The politics of all small communities tend to have a Byzantine quality. Malta’s baroque politics have much more than that. Besides being complicated, they tend .to defy comprehension. The more brazen politicians have no qualms making truth stand on its head. What is bizarre about all this is not that such politicians manage to keep a straight face. The astonishing thing is that they expect to be taken seriously, when the audience is manifestly stupefied by their folly.

It is a fact of life that Malta’s economy has fallen on bad times. Unemployment has peaked persistently at record levels. Investment fatigue has debilitated the economy. For 17 consecutive years, the government has spent more than it has raised in taxation. It made up the difference by borrowing.

For a couple of months or so of every year, Malta has been living on credit –not to fund productive capital investment, but to maintain an overmanned civil service and a bevy of autonomous agencies, to buy property in Brussels, and to invest in failed projects like the terminal at Taranto among other things. Under the PN administration, Malta became addicted to the money no problem drug.

Yet, Prime Minister Gonzi has had no hesitation in making repeated claims that the economy is “on track”.

Mounting debt

Malta is up to its eyes in debt, which is fast approximating Lml.5 BILLION, and was flying merrily in the face of the “ Maastricht criteria” at the time of accession to the EU. One of the first exhortations of the EU Commission, on accession, sought ways and means to draw up a Convergence Programme that would bring discipline to the government’s finance regime.

One year after the launch of the Convergence Programme, the National Statistics Office reported that government total expenditure is still in excess of revenue and that the national debt continues to soar.

Yet, when he addressed his last monthly Press Conference on 4 June, Prime Minister Gonzi reportedly declared, without batting an eyelid, that he “was cautiously optimistic over economic prospects”!

Feeling the pinch

How can one sell this spiel to businessmen who have been feeling the pinch and whose firms have been falling like ninepins? How could one convince the numerous heads of household who have been pushed down to, or below, the poverty time, as the threat of loss of jobs, higher taxation and rising costs have continued to take their toll?

The situation is far grimmer than it appears at first sight. Only a few days ago, the president of Din l-Art Helwa lamented that Malta has become “shabby, dirty and polluted” –and that Malta is “one major environmental disaster”.

His plea on behalf of the city of Valletta, which is a World Heritage Site, amounted to a cri de coeur. “Valletta is in a shameful condition, with its approach marred by an open multi-storey car park,”

he said. And he underlined that “the entrance is a grubby piece of failed neo-fascist architecture, leading on to an inappropriate square, which is still used as a car park, and looks on to the destroyed Opera House, that has failed to rise from its ashes 60 years after the end of World War II.”

Prime Minister Gonzi has declared that he wanted to put the environment on top of his agenda. It’s high time the government gets cracking – if for no other reason, to instil life in the tourist sector.

There are plenty of other areas where the government has to pull its socks up. The health sector has fallen on bad times and is not delivering up to the standards of which it was once proud.

Criminality and drug abuse have tended to increase. Court delays have become notorious.

There been far too much neglect for far to long, and incompetence has compounded Malta’s problems.

Harassed citizens are seeing with their own eyes the government’s inability to meet in due time its commitments to medicine importers and other major contractors, running into millions of liri.

Businessmen are hard pressed and some of them are now resorting to the barter system to keep going.

Dishonoured cheques

The problem of dishonoured cheques is giving cause for concern and is the subject of complaints by the Malta Association of Credit Management and comments in the Press.

Winston Churchill once famously said, “Political skill is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”

Wiser people have since learned from experience that politicians can fool some of the people, or all of them, some of the time. But you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Nikita Khrushchev put it differently. He said that politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

George Orwell was equally convincing on this subject when he said, “in our time, political speech and writing are largely in defence of the indefensible”. He was even more graphic when he held that “political language – and, with variations, this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” (Politics of the English Language. Shooting an Elephant. 1950).

There is a German proverb which says that Truth has a handsome countenance, but torn garments.

Yes. But truth is also tough. It is fortified by its own evidence.

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