Joseph Muscat has been in power for only two years. Yet, in some respects, he is behaving like one of those Third World dictators.
In tin-pot democracies, the governing few and their lackeys are gluttons for money while the rest of society makes do with, umm, two-cent decreases in prices. Leaders of these countries see themselves as royalty or supreme leaders. They surround themselves with tight security to flash their power as well as out of fear that their own people will sooner, or later turn against them.
Cynicism in such countries is rife. Public trust in institutions is so low that society takes years to recover, if at all, even after the supreme leader is gone.
Muscat is not a dictator. But he is cynical about institutions, paying lip service while undermining them in favour of ministerial power. He is either cynical about how public appointments are made or else paranoid. Even a dog-handler needs to be Labour because, you never know, he might train the dogs to become assassins (or, who knows, sniff out the wrong ‘ice-cube’ at the wrong time in the wrong place).
Above all, Muscat is acting as though the country is his and at the same time as though it could be taken away from him soon. After 25 years in opposition, Labour has made a headlong grab for all the goodies they can get, just like guests rush to the buffet table at an all-inclusive eat-as-much-as-you can lunch.
Why else would he and his chosen few associate themselves (personally) with such shady but very lucrative deals? To think, how shocked they were in Opposition at every decision taken by the previous Government. And yet here they are today, misusing millions of public funds with the lame excuse of making mistakes due to inexperience.
Muscat and his PR team never miss a chance to deflect public attention from the real issues. If Muscat broke his promise about building a new power station, he does not apologise or try to find an excuse for not resigning (even though he himself had publicly said he would do so many times).
Instead, he creates a huge media event to close down the old Marsa power station. It turned out to be yet another excuse to spend public funds in a kitsch ceremony full of sparkle, glitz and of course ‘optimism’.
Just when we thought we had hit rock bottom with the Premier Scandal, the NAO publishes yet another damning report. This time Konrad Mizzi is the politician directly involved in decisions involving nothing less than €67 million.
He also wants us to believe he is clean and calls the lack of transparency a mistake. The problem Mizzi seems to be overlooking is that the company involved in this new scandal is a shady oil company which hails from a country where corruption is the name of the game.
Recent articles in the international media have exposed Socar to be corrupt despite promises made by the Azeri Government to the contrary.
Do you know how the Azeri government works? Here’s one article from 2012. The journalist, Khadiya Ismailova, is now in jail on trumped-up charges. In her article she wrote: ‘Despite a lack of big scandals, some journalists have reported concrete corruption cases in which bribes did not come in the form of cash, but in bids and contracts’.
Does this sound familiar? Any passing resemblance to Malta in 2015? You decide.
Muscat wants us to believe that the Premier Scandal was just a mistake of overzealousness. He wants us to believe he wanted to do so much good that procedures were ignored. No, Prime Minister. The deal was rotten at the core. You paid millions for something you could have got for free. You let the other side get away with stuff that not even a lawyer fresh out of university would permit.
You are either way out of your depth or else you knew exactly just how rotten the deal was but, for who knows what reasons, you decided to bluff your way through. Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, Konrad Mizzi says he did the nation a favour and would do it again. Thank you, Minister, for helping me relive my youth – in the golden years of Labour.