in the role of President, so that knowledge can play its part in resolving damaging situations.
In so many areas of national importance, these days, a level-headedness is what is needed to calm things down and offer mediation and sober judgement.
We can begin with the Minister for Finance, Edward Scicluna, who is under the spotlight for allowing the agencies that fall under his responsibility, the FIAU and the MFSA to become discredited and departing from their charter of conduct in a very unhealthy environment. The public is not stupid and neither is it so stubborn that it will not admit to a total failure of duty by those responsible and realise that the whole country has been seriously let down not just by the agencies involved but by the person who at the end of the day is accountable for gross misconduct on their part.
On the contrary, the public is ignored, scorned and anyone who directly faces up to the Minister on this grave matter is treated with the same disdain as a rival reveller in a village feast.
That is, in fact, the prevailing atmosphere in Malta. One club, one village, one band, one festa against another. Make noise, drink yourself silly and brag about your saint. Ironically, even rival festas behave better these days and put divisions to the side.
A normal country would expect the President to see beyond the revelry and rivalry and stick to the plot, bringing moderation and solutions to the table so that something of our reputation can be salvaged from this demolition.
But the Scicluna role is a support act for the grand soiree of Mizzi, Schembri and Nexia BT. Pilatus bank was created with special clients in mind who had special needs that preceded its creation.
Once again, the spectacle is as absurd as it is unique.
But it is festa season and yet, the events happening around us seem bizarre and from some virtual reality. Gruesome murders, stabbings, over the top driving and drinking, resulting in loss of life or permanent injury. Drownings, fatal falls, drug related incidents, closed ports, barred flights, cancelled flights, delayed flights, massage parlours harbouring disease and causing grief to innocent people, laws that destroy life, laws that create inequality, unknown owners of our country's assets, the shame on the city of culture. All allowed to be interpreted in a selective manner by the national broadcaster.
It is all getting a bit too much now, to handle. Either there is some person or some authority who can bring back some level-headedness or things are only going to get worse, to the point that the only discourse to be heard is babble, as we sink into a pit of lies.
Those who are suffering or have already suffered greatly as a result of this abdication of truth and justice, are individual persons and are a common people, the Maltese people, a country to which they gave all their energy and belief in the past and which has returned that trust with subversion of facts and truth and misappropriation of its wealth, identity, history and patrimony.
We wonder what a Prime Minister really does, if he or she would abandon the hopes and trust of the people in this way, pursuing false ideals and running amok with authorities, institutions and agencies that really belong to the population served, rather than to the Minister or Prime Minister to manipulate and sink.
"Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it." -Mark Twain
Will it stay this way or can someone bring some honest mind to the scandals surrounding us, in a way that we can actually find our way out of this morass?