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 about 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 their 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. 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 and by selling the family jewels.

For a couple of months or so of every year, Malta has been living on credit – credit not to fund productive capital investment, but to maintain an over-manned 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 has become 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”.

Rising debt

Malta is up to its eyes in debt, which is fast approximating FIVE BILLION EUROS, 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 of drawing up a Convergence Pro-gramme that would bring discipline to the government’s finance regime.

Years after the launch of the Convergence Programme, the National Statistics Office has reported that government total expenditure is still in excess of revenue and that the national debt continues to soar as if there is no tomorrow.

Feeling the pinch

How can one sell this to businessmen who have been feeling the pinch and who struggle for survival with their backs to the wall? How can one convince the numerous heads of household who have been pushed down to, or below, the poverty line, 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. Malta has become “shabby, dirty and polluted” – it is “one major environmental

disaster”.

Prime Minister Gonzi once declared that he wanted to put the environment at the top of his agenda. It’s high time the government got cracking. Above all, it is high time the Gonzi Cabinet instilled life into the administration of Malta’s financial resources.

There are plenty of areas where the government has to pull its socks up. The health sector has fallen on bad times and is failing to meet the standards of which it was once so proud.

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

There has been far too much neglect for far too 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.

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 that 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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