A Maltese language expert has taken legal action over the appointment of former PBS head of news Norma Saliba as head of a new agency which is tasked with safeguarding the Maltese language.
The centre was created, one must say out of the blue, to serve as the “administrative, organisation and operational organ of the National Council of the Maltese Language”, according to a legal notice. In other words, an agency to run another, already established agency.
One is tempted to write “only in Malta” at this stage.
The thing is that the National Council of the Maltese Language was not aware of the setting up of the agency. No consultation exercise took place.
Saliba’s appointment comes a few weeks after she resigned from PBS after what she described as a “character assassination campaign”. It did not take long for her to find a new job, and there are strong suspicions that, before she left the national broadcasting station, Saliba knew where she was going.
Her appointment is now being challenged in court. Maltese language expert Mark Amaira is arguing that she does not have the necessary qualifications for the job. The judicial protest also points out that the appointment was done without due process and without basing it on merit, qualifications and experience. The legal action was filed against Culture Minister Owen Bonnici, the Centre of the Maltese Language, the National Council of the Maltese Language and the State Advocate.
Amaira described Saliba’a appointment as “irresponsible and insulting”, rendering Maltese language graduates and academics into “beggars”.
He is not the only one to have criticised the appointment.
Former MP Jason Azzopardi said the legal notice creating the new agency is “null and illegal”, urging MPs to challenge the legality of the legal notice in Parliament.
Professor of Law Kevin Aquilina, writing in The Malta Independent on Sunday, called it “Owen’s magna kawlata kawlatorum”, going on to explain how the system supposedly works and how, in this case, it did not. He wrote: “The crux of the matter is that the Minister (Bonnici) approved regulations without consulting thereupon with the National Council for the Maltese Language in terms of the law that establishes that Council. Was it a genuine mistake? I very much doubt. An oversight perhaps? It does not appear at face value to be so. Incompetence? Surely this cannot be excluded. Or simply abuse of power? I hope not!”
Remember what the Labour Party had promised before the 2013 election? Remember that one of the slogans was “meritocracy”, with Labour promising that all appointments would be given according to merit? That promise did not last long, as it took days after the 2013 election victory for Labour to forget what “meritocracy” means.
And this forgetfulness continued for 10 whole years and beyond, with Saliba’s appointment only being the latest addition to the very long list.
Someone has now had the courage to challenge the system. We hope it will not stop at just a judicial protest.
We wait and see how it will develop.