From Mr J. Formosa

Local councils have featured in the news lately, mainly because Parliament is discussing the amendments to the Local Councils Act, but also because the Auditor General has published his report about local councils’ financial performance, and preparations for the elections in March are underway.

Both the main political parties and AD maintain that local councils have been an unqualified success because they have a vested interest in saying so. But have local councils really been a success? I do not think so!

The main stumbling block is the councillors themselves. All of them are party hacks that owe their first allegiance to the party and not to the electorate who voted them into office or the locality they serve.

They have not been chosen by their party on the strength of their qualifications or their potential as leaders or visionaries, but on the basis of their political allegiance.

Their raison d’être is to be re-elected and to see that their party gets the majority of seats in the council. To do this, they pander to the masses and spend our money on coffee mornings and cultural (read tombola) outings. A modern version of bread and circuses.

Councillors are a motley bunch. Some – the ones who actually get something done come from the professional classes – are lawyers, doctors accountants etc. They can read a financial statement, understand budgeting, debate intelligently and are generally the ones who are being groomed for higher things within their party. Some, more by accident than design, actually do make it to Parliament.

Some of the others, because of the amendments to the Local Councils Act, will become mayors, God help us. They are your average party activists – the ones who prop up the bars in party clubs and wave flags and scarves at mass meetings. They are from the proletariat – blue collar workers, whose level of education is, on average, lower than that of the clerical staff employed by the councils, which is nothing to write home about either as most council employees are not employed on merit, but according to their political allegiance.

If you factor in the ego boost that a nobody gets when elected to office, you get a very unhealthy state of affairs. But that is democracy. Everybody, even a blockhead, gets a chance to become a leader of men provided he/she is backed by a political party.

Look around you. Look at the puffed-up, pompous people, we the people have elected to manage our localities and fritter away our hard-earned cash, and you’ll see what I mean!

Next March vote intelligently. Don’t elect people into office just because they are backed by a political party.

John Formosa

Ghadira

MELLIEHA