Often in the administration of public projects, apart from the delays they accumulate beyond their estimated time for completion, major cost overruns occur compared to planned targets. Later, defects are discovered in the completed project to the extent sometimes that works need to be redone. To complicate matters, the red warning light goes on about all this a long time after the project has been "completed".

Another problem (though it is not openly mentioned) then is that such failures get presented as if they were stand alone events... because this aspect or that individual were the trigger for what happened. In reality, the problem is systemic: it arises and will continue to arise becuse the mechanisms by which projects get done are not suited to the work that governments undertake. Moreover, mechanisms hardly exist by which the problems that have arisen in the past are recognised and remedied before they can re-emerge. We only go as far as having an auditor's report full of cries and lamentations.

The need is for updated, flexible and effective structures and rules by which public projects  are regulated, run and supervised. Unfortunately, this is still not fully accepted.

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PARTY FINANCE

One can hardly comprehend how a political party which aspires to run the government in a democracy can stay for years in breach of a law which obligates parties to submit every year their audited financial statements. If  a party does this because it disagrees with the law on the basis, say, that such a law is anti-democratic, one could perhaps understand.

But this is not the case for the Nationalist Opposition. If I understand correctly the reason given why the law is not being respected, it is that the audited accounts still need to be finalised properly. If this problem had persisted for only a while, then again the situation might be considered understandable. But not when it is allowed to persist for years... And if there had been good faith, unaudited accounts could have been provisionally submitted. It makes no sense at all, even if for the sake of being formally correct, to allow such an issue to remain pending for so long. This holds even if there's some fear that if the accounts were to be published, the PN would have to declare financial bankruptcy.

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TERRORISM

In international affairs, the words terrorist/terrorism have continued to carry a strange meaning. They are applied to the enemies of one side or another depending which side one approves. What for one side is terrorism, constitutes for the opposite camp a patriotic fight, for freedom. When the Ukrainians manage to carry out an attack in the depths of Russia, they're terrorists for the Russians... even if the two sides are in an active state of war.

When the Israelis manage to kill scores of innocent Palestinian civilians, as they've acquired the custom of doing, they immediately label their victims as terrorists. No matter that Israel partly owes its achievement of independence to the Stern gang, which the British labelled as terrorist. At around the same period, the latter had tagged the fighters for Kenya's freedom with the same label.

And the cruel game continues...