As the story of Labour's fabled power station becomes ever more tangled and complicated, it is evident that this is not a matter of the project been late, or delayed, as the press and the politicians would have it. This is clearly a matter of a project which doesn't exist, which hasn't even started yet (so much for being late) and for which there is no evidence even of a contract having been signed.

There is no sign of finance or where it will come from, and last month the lead partner in the Electrogas consortium, Gasol plc, published its accounts and was revealed to be on the brink of insolvency, with its auditors expressing their doubts as to the possibility of its continuing as a going concern. Meanwhile, the government refuses to come clear on anything and we must content ourselves with any information we can root out or the bits that Konrad Mizzi lets slip when he isn't paying due attention. For example, the new fact sprung upon us that the Azerbaijan state-owned gas corporation, SOCAR, which is another main shareholder in the Electrogas consortium, will not be supplying the gas for the power station itself, and that Electrogas will be buying it in from elsewhere. Press the pause button there. So exactly why is SOCAR involved in this project at all? The original reason for its involvement was to sell its own gas. So what happened between then and now?

Something else that Konrad Mizzi let slip during one of his more excitable moments when talking about the project in Parliament, just before he tried to deflect attention from his own government's problems with this power station business by dragging Opposition member George Pullicino into the mix, is that the government now has to "look for a third investor" for the BWSC/Enemalta sell-off. Both the press and the Opposition skidded right over this one instead of poking and prodding him further. The only reason that the government would be looking for a third investor now, at this late stage after ripping up their roadmap, is because the original two are not going to deliver the entirety of the goods. And wasn't there just the one investor to begin with, anyway - Shanghai Electric? Because all these random bits of information are emerging piecemeal, putting them together is like working on one of those 'blue sky' jigsaws which don't make any sense at first. But we should not have to be doing this anyway, not the press and not the public on whose behalf we work, because we live in a democracy and a European Union member state, not China or a south American dictatorship.

The Opposition really has to let rip on this one instead of allowing itself to be distracted by other concerns and allowing different issues to be thrown into the mix. This power station roadmap was at the very fundament of the Labour Party's electoral programme. Indeed, you could say it was the Labour Party's electoral programme in its entirety. Joseph Muscat tied his credibility and his staying power in the party leadership to it. So the Opposition should just sink their teeth into the subject and not let go. I wonder though, whether they are capable of that level of tenacity which brought the Labour Party to power on a wave of relentless Super One repetition and Muscat's single-messaging.

Another thing the Opposition has to do is stop talking about Enemalta being privatised. Enemalta is not being privatised. Privatisation means private, non-state investment. Shareholding in Enemalta is being sold to another state; Shanghai Electric is owned by the Chinese government and therefore it is the equivalent of Enemalta itself. Sale to another state is not privatisation but diversification in state ownership. The government's response to the Opposition's criticism that Enemalta is being privatised is that it is not being privatised because the government of Malta will control the majority shareholding. Yet even if Shanghai Electric were to be sold a controlling stake, that would not be privatisation. That would be a shift in state ownership: Enemalta controlled by the government of China rather than by the government of Malta.

Once more, the weakness of the democratic process in Malta has been exposed. A government elected to build a new power station and on the assurance of a "concrete, prepared and costed roadmap" is, 19 months down the line, in a right and proper mess and nobody knows what is happening. All requests for information are stonewalled. The people elected the Labour Party and it is their right to know what the Labour government is doing. Yet the Labour Party refuses to say, behaving like a dictator who owes the people nothing but the occasional scattering of corn and one or two shows in the arena.