Robert Mugabe was recently in the news. A speech he delivered to his country’s parliament was identical to the State of the Nation address he had given only a month earlier. Tension is running high with his opponents, and the 91-year-old President of Zimbabwe must have been surprised to see that the parliamentary Opposition’s reaction to his delivery was one of quiet bemusement.

In a country rife with cronyism and mismanagement, not to mention strong-handed governing, why should this anecdote make international news? After all, a government spokesman did clarify later that the President’s secretariat had picked the wrong speech for the occasion. The answer is simple: because the cock-up is symptomatic: if the President’s men cannot deliver the right speech on time, can they be expected to sort out the economy?

It’s a mistake

Earlier this week, the Finance Minister presented the Maltese government’s financial estimates for 2016. Now, I can never overstate the importance of the annual Budget in our system of governance. The policies that a government churns out during the year count for little if they are not underpinned by adequate financing – and by ‘adequate’ I do not just mean the right amount of money but also using it in the right way to incentivise a desired course of action.

I am sure that Edward Scicluna knows this. His staff, however, seem to think that the budget should be handled with the same care as that used when you are uploading funny cat videos on Facebook. The budget speech that went online on the Finance Ministry’s website was different to the one that the Minister was delivering in Parliament.

Men of talent at Scicluna’s disposal

It is easy to dismiss this as trivial, or a case of the Opposition cheering every time the Government slips. But this is not about the Opposition, it is about the Government. It is about the contempt in which it holds not only what should be its single most important document but also the Maltese public whose lives it affects. And it is also about how much one can trust the eponymous ‘people of trust’.

I can still remember Minister Scicluna being grilled by his former colleagues in the European Parliament over the scheme to sell passports. He was careful not to use the same sales pitch as the one used in Malta – that the scheme will rake in untold millions. No, it was intended to attract talent. Have you heard of any outstanding talent becoming Maltese since? I haven’t (ignoring the only case that went public, of someone whose talent consists in building hotels of which we are not lacking). Talent, for sure, is desperately needed – most of all in Scicluna’s Secretariat and the Labour Government.

Transport without direction

The differences between the two versions of the Budget speech are neither few nor insignificant. But even then the core theme is still “this budget is not about things that really matter”. Take the number one concern currently on people’s mind: transport. Of course, the starting point was not ideal. For all the problems of the new public transport system introduced in 2011, the service only reached the state of omnishambles when the present Government decided to wreck it – including whatever improvements were made over its predecessor – just for the heck of it.

Fuel prices are at an all-time low. Finance Minister Scicluna had massive room for manoeuvre compared to the holder of the office in 2010, when international prices were approaching $150 a barrel. So what does he do? He keeps fuel prices high so that – he claims – it acts as an incentive to use other means of transport. In the meantime, chaos reigns supreme.

Don’t waste your time looking for any sense of direction in the Budget speech – unless it’s vagueness you’re looking for. Whichever version of it you look at, you won’t find anything there.