I do not know whether it was planned or not but the announcement Malta had a surplus came right in the nick of time.
It came on the last day of the EPP congress in Malta, pulling the carpet out from under Simon Busuttil's legs, but it also marked the real beginning of the election campaign.
Ministers' waiting rooms, I am told, are now full to overflowing. People in government offices are being called: "Do you want another clerk (or two)?"
The surplus seems to have triggered a splurge, a tsunami, of jobs, promotions and permits. Nobody seems to have noticed that the surplus was actually quite small: a mere €9 million in a billion-plus budget - and that can even disappear in a Eurostat revision months down the line.
It would, however, have served its purpose, which is to kick-start the election campaign. The KMB strategy is being used again.
In 1987, the Labour government came to the end of a legislature marked by electoral fraud (and many other things besides, including violence) since it governed in accordance with the Constitution as it was then but in defiance of the will of the people, who had voted more for the Opposition PN than for the Socialist government (as happened with Trump last November).
Labour was completing three terms, among the most radical and historical in independent Malta's history up until then, but it had lost the shine of the first term. Dom Mintoff, the prophet through the 1960s desert and the architect of the new republican Malta, had gone, resigning in mid-term for quite unexplained reasons.
In his stead, Mintoff had handpicked KMB, an austere bachelor from one of Malta's foremost Nationalist families, to spite Lorry Sant and a bevy of Lorry clones, who very obviously wanted to take over. KMB (Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici to give him his whole name) tried very hard to straddle the Labour electoral beast to the point of even accompanying the Labour-dockyard mob when it ransacked the Archbishop's Curia (although KMB tried hard to head them off).
That episode came in the middle of the battle for church schools, a battle initiated by Dom in his last days, but taken over and radicalised by KMB.
By 1987, the church school battle was over. So too was Dom's adamantine refusal to install reverse osmosis plants and provide the island with a sufficient water supply. The election was beckoning and KMB's Cabinet reinvented itself as a business-friendly, right-of-centre administration (although it had to be the next government, the PN one, to unravel the centralised procurement regime that spawned multiple cases of corruption).
But the Labour government faced a difficult poll. The Nationalist Party spent the entire legislature in public protests which occasioned predictable clashes with the hated SMU and the PL thugs. Malta was on the brink of a civil war.
That is when KMB - or someone for him - had his moment of inspiration. Where the previous years had seen austerity all around (with even street lighting switched off) and a government very reluctant to employ people in the civil service, now caution was thrown to the winds and recruitment was thrown open to one and all. Hundreds, thousands even, were offered jobs - at the Freeport, with Air Malta, anywhere possible.
In the end, KMB almost made it to government. The Nationalist campaign through all the previous years for justice and freedom (Xoghol, Gustizzja, Liberta) almost failed to persuade the majority of the Maltese to choose change. People were thankful for a job obtained, secure that a PN administration would not sack them and a job more in the family outweighed all the other considerations. People thus recruited are still in government employment although many are coming to the end of their working life.
It is clear that the present administration has retrieved the KMB strategy. Not that successive PN ones did not use this strategy too, but this is something to be expected. Bread-and-butter issues, as Trump showed, are extremely important to many people. Only those with secure employment fail to see this - those already with a job with the government, those employed with independent bodies such as the university.
It has been reported that a Ministry or two are planning to recruit people with, for example, tile-laying, etc., skills. This would be taking resources from an already tight market - as anyone who tries to get work done in a house can attest, leaving the area open to people from outside Europe who are already dominating the market.
On the other hand, I have never understood why the PN wound down the Works Division and why so many government, etc., contracts are being outsourced. I would have thought that government employment would be cheaper in the end, as long as - an important qualification - they are well-managed, which is not usually the case.
In the end, though, this massive tide of recruitment could be the surest sign that the surplus will not endure. All the government hoo-ha when the surplus appeared (and all the talk about the 35 years of deficits) can just disappear when the surplus is gobbled up by the KMB strategy.
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