This newspaper has on a number of occasions commented both editorially and in its news pages most favourably about President George Abela and the new style he has introduced to the presidency.

The elimination of prize giving at the l-Istrina charity telethon, injecting a new impetus into the Malta Community Chest Fund and subtly breaking down partisan divides are all highly commendable initiatives that deserve praise.

Unfortunately, this is not the case today.

President Abela’s trip to Libya this week should never have happened, not in the immediate wake of the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Malta is intrinsically and inextricably tied to the issue, and the recent release of Abdel Basset al Megrahi and the “hero’s homecoming” he was given in Libya has sickened people on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Lockerbie tragedy has left an indelible stain on Malta’s reputation – a stain that will remain, irrespective of whether an enquiry into the Lockerbie case and the evidence that was to be heard at appeal is undertaken, and regardless of what the outcome of such an enquiry would be.

Malta, for many, will always be the place from where the Lockerbie bomb started its fateful journey.

President Abela’s trip was ill-advised, ill-thought out and ill-conceived.

But within this context, one must also appreciate Malta’s lasting, strong ties with its neighbour to its immediate south – ties that have endured past the Mintoffian era, and there is a great deal to be said for nurturing and strengthening those ties. The areas of irregular migration, oil exploration and mutual business interests, just for starters, are areas of major concern for Malta.

But, on the other hand, no other Western or European Head of State or government deemed it fit to attend, with the exception of Malta’s Head of State of course. That no Western leaders were present for the event was no logistical oversight. Even the former British ambassador to Malta, now posted in Libya, excused himself from the celebrations, having been on a return visit to Malta at the time, and sent a junior staff member in his stead.

If the trip had been a calculated political risk on the part of Malta, it failed. If Malta had carried out a political cost-benefit analysis of the trip – between placating and remaining in Col Gaddafi’s good books and being scoffed at on the international stage – that too failed.

President Abela placed himself in a rather dubious international spotlight, with eyes from around the world having been focused on the celebrations marking 40 years since Col. Gaddafi came to power. He was also in dubious company: “a gallery of grotesques”, as one prominent British newspaper described it, which included Robert Mugabe, Sudanese Omar al-Bashir indicted for war crimes in Darfur, and Somali pirate gang leader Mohammed Abdi Afweyne – not exactly the type of leaders Malta, it is assumed, would like to make a habit of being associated with.

The presence of a minister or some other government functionary at the celebrations would have sufficed, but that of the Maltese Head of State was certainly not warranted at such a sensitive moment.

And, to add insult to injury, President Abela’s presence, as reported in today’s issue, did not even yield results – he was effectively snubbed by the Libyan leader.

Malta needs to choose its friends and those it keeps at arm’s length a little more carefully.

The Cola war

In the 1980s and 1990s much of the Western world witnessed what became known as the Cola Wars between the world’s top two soft drink manufacturers, a commercial war for consumers’ taste buds.

Now, decades down the road, Malta is engaged its very own Cola war but this time it is not about the battle for consumer sentiment but rather ensuring that its consumers retain the spending power to purchase such non-staple consumer goods.

Malta is facing a very different Cola war from those of the 1980s and 1990s– Malta’s war is over the cost of living adjustment (COLA), its level and whether it would be shared out between the government and the private sector. The latter, of course, has always footed the bill but it is now suggesting that the onus of adjusting wages in line with inflation be shared.

The wage increase, the level of which is announced in the yearly autumn budget, is expected to range from between e5 and e7. Employers, this week working on the assumption of a e5.80 adjustment, proposed they would pay e3.50 of the weekly increment while the government would contribute e2.30.

Now that the government, at least according to the governing Nationalist Party’s printed media arm in-Nazzjon, has dismissed the employers’ proposals, much will be anticipated come Budget day.

Consumer spending is an absolute must for the economy but, then again, so is the ability of businesses to turn a profit and in the process keep the wheels of the economy itself turning.

As such, a balance between the two must be achieved, which, it seems, was the Malta Employers’ Association’s concept when it suggested this week that the COLA be shared between the two.

But it is not only the MEA that is recoiling at the prospect of a higher than usual upward adjustment of the COLA – the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry, the country’s other predominant employers’ representative body, has contended that the COLA be replaced with productivity-linked wage increases.

The International Monetary Fund has come up with a similar suggestion for Malta, with the added suggestion that such increases could be established at enterprise, rather than government, level.

The country’s unions are said to have not taken all too kindly to the suggestions, which have changed the very nature of the COLA debate from one over the adjustment’s level to whether it should be retained or not.

The government, on its part, has made it clear that the COLA is here to stay and it has also dismissed the COLA sharing proposal. As such, it will have to do some serious lateral thinking if it is, at the end of the day, to strike a balance and placate both sides battling it out in Malta’s very own 21st century Cola war.