The jury is still out on what caused Tuesday’s massive power cut. There are all sorts of inquiries being made and one hopes that eventually the truth, however complex, will out. And, if there are responsibilities for what happened, those responsible should be made to face the music.

The blame game is out and so are those who try to point elsewhere and escape blame being laid on their doorstep.

But when all is said and done, I am left with the distinct impression that Enemalta, like in other areas of Malta, faces a huge infrastructural deficit.

From what has been said so far, it would seem that the Enemalta distribution network has not been upgraded as it should have been.

Over the past years, we had come to think that Enemalta’s problem was in generation: despite the Delimara power station we are still constrained to use the old Marsa one, despite fines from the EU. So to bolster Delimara, the previous government put in the power station extension which instantly became the centre of a hot controversy because of the BWSC involvement.

Then the new government came to power promising to close down the BWSC plant, to switch over to gas and to build a new power station. All this is still ‘work in progress’.

Now, after Tuesday, it is being said that Enemalta’s real problem is distribution, not generation. The distribution system, at least according to writers on comment pages and blogs who seemed to know what they were talking about, has been left to deteriorate and has not been adequately maintained.

Photos of the area where the initial conflagration occurred, just outside the Marsa distribution centre, show cables that were reported to have erupted in flames.

It seems that the thick cables were buried in the ground just a few centimetres underneath the road and the summer heat together with the pressure exerted by so many trucks driving over them seem to have heated up the cables so much that they burst into flames.

I noticed, (I wonder how many noticed this) that the method used with the cables was very difficult from that used for instance in the new roads built to modern standards with EU funds where proper channels are dug and the sides and top are covered with cement.

In fact, at the press conference given by the Enemalta CEO, it was announced that three new distribution centres would be built.

It would seem that this is a national flaw: we are good at new ventures, green field sites, but hopeless at ensuring that the underlying infrastructure is kept up to the mark.

Take an even more basic and important service, the drainage system. According to a friend who at that time was ideally placed to know things, there is a huge infrastructure deficit in drainage in places like Cospicua and surprisingly in Gzira, mainly because of enemy action that has still not been corrected, because of ageing buildings, and also because of lack of investment to correct the faults and the lacking infrastructure.

Some paragraphs back I mentioned the roads and, for all the spend that has gone into providing us with wonderful new roads to the north, the main roads where the Maltese live, work and travel are mostly still based on the (basic if not primitive) technology that was used when they were laid. When the workers were redoing the Marsascala Bypass, they were surprised (and they should not have been surprised) to find out that it was basically tarmac laid on soil.

One would think Malta, with its small size, its advanced economy and so on would find little difficulty in upgrading its infrastructure but there you have it, many times we live in quite primitive conditions. Our visitors can only look and stare.

There is no simple solution that will solve everything with one stroke. Take this everlasting saga of public transport. Austin Gatt and those around him must have thought that removing the old buses and their drivers would do the trick and we would have a bright, new, efficient, and courteous public transport. We all know how that dream disintegrated and we are still looking for a happy ending today.

So too with that huge issue – the environment. The big decisions are alright, such as cleaning up Maghtab. But when it comes to the nitty-gritty, such as getting people to try and minimise waste by separating what can be recycled, we are just paying lip service. Two governments down, we are still deluding ourselves we are moving up the chain when we most palpably are not.

Politicians, being very transparent people, are far more comfortable opening new things, such as gardens, new roads, etc than carry out the much harder task of making what others had set up, finishing off what others had begun, analysing what’s wrong with any system in place and finding out how it could be improved and made to work. No politician gets a marble plaque saying he found the drainage system so bad he set about to improve it. Of course, the drainage system is not sexy.

To be fair, there are other areas where the infrastructure is there and it works and at quite competitive rates too. One area I can think of is telecoms where we are miles ahead of competing countries. Having mentioned him negatively, I think it is only fair to mention him positively: it was Austin Gatt (and Claudio Grech) who pushed and pushed to get Malta with the highest broadband levels in Europe. What we consider as a given in today’s Malta, such as free Wi-Fi, broadband access, and so on, is simply unobtainable in many of the countries we think are our superiors.

So too, to move on to a different sector, is our financial services sector. But here this hits a rock that is not that submerged: a financial services sector is also based on the rapidity and efficiency of the justice system and here too the infrastructure is simply not there to ensure a speedy and just resolution of difficult issues.

To tackle infrastructural issues requires patience, dogged persistence and attention to detail. Unfortunately, our politicians and those immediately connected to them lack such qualities. They would rather paint the overall picture in glowing colours than prepare and mix the colours. They would rather finish their effort in a short burst of time than stay overnight to ensure a good deliverable.

To conclude, I am many times struck by the number of times a particular road surface is done and redone (especially those where holes are plugged in with spalls) and where pavements, undulating in front of every garage, with a different typology not from village to village but from street to street have to be renewed every so many years.

We spend so much time and effort doing things we all know we will have to redo some years down the line instead of doing them well so that they last for many years.

Then too our almost constitutional principle that we always choose the cheapest tender ensures we limp from one level of inefficiency to the next, which is usually worse.

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