One of my duties as president of the College of Councillors of the Nationalist Party is to attend all the seminars organised by the Association of Local Councils and represent my party. Some days ago I attended another one of these seminars organised for the local councils in the south of Malta. It was another unproductive Saturday morning and as interesting as watching paint dry!
It is a well-known fact that there is a majority of Labour councillors in the south and therefore the seminar was dominated by Labour mayors and councillors. As expected it was a morning fraught with grumbling and attacks against the government. John F Kennedy’s dictum was inverted and the Labour Councillors’ message was “ask not what I can do for my country; ask the government what it can do for me”. The Labour party is obsessed with painting a bad picture of whatever is going on around us before the elections, and their attacks against the government have become an admission of their own failures.
I have become accustomed to hearing from the Labour-led association, and from Labour mayors and councillors, that nothing is being done in their locality because the government has not done this, that or the other. It is true that the local councils are part of governance and work very closely with a number of departments and authorities, but it is equally true that local councils are empowered to take their own decisions and carry out works and projects themselves. It is not true that every single initiative needs government approval. The residents are aware of this and know very well that the mayors and councillors have a function and can act directly. Residents compare one locality with another, and also compare previous mayors and councillors to the current administration of “their” council.
It is clear that the most successful councils are the proactive councils – those councils that have a clear direction and an ambition to see their locality offering new and better services and projects.
At every mayors’ meeting and at every councillors’ meetings organised the Local Council Association, Labour participants grumble and moan and point accusatory fingers at everybody but themselves. They portray their locality as being on the very brink of disaster, and obviously according to them, the fault is the government’s. But the people do not want to know from their mayors and councillors what the mayor and councillors think that the government should do, because the people can appeal to, or ask the minister or local MP for that. The people want to know that the mayors and councillors are working to solve their problems. Elected politicians are elected to solve problems and local politicians are no exception to the rule.
Meetings organised by the Local Councils Association should be an opportunity to discuss how to overcome the problems that local councils certainly face. The mere fact that we meet just to complain and attack the government is counter productive. The Local Councils Association should enter into a dialogue with the government and its agencies in order to iron out these problems.
Many mayors and councillors are bored with this attitude, because they are not convincing and are totally predictable. The Local Councils Association is now constantly stating that it is organising meetings, when previously these were not called. However, they fail to enlighten the attendees what work has been carried out between one meeting and another. In this last meeting the minutes of the previous meeting were approved and the chairperson, Claudette Abela Baldacchino took the stand to continue to provoke more complaints and try to relay the message that nothing was done and whose fault was it? The government’s, obviously!
For example she mentioned that councillors should be respected and that there should be a crack down against violence against mayors and councillors. I fully concur with this. But what are the proposals that the association is putting forward to remedy this? Councillors do not work a 40-hour week in the council offices. They have the own full-time job and participate in community work at various times. Are they proposing that police or some other security measures be placed at the council offices, or at our residences or places of work? What are they proposing exactly? From what I know and understand they simply lumped the problem on to the Commissioner of Police or the government. This is not how the association or local politicians should work.
Another complaint I receive from councils is that we are losing out on EU programmes and funds, because they are not well informed. What is stopping the association in engaging a person solely dedicated to collecting and disseminating information and partner searches. Does the government have to do this as well?
It’s a good thing that these meetings are not open to the public and do not attract too much interest, because otherwise I am morally convinced that voting patterns will drop even further, once people learn what type of Labour mayors and councillors they have elected to represent them.
Dr Malcolm Mifsud is
president of the College of Councillors of the Nationalist Party and a
PN candidate for the
next general election