In any discussion of government, the words “overload” and “stress” go together. They represent an ever-present danger to stable and good government.

Come with me first to the National Office of Statistics. You will be told that the shortfall between recurrent revenue and total expenditure during the first quarter of this year exceeded Lm61 million, against Lm58 million one year ago, and that gross government debt continues to peak merrily approaching the Lml.4 billion mark

Come with me next to the Finance Ministry. You will find that the government is implementing a positively deflationary policy in the pit of an economic slowdown

Our relative decline has assumed a degree of permanence, notwithstanding the fact that ministers have pressed every button. None of them, nor their spin doctors, know which button, if any of them, will yield the desired results.

The charts are out of date.

If one takes away the hype, nothing seems to work any more.

Of course, power brings as much frustration as satisfaction, particularly in a country in relative economic decline. It is not so much a case of one political party scoring off another. It is the case of successive governments facing an enduring problem, and being judged by their success or failure in the duel. In Churchill’s famous words: “The compass has been damaged. The charts are out of date”.

In such a situation, a prime minister in office is more like a climber on a rockface – unable to go up or down – than a general ordering his troops wherever he wishes around the landscape.

This is where the stress is most in evidence.

No honeymoon

Dr Gonzi’s honeymoon days in office have receded by a long stretch. He has been in the saddle for more than a year. Yet the cost of government continues to edge up. No significant new investment has been attracted to break the back of our unemployment problem. Growth prospects are bleak. Disposable income is fast being eroded by taxation and inflation.

Adverse conditions in some of our main markets do not make the prevailing situation in Malta any easier. If anything, they make it all the more necessary for us to restructure and compete. But, if the spirit may be willing, the flesh is decidedly weak.

Maltese bureaucracy is ill-prepared and, moreover, ill-disposed to make any big leap forward.

Successive reports from Brussels bear this out with disconcerting monotony. They are reinforced by many pronouncements from the offices of the Auditor General and the Ombudsman.

At the political level, there is a dearth of “managerial material”. In the public forum, perceptions are gloomy, and disenchantment has taken the upper hand, after so many broken promises.

Heavy burden

Scant success is a barricade against forward movement. The situation is evocative of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: “The waters rise. The apprentice rushes around with his bucket. And none of us knows when, or whether, the magician will come home”.

The medical health sector deteriorates; the state of the roads in certain areas approximates Third World standards; pollution defies control; public transport continues to leave much to be desired; taxation erodes the tender sinews of more families, as they approach the poverty line.

One would have thought that, on taking over as Prime Minister, Dr Gonzi would have been fully seized of the intolerably heavy burden confronting him. He wasn’t. Instead, he blithely assumed the added burden of the Finance Ministry.

Quality time

Add to this the increasing number of expeditions Dr Gonzi has had to make overseas since Malta’s EU accession, and you will understand under what stress he has to work and what quality time he can afford to organising Malta’s economic break-through from its present predicament.

Politics as a profession could be immensely risky, tending to appeal to chancers who live on a diet of adrenalin. A well-known psychologist, Professor Norman Dixon (Our Own Worst Enemy, Cape l987) considered that this genus has an inclination to think that rules apply to others rather than to them.

Like anyone else, politicians are fallible human beings, and the health matters of the powerful should preoccupy thinking citizens. But the main concern of thinking citizens is the nation’s survival, which takes priority over the political fate of the powerful.

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