The National Statistics Office has just announced that the number of licensed motor vehicles in these Islands increased from 248,270 in January 200l to 274,355 at the end of June

What it did not say was that over 20,300 vehicles are unlicensed. This snippet was disclosed in The Times of 26 August. The newspaper story that spilled the beans added that, with effect from 1 October, cars whose licence has expired by more than three months will be clamped, as part of a campaign by the Transport Authority and the Association of Local Councils.

To release the impounded vehicles, offenders will have to pay the clamping fine, the backdated licences and an administrative charge to the Transport Authority.

It does not follow that all unlicenced vehicles are on the road. Some vehicles may have been scrapped without the proper procedures being followed. Some may have been involved in inheritance litigation. Some have been garaged and out of use. The majority of the owners concerned, however, ignored the law. And are doing so blatantly and deliberately.

Suffice to say that, in January of last year, a legal notice ushered in new regulations, under which, defaulting owners had to come in line with the law. Certain waivers were offered as an incentive.

Urgent questions

These notwithstanding, a substantial number of owners, running into thousands, have failed to come clean.

This raises urgent questions and provides food for thought.

To what extent are the relevant authorities up to the standards of a developing country – as distinct from third world status – when they allow so many thousands of citizens to evade their dues for so long?

Who are the responsible officials that allowed this situation to develop and to assume such a scale, without taking corrective measures at the right time?

What sense does it make for the powers-that be to devolve authority to local councils, if the system was not tight enough, to the extent that new expenditure now has to be incurred to remedy matters?

Isn’t our democratic system patently inadequate, considering that no one has been held accountable for this incompetence, and that our system of parliamentary oversight did not stop the rot in time?

This is by no means the one and only instance that highlights administrative incompetence and raises sinister questions relating to public finance. Many have to do with the transport sector.

Not so long ago, it was affirmed in the press, without contradiction, that about 2,000 private car owners have obtained exemption from payment of a Valletta licence fee on false pretences, merely by claiming to be Valletta residents”

We are still being regaled with press stories about the Lm1.1 million “state of the art” bus ticketing system which had, reportedly, over 2,000 faults since it was installed in July 2003.

Bureaucratic excesses

The Malta Transport Authority was established with much fanfare, 16 years ago or so, soon after the PN administration, under Dr Fenech Adami, took office in l987. It has since been repeatedly revamped and reorganised. As recently as March of this year, the local press was carrying the laments of taxpayers complaining of “bureaucratic elephantiasis” at the Malta Transport Authority!

It is one thing for Malta to tell the EU, and the rest of the world that a Public Transport Authority is locally in place, fortified by so many years of experience, when its proven record is one of disappointment and inadequacy, beyond the effective control of successive ministers.

But it’s another thing for the EU and the rest of the world to take us seriously when the results cry to high heaven for a serious approach that would usher in our transport sector into the 21st century. The worst performance, and the biggest let-down had to do with public transport, which, to all appearances, has been running for the convenience of bus owners. Nobody seems to have thought about the convenience of the public.

Meanwhile, buses are being subsidised, even when they are not in use. Over the years, the authorities condoned a system whereby bus licences are traded with the result that a bus licence, once obtained for a few shillings, is now changing hands at a price higher than the value of each bus.

The government is now paying a high price for having failed to take the bull by the horns, and for failing to assault the ramparts of monopoly interests, when it was feigning to speak the language of the market to win the favours of the European Union.

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