The events of the past days, and also the past year, have shaken people’s trust in energy provider Enemalta.

First there were all those allegations regarding corruption in fuel procurement about which there is now a mammoth investigation by the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Representatives, and other procedures in Court.

Now there are these allegations about tampering with many people’s or corporation’s ‘smart’ meters.

It makes you ask whether there is any honest man left working at Enemalta, although undoubtedly there are. One can also ask if Enemalta is better at producing electricity than it is at producing scandals and corruption, although the corporation does produce electricity.

There are, at present, many ongoing controversies between the parties about how to deal with the meter tampering scandal. This controversy has spread to the news and social media with allegations and accusations flying about.

But, beyond the immediate, there is far more than meets the eye here.

First of all, these smart meters were proclaimed in their time as a world-first. They were the first smart meters by IBM to cover an entire country. As in so many other ICT infrastructure programmes launched by the previous administration, they were said to be state-of-the-art and could enable consumers to monitor their own consumption patterns.

It would seem, at least from the allegations that have been made, that somehow Maltese ingenuity found a way around the security walls of the smart meters. We do not believe IBM would risk its international name by putting on the market something so hackable as to be easily accessed. We expect IBM to clarify this, which then would lead to a second question, whether the hacking, such as it seems to have been, points to a person who was as high-up in the infrastructure structure at Enemalta as he/she was bent.

In short, it is coming to seem that Enemalta was/is riddled with corruptible and corrupted persons. Now one can rest assured that no administration past or present willingly collaborated with corruption. On the contrary both administrations tried very hard to eliminate any trace of corruption not just from Enemalta but from all bodies under their remit.

However, the prevalence of corruption at different levels and in different times in the corporation seems to indicate that the governments have been unable to really weed corruption out.

One must consider Enemalta’s special place in the Maltese scheme of things.

First of all, the energy must be provided, around the clock, to all corners of the country. To do this, since we are still a single-source country, requires huge organisation, the transport of fuel, the combustion and the delivery. Anything can go wrong, and sometimes something does go wrong. The corporation is perennially on the ‘qui vive’, fire-fighting, delivering. There is no time to consider the niceties and to see all legal provisions even if that were what everyone says should be the aim.

Secondly, Enemalta is a monopoly and these cases that have erupted into public knowledge are simply the proof that where power is absolute, corruption lurks.

Obviously, Malta is too small a country to allow for a plurality of energy sources, as bigger countries do (and as Malta was going to switch to in a degree with the possibilities offered by the Interconnector) or to introduce real competition into the sector which would have allowed companies to slim down their workforce and drive the prices down, as competition is said to do whenever a monopoly is removed.

No government, no minister, can be said to have succeeded in cleaning the Augean stables that Enemalta seems to be. To replace one set of people at the top with another set following a change of government is no guarantee that corruption will be eradicated.

One can be sure that all ministers, all governments, truly in their hearts want to run a clean ship and act in total transparency. It is however patent they have failed. Beyond the present blame-games and associated controversies, this case should be an added incentive to be humble and prize transparency even more. The more unattainable it seems to be, the more honesty and diligence emerge as very essential factors in the moral composition of the country.