The news that the government will subject the St Philip’s Hospital deal to the auditor-general, who will in turn hand his report over to the Public Accounts Committee for parliamentary scrutiny is welcome indeed. It does, however, fall short of the demands being made for the issue to be brought before the House in its entirety.
Technically, the government is not obliged go down wither route when renting a property but in this particular case, it was morally obliged to do so given the questions being asked about the €12 million rental agreement. And especially when the country’s former main hospital, St Luke’s, is doing little but gathering dust since it was closed down, very much the same as St Philip’s Hospital has been doing.
Even if there is nothing improper about the deal, the public perception is that it is quite possibly rotten to the core. The hospital’s owner is far too entrenched in the governing political party for anyone to not bat an eyelid at the very least.
It is beyond any reasonable argumentation that the shortage of beds at Mater Dei Hospital is a national affliction, if not a downright scandal of mismanagement and bad planning over successive governments and health ministers. To have patients in beds in makeshift wards in hospital corridors, deprived of privacy and dignity when they are at their most vulnerable, is simply not on and something very clearly has to be done.
MP Franco Debono has already presented a motion in Parliament for the deal to be halted, and independent MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando on Thursday brought the issue to the fore of the House Business Committee, arguing for full parliamentary scrutiny on the deal.
Taxpayers, he argued, are asking why the government is about to spend €12 million on leasing a hospital when the former hospital, St Luke’s, could be renovated at a fraction of the cost. He asks whether a study has been carried out to determine what it will cost to renovate St Philip’s, and along these lines it should also be asked what it would cost to do the same on the same footprint at St Luke’s.
These are valid questions that need to be answered, unless, of course, the government has plans in store for the St Luke’s site that it is not yet willing to reveal. Were this to be the case, the St Philip’s deal would make more sense and as such the government needs to make its intentions for site, known.
The government clearly does not want the issue to be debated in Parliament, where it knows full well that the deal does not enjoy the backing of the majority of the House. Instead, it prefers the Public Accounts Committee where, unlike in Parliament, it holds a majority of members although the committee is chaired by a member of the Opposition. This recipe is fraught with polemics and controversy and a good deal of both are expected once the issue reaches the PAC. Just remember what happened when the BWSC issue was brought before the PAC.
It is doubtful that the government’s solution - although a wider ranging debate on the issue than that initially contemplated is most welcome - will be gladly accepted by all or anyone questioning the deal and as such the issue is bound to remain a source of bitter political acrimony over the months to come.
The hunger scandal
Remarking on the results of a UN report this week that found over 870 million people around the world are going hungry, Oxfam hit the nail right on the head when one of its spokespeople said: “The fact that almost 870 million people — more than the population of the US, Europe, and Canada — are hungry in a world which produces enough for everyone to eat is the biggest scandal of our time”.
In today's world of unprecedented technical and economic opportunities, it is also entirely unacceptable that more than 100 million children under the age of five are underweight, and are unable to realise their full socio-economic and human potential, the UN report, published this week, states.
While we here in Malta worry because our spending power is decreasing, because a certain HD television is out of our financial reach or because electricity has become so expensive that we can no longer leave our air conditioners and lights on day and night, there is a very large segment of the world that does not have enough food on its table in the first place.
We worry that the price of petrol for our cars is rising, that the price of gas to cook our food with is skyrocketing, but we have vehicles to drive and food to cook and as such a sense of proportion would certainly not go amiss.
While all things are, or course, relative, when looking at the big picture we should thank our lucky stars that these are the things that we have to complain about. Yes, times are challenging and they are bound to become more challenging still given the state of the world’s economy, but we do not have people going hungry in the streets.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in its report projected that if the right action were to be taken now to boost economic growth and invest in agriculture, particularly in poor countries, the UN’s goal of halving the number of the world's hungry people by 2015 would still be very much within reach – a worthy goal that this generation should be rising to.
The developed world cannot wait for the rest of the world to feed itself, its people must make their leaders keep their pledges despite the political hardships - otherwise we stand little chance of meeting those lofty Millennium Development Goals of pulling the world’s most disadvantaged out of destitution.