Many are the theories behind the despicable assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, a heinous crime perpetrated two weeks ago tomorrow but one which seems almost a lifetime ago to quite a few.

Many are those who will not rest until those behind this atrocious crime are brought to justice.

Many are the threads of investigation, considering the fact that Caruana Galizia through her writings had exposed so many misdeeds, so much corruption and so much sleaze – and along the way upset and insulted so many others – that the list of suspects must be  a long one indeed.

From whatever angle one looks at it, there is undoubtedly an element of cause and effect at play when one looks at the government’s behaviour over the last year-and-a-half, particularly since the outbreak of the Panama Papers, and the national cesspool of impunity that the government created through its own actions or, rather, its inactions.

Yes, one of the causes of Caruana Galizia’s murder was undoubtedly her writings. Those writings, love them or hate them, were her right in a democratic country such as ours. For those who felt they had been injured by them, there are the courts to seek redress, and many did. That is their right in a democratic country such as ours.

But it was no one’s right to commission her cold-blooded, cruelly calculated murder.

The question is: why would someone feel they had that right, or that any such act was in any way permissible in a democratic country such as ours?

This, after all, is the heart of the real cause and effect behind this ‘shock and awe’ attack against a journalist who treaded fearlessly where so many others had feared to tread.

When the Prime Minister’s top two people, Minister Konrad Mizzi and chief of staff Keith Schembri, were caught with their pants down with secret companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand that had been set up just after Labour was swept to power in 2013, they escaped what should have been a career-ending revelation with complete impunity.

After ignoring the situation until it had quite obviously became unbearable, the minister was cosmetically stripped of his portfolio but continued carrying out practically the exact same functions as he had before, and had been simply made to stand down as deputy leader of the party in government. 

He was reappointed to Cabinet after an election and was put in charge of public private partnerships, the likes for which he had orchestrated over the past legislature and who stands accused of having received kickbacks from such deals.

The chief of staff emerged completely unscathed because, as the Prime Minister explained it, he was a private and successful businessman and not an elected official. 

But despite pressure from the local and international media, and the pressure applied by Caruana Galizia herself, nothing else happened. A European parliamentary committee visited Malta to look into the situation, and the chief of staff refused to attend while the minister, obliged as he was, showed up and gave a performance about how he was the victim of fake news, even though he himself owned up to his overseas financial set up. And that was the end of it.

But the pressure did not stop, and the government railed against that furiously.

It fostered a situation in which surveys showed the public had begun trusting the government more than it trusted the media. It fostered a situation in which people in the upper echelons of government could get away with all that was revealed in the Panama Papers with impunity. It fostered a situation in which almost every instance of corruption and misconduct was simply ignored or addressed with platitudes by the government until the storm of the day blew over.

It fostered a climate of impunity, a climate in which a police commissioner goes unpunished for sitting around and eating rabbit while a crime scene that was about to be assigned to a magistrate for inquiry was allowed to be compromised and possibly cleared of evidence, when the Prime Minister’s wife had been implicated by Caruana Galizia in the Panama set-up.

Successive police commissioners, including the present one, and the Attorney General had chosen to ignore reports from the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit that accused Schembri and Mizzi of financial crimes.

It created a cesspool of an electorate which merely rubberstamped the manifold corruption allegations, despite so much. The media was branded as a bunch of liars.

And in this climate, the government won a snap election. The government had created a climate in which the country’s institutions had been allowed to rot practically to their cores.

The protests calling for the removal of the Attorney General and the Police Commissioner do not have so much to do with any misconduct in the investigation of the slaying of Caruana Galizia.

What they are about is the fact that, after all that has come to pass, these people can no longer be trusted by enough of the public to keep their positions tenable, let alone to deal with the investigation into the murder of Caruana Galizia.

Concrete action is needed to restore a semblance of normality to the country, and the action required is the removal of the Attorney General and the Police Commissioner. Minimal damage limitation and burying one’s head in the sand is no longer a viable escape clause for the government will not suffice this time around. The outrage sparked by Caruana Galizia’s murder is far too great.

The situation calls for the Prime Minister to do what is necessary to restore faith in the country and its institutions. The Prime Minister needs to do more than bring in investigators from abroad and offer €1 million rewards.

He needs to take the kind of action that separates those who merely lead a country from actual leaders.