One of the reasons Labour got elected in March 2013 was Labour’s promise to rule by meritocracy. “You may not agree with us, but you can work with us” resounded in the squares and on television.

The promise, writ large in the electoral manifesto, was to rule by meritocracy.

Now in any country such as ours that is a promise that is very hard to implement. Malta has the highest government employment when compared to other countries, especially when you consider the outer regions such as the various agencies, corporations, whatnot.

And while the government machine tries to get on with its job, it is riddled at any time with one single question: who is in command? Any government tends to have its own people at the top or at least would like to do that.

But since Malta is split down the middle, there would inevitably be people from the other side in the various authority levels – some would be pro-government and some would be anti-government. People who are completely neutral or apolitical are rare on the ground.

Hence the continual struggle to increase the pro-government component in each and every ministry, agency, corporation, etc.

People who work in the private sector have no idea of the stresses inside any government office. Before they want to know your name, they want to know who you voted for.

There is no trace of the British tradition of a completely apolitical civil service, assuming it ever took root in Malta. Mintoff’s government has to be blamed for this,.

So to promise government by meritocracy was either a big electoral bluff or else a promise that could never be kept.

In fact, it was not kept.

Worse, what took place has succeeded in angering not just the Nationalists who are out of government, but also the Labourites.

Some people have found the secret stairs which led to the top, but it seems this had less to do with party allegiance than with personal relations.

Rank and file Labourites complain they have been left by the wayside. Others that the Nationalists who were in power in PN times are still there.

Basically, to use a term from Communist times, it is the Nomenklatura that reigns.

In practice, this has meant that for every one person who got his iced bun, some 20 are angry because they have been left without. The government is doing itself no favour by ruling in this manner. On the contrary, it may well be handing over the government to the Nationalists not because of any merit by the latter, but by default.

There may have been rules for government recruitment some time in the past but they have been mostly bluntly abused. That is also why the government keeps employing more and more people because it cannot keep promising and promising without ever delivering.

In many cases, the people who benefit from such recruitment or promotion are hardly worth it. Many do not understand what their roles require of them, many are simply academically unprepared for the job. The result is that these people promoted beyond their abilities then use threats, shouting and the rest to reinforce their position because they obviously are not going to accept they are unworthy of the post they occupy and their subordinates obviously are not going to tell them to their faces they cannot do their job.

The end result is to turn the government machine into a hell of hate where such considerations impede any proper work from being carried out.