I have written twice to the Prime Minister on behalf of The Today Public Policy Institute. The first letter, a few days after his electoral victory, was to congratulate him on his victory and to place the report by the think-tank on the Maltese Constitution at his disposal in connection with the forthcoming Constitutional Convention. The second, on 7th April, dealt with “Same Sex: Same Civil Entitlements” and the introduction of civil unions, a subject on which the Prime Minister had expressed brave views in the run-up to the election.  

I am still awaiting a substantive reply to both letters. There has been a barely literate acknowledgment of both, which stated: “The Office of the Prime Minister acknowledges that it received your letter”, a slight improvement on the earlier one that said, “The Office of the Prime Minister acknowledges that your letter dated 18 March has been read (sic)”. (Well, that’s a relief then. The OPM can read).

I quote this personal, relatively trivial experience of government administration as there is a direct line of poor governance that can be traced from unanswered letters to Malta’s top-most office of state to, at random, the inefficiency of ARMS, the inability to resolve the illegal boathouses at Armier, the slip-shod way in which foreign residents in Malta are dealt with on new identity documents, the inefficiency of Arriva, the way some ministers fail to respond to invitations or fail to turn up at events as promised because they are not fully in command of their diaries, and the recent botched ministerial statements of assets to Parliament.

This kind of poor administration is not confined to a Labour government, as some may be thinking. We have only to turn to the damning report by the Auditor General on the workings of Enemalta’s Fuel Procurement Committee to see at first hand the maladministration, and worse, displayed under a Nationalist government in its oversight of one of Malta’s major imports amounting to several million euros a year. In Malta, no single party holds a monopoly on poor governance, incompetence and maladministration. There is a direct link between sloppy responses to letters, right through to the monstrous misgovernance of Malta’s oil procurement.      

It is a scandal to witness what went on at Enemalta for many years under the watch of former Minister Austin Gatt and former chairman Alex Tranter. The current Energy Minister has rightly asked the police to investigate whether Enemalta’s oil procurement process between 2008 and May 2011 involved criminal conduct. But there is an equally valid matter and it is imperative that it is pursued in a liberal democracy if Malta is ever to aspire to good governance.

This concerns the issue of ministerial responsibility. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility holds that Minister Austin Gatt was given formal responsibility for that department’s activities (or inactivities). He was the minister responsible for laying down policy on fuel procurement, but the Auditor General’s report states that no such policy framework existed throughout the period in question. He was accountable to Parliament – and to the then Prime Minister, and to the wider public – for what went on in his ministry.

This is what the other governing convention, that of “individual ministerial responsibility” is all about. It is about carrying the can for what went on under his watch. Austin Gatt was ultimately “responsible” and “accountable” for the policies he set (or didn’t set) and the actions (or omissions, or worse) taken by his (the country’s) Fuel Procurement Committee during the years he was the minister in charge of Enemalta.

Plain Dr Austin Gatt, as he has now become since leaving politics on 9th March, claims that he has nothing to say on what the Auditor General has uncovered as he is now a private citizen. But this is not an acceptable response. Austin Gatt is an embarrassment to his party which, thanks largely to the Oil-gate scandal that broke in the run-up to the election, has found itself thrown out of power and will probably find itself in Opposition for at least the next 10 years. Moreover, his nakedly nonchalant attitude is an affront to the whole concept of good governance and accountability to Parliament; it is an act of disloyalty to his party and an insult to the electorate which entrusted him with responsibility for overseeing one of the most critical areas of Malta’s administration.

Even now, there is nothing to prevent Parliament from summoning both Dr Gatt and Mr Tranter before the Public Accounts Committee to explain themselves. In the United Kingdom and in the United States we have seen bankers, once the self-appointed “masters of the universe”, and media tycoons, such as Rupert Murdoch, hauled before Senate or Parliamentary Committees and reduced to apologetic shadows of their former selves. Dr Gatt remains answerable to Parliament and the people for his actions while in government. He must be made to explain himself.

There is no reason why this should not be done in this case and every confidence to suppose that it would have a salutary effect on standards of governance in Malta if it were. For the governing Labour government it would demonstrate that it means business when it says that it intends to root out corruption and maladministration in government.

For the Nationalist Party, still smarting from the scale of its defeat, it could have a cathartic effect in showing that former Minister Tonio Fenech’s improvement to the oil procurement system when he took responsibility for this portfolio in 2010 was not simply a cover-up of what had happened before. Unless the Nationalist Party is prepared to ditch somebody whose actions brought it down, Austin Gatt will continue to be a political millstone round its neck for years to come. The fact that Dr Tonio Fenech is now the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee should add piquancy to the whole affair and enable Parliament and the public to get at the truth.

The Ombudsman has proposed that the right to good governance should be enshrined in the Constitution. He may have a point. But enshrining something in the Constitution is not of itself enough. What is required is the political will and the institutional means, led by effective parliamentary scrutiny, to uphold the values of good administration to which the Ombudsman is wedded of “honesty, adherence to the law and respect for the truth”.

The quality of Malta’s governance rests ultimately on good leadership. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has been elected on a promise to restore public trust in government. The Oil-gate scandals and the dysfunctional state of Enemalta as revealed by the Auditor General’s report have eroded public trust. Promoting transparency, accountability and openness are fundamental to good governance.

How Parliament – on both sides of the House – now handles the appalling administrative deficiencies in fuel procurement between 2008 and 2010 will be crucial to the kind of message about good governance which it conveys: either business as usual and a Maltese shrug of the shoulders; or an absolute determination by Parliament to make an example of those that had failed the country.