This is not an exercise in tongue twisters, nor an exercise to get you digging out your dictionaries. It is, as I see it, an exact description of Malta today.
Nomenklatura is a word coming from the old Soviet Union time, the system whereby influential posts in government and industry were filled by party appointees.
Kleptocracy, according to Wikipedia, is a government whose corrupt leaders use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population.
One area which bears more investigation regards the appointment of persons of trust by the present administration. In a report two years ago, the Venice Commission had said it was informed there were about 700 at the time.
It also emerged that among those engaged as persons of trust there were a security guard, a maintenance officer, a crane and fork-lifter operator, a dog handler, gardeners and cleaners.
The Venice Commission had admitted there can be a legitimate need for ministers to benefit from the assistance of persons of trust in implementing their political programme but it added that both the number of such appointees and their role should be limited.
The former Commissioner for Standards in Public Life had pointed out that such appointments on trust had attracted controversy both because they were not limited to ministers’ secretariats and also due to the fact that they are considered as being in direct conflict with the Constitution because the Public Service Commission is effectively bypassed and ignored.
Instead of listening to reason and returning to the straight and the narrow of what used to be done under previous administrations, the Muscat-Abela administrations continued along the lines of giving priority to party loyalists.
The mainstream and not so mainstream media continually highlight the iced buns given out and the Government Gazette as well as replies to parliamentary questions dutifully list the names, the contracts, and the amount of money being doled out.
The problem is this information is being given sporadically and not in an organised way. It is up to the mainstream and not so mainstream media to tot up the sums, join the dots and provide a more comprehensive picture.
Now there have been some developments along this line with the future still enveloped in mist.
On the one hand we notice that some ministers’ wives are now being appointed to boards about which they are not thought to be competent, such as the Grain Terminal. The only point seems to be the honoraria they will get from attending board meetings.
On the other hand, we now have some people who have double employment in full time jobs. Such as the CEO of the Dar il-Mediterran.
No wonder then that Rosianne Cutajar was quoted as telling Yorgen Fenech that once everybody was “pigging”, she might as well join them.
The accent was, as always, on the money these accumulated jobs would bring.
Labour has been reduced to this. They have siphoned off the country’s finances, driven the deficit and the debt to unsustainable heights (blaming Covid and the war in Ukraine) and let future administrations (which may be Labour for all we know) to pay the bill.
Allowing more and more people to move to Malta will not get our future pensions paid, as we were promised. We will get more traffic jams, more people living in substandard accommodation, and plunge us more to the bottom.
Meanwhile the pigs continue to gorge themselves regardless of any other consideration.
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