As the Labour Party's top officials and CEOs of leading agencies and entities in Malta come and go with dizzying speed and regularity, even well-informed political commentators are left clutching their heads, scarcely knowing what to make of it all.
This is all becoming a tragic joke.
Let's imagine for a moment what this must be like for the staff of a major political party or a pivotal government agency, authority or other regulatory entity at all levels, constantly pulled from policy pillar to administrative post as they struggle to respond to ever wilder and more unrealistic directives from the top. Imagine what it must be like for the newly appointed to be asked to do the impossible with dwindling resources as an ever-changing cast of ministers seeks to impose their often experience-free personal prejudices on them.
All seem significantly lacking in good judgement, morality or social awareness. The jury must as yet be out on the judgement, morality and compassion of the latest versions. In striving to attach sticking plasters to the deeply divided and wounded Labour Party, Robert Abela seems already to have taken unwise hostages to fortune; meanwhile, many of the Labourite ferrets are out of the sack. They'll soon be lunging at each other again.
Given the mid-summer madness that has characterised the prime ministerial game of musical chairs and the feelings of anger, depression and outright disbelief that now pervade the Maltese political system, it's not easy to retain a grasp of what we might call the long view of our governance system.
A real concern here is that the root causes of all this instability will be neglected and sidelined as the traumatised Labour Party seeks to draw a veil over the contribution of its own fractiousness and internecine disagreements to Malta's existing crises. Proper scrutiny and accountability will be avoided.
The idea that a week is a long time in politics has lately given way to 24 hours is a long time in politics. Each daily bout of chopping and changing, both people and policies, preoccupies both the media and a bewildered and increasingly fearful national audience inclined to lose trust in the whole system.
The government's "musical chairs" with public roles are turning us into a banana republic.
Clearly, we need to return, if we can, to more stable political and administrative governance.
Understanding domestic violence and femicide
Any casual reader of the news and social media might be forgiven for thinking that a new and terrible criminality trend has recently manifested in Malta, namely that women are suddenly being targeted for violent acts that sometimes begin with rape and often end in murder.
In the wake of the remarkable number of domestic violence and femicide cases over the last few years, there have been several calls for the government to take action against this crisis.
Such calls obscure the fact that women have been murdered for as long as men have been, and rape is as old as history. Since reliable data is hard to come by and definitions of crimes are seldom thoroughly understood by the public, there is a lot of room for misunderstanding the scope and historical depth of Malta's murderous misogyny.
Things have not changed much; we have merely developed new words to describe them and new ways of conceptualising them. Researchers understand femicide well because there has been a significant amount of good-quality research into the epidemiology of fatal violence against women in our country, but the public doesn't.
Not long ago, the term femicide didn't exist in a criminological or practical sense. Nor did domestic violence. We created new terms not because the acts they describe were new, but because our understanding of why and how they happen changes and matures over time. The emergence of the term femicide in itself tells us a particular story about how the way we name things demonstrates our changing understanding of things.
When feminist activists started to describe femicide as a particular thing, it had a very strong socio-political importance because it finally recognised that women were killed in different ways and for different reasons than men, and that it was their womanhood itself that was often the cause of this violence against them.
The government must focus its attention on actions that will make a difference. It must resource our police stations and our police force, our prosecutors, and make sure our magistrates and our courts are set up to handle all forms of gender-based violence.
More female prosecutors, female policewomen, and more female magistrates and judges would help too.
Instead of trying to bypass the system and saying it doesn't work, we have to try and fix these systems so that they work for women. These are the changes that would have very meaningful impacts on women's lives.
Traffic fatalities concerns
In our country, there were a total of 14 road fatalities in 2023 and 1234 traffic accidents that caused serious injuries. This year, we already had 4 fatalities, 3 of them just in a single day.
Poor road conditions, reckless passing, drowsy driving, sleepwalking, intoxication, illness, use of mobile phones, eating and drinking in the car, inattention in the event of a street accident, and the inability of other drivers to react quickly enough to the situation are all contributors.
These are all causing major health problems and are of concern to our health institutions.
Dr Mark Said is a lawyer