On the evening of 28 February, a year ago tomorrow, the Nationalist Party’s councillors chose Lawrence Gonzi to succeed Eddie Fenech Adami as party leader.

A little less than a month later, on 22 March, Dr Fenech Adami resigned and Dr Gonzi was appointed Prime Minister. That very same day he appointed his Cabinet and later on the same Cabinet approved Dr Fenech Adami appointment as the next President.

At a press conference sandwiched between the oath taking and the first Cabinet meeting to appoint the new President, Dr Gonzi outlined the top 10 priorities on the agenda of his new government. These were:

• Exploiting the beauty of Malta in the EU through contributing the values of the people of Malta and the Mediterranean dimension that is part of Malta’s identity.

• Strengthening the country’s finances so that Malta can then decide on the introduction of the euro in Malta.

• Creating jobs and promoting investment to and in Malta.

• Focusing on economic growth with particular attention to tourism.

• Aiming at competitivity through an efficient and restructured public service.

• Give attention to the roads and capital projects which can exploit Malta’s potential.

• Strengthening the environment.

• Guaranteeing that no one is left behind by strengthening the social net for the future and continued investment in education and training.

• Ensuring a coordinated, focused and energetic government, and

• Ensuring that the parliamentary group gives its maximum in Parliament, now that the country must work in the context of the new European reality.

Brave promises. Courageous commitment. Full marks for good will.

A year later, the country can now judge what has been implemented and what is still a long way off. Dr Gonzi was chosen as party leader a year into his party’s electoral mandate, so he still has three years to run before the next general election.

The coming 12 March local council elections do not count for much, although the PN leadership gave the worst example of panic when it did not allow its own hard-won electorate in Labour fortresses of Zejtun and Marsa to exercise their right to vote even as a minority party in what everyone sees as a desperate attempt to minimise the losses.

Far worse than any impending election defeat is the evidence all around us that Dr Gonzi’s penultimate deliverable, “ensuring a coordinated, focused, and energetic government” is right only where “energetic” comes in but completely haywire where “coordinated” and especially “focused” are concerned. The events of the past days, as explained in the pages of this paper’s issue, show a shambles that is far worse than anything this country remembers.

It shows ministers out of synch with each other, government bodies pointing fingers at each other and squabbling like fishmongers, a minister forcing a body under his control to apologise to the public when it should have been the government as a whole which should have apologised for having left the gas division in such a starved state, and the same minister to raise issues such as work practices at what surely must have been the worst possible moment.

And all the time people were left suffering the intense cold without gas, or having to queue in open spaces for something which should have been their right to wait for at home. One should have heard the many elderly people who phoned in on PN radio yesterday to plead that they cannot go running after the gas man! All this from the government which came to power in 1987 after its intense campaign that capitalised on the Labour government’s similar inability to get its act together.

The simple explanation is that the situations are similar because their genesis is similar. In both cases it is a case of a strong and historic leader being followed by his hand-picked successor, although this time with the chrism of the 28 February 2004 election. It is the story of a party that has been so long in government it has become arrogant and careless, and especially careless about the concerns of the simple people at street level. In both cases it is the story of a new leader and the party which has been sucked into the vortex of leadership and into an exclusion mode rather than an inclusive one. The outcome will be the same, it does not take a prophet to see this.

Dr Gonzi would do well to ponder on the Ian Duncan Smith paradox: he was indeed chosen by the vast majority of party insiders but he proved to be unacceptable to the country as a whole. Being elected to the party leadership is the easy bit, especially when the historic leader is doing the pushing. But getting the government machine to act as one requires far higher skills. And, getting your message to the country, engaging the various sectors in dialogue and cajoling and persuading and pushing the various sectors into a synergy takes even more.

Following the 12 June European Parliament election defeat, Dr Gonzi promised to listen to what the country had to say. Somehow, that was later turned into getting the country to hear the government’s side more. That has meant more government PR and more communication officials putting more pressure on the media. Things have now gone overboard: the events of the past days amply prove this. If government wants to get anywhere it has to put its house in order, and get all ministers and all the ministers’ men to sing from the same score.

Then, instead of attempting to do everything all at once, it must focus on what really matters and get things right first time, instead of all this backtracking on the various issues we have had over the past year. If it gets anything wrong, what’s wrong with apologising? Had it done that instead of going ballistic over the gas fiasco, its standing in the public view today would have been higher. And it must finally be honest enough and humble enough to admit it requires all hands on deck instead of this continuing game of shedding people right and left. Talk of Alfred Sant and his diminishing band of merry ministers!