Flushing our money down the drain

Chris Bonett won’t answer a simple question – How many youths have applied for his daft scheme to pay them €25,000 each for giving up their driving licence for five years?

Times of Malta has been asking him that question since the scheme was launched at the beginning of the year. MP Bernice Bonello asked him that same question in parliament on February 18. She asked him the same question again on March 30. 

Bonett not only refuses to answer but he’s ordering the media to stop asking questions: “We launched the scheme a month ago and urged the media not to start asking for figures immediately – now you’re doing that, for other reasons.”

Why is the minister so touchy about the subject of his harebrained scheme? Because it’s a useless waste of our money. That’s why Bonett is so sensitive, why he keeps evading the question and gets so hostile towards anybody who dares ask that question – because it exposes his sheer amateurism and his blatant ineptitude.

Bonett initially proposed squandering €15 million of our money to entice any driver to give up their licence for five years. That silly proposal was delayed as Bonett faced significant resistance from his own cabinet colleagues, particularly Finance Minister Clyde Caruana who politely told Bonett his scheme “made little sense”.

To dampen Bonett’s humiliation at the hands of his own cabinet colleagues, Prime Minister Robert Abela instructed the minister to go back to the drawing board and come up with a “pilot project” and cut the projected cost to just €5 million.

Bonett couldn’t drop the idea because he had prematurely made public comments about his silly scheme. So, he came back with his revamped plan.  This time only drivers aged under 30 would be eligible. But applicants don’t even need to prove they own a car or that they’ve been driving at all. The  Malta Independent published cases of applicants who hadn’t driven for years despite having a driving licence.

In 2024, there were more than 285,000 valid driving licences in Malta. A total of 400 new driving licences are issued every month. Bonett’s crazy scheme would, at best, remove 200 drivers, out of a potential 285,000, from Maltese roads. That’s the equivalent of 15 days of new licences.

Even if Bonett managed to get 200 drivers off the roads that’s a veritable drop in the ocean – that’s just 0.07% of all drivers on the island. Nobody would even notice. That’s like having 10,000 cent coins in your pocket and seven cents fall out.  You wouldn’t even bother stopping to look for the missing coins. Spending €5 million to remove 200 drivers out of 285,000 drivers makes no sense at all. Unless those lucky 200, picked by Bonett’s Transport Malta to receive a €25,000 bonanza each, all happen to come from his electoral districts.

Senior Transport Malta officials warned him repeatedly that his plan was a ridiculous waste of taxpayers’ money. But he stuck to his dumb scheme, maybe just to save face or maybe because he had some cunning electoral plan. Now he just wants journalists to stop asking him questions. He’s desperate for the whole scheme to be forgotten.

He can’t afford to be seen as the weakest link in Abela’s cabinet, as the one who just squanders our money on daft schemes or the one who uses his ministerial position to cheat his fellow Labour candidates – especially not in an election year.

Bonett fails to understand the most fundamental principle – cabinet ministers are accountable to the public- Kevin Cassar

So Bonett has been quietly trying to recover lost ground. He’s using every dirty trick to win over voters at the expense of his fellow Labour candidates. In his latest abuse of power, he sent out a political letter to residents of Gudja, which is part of his electoral district, informing them that he’s stopped Y-plate drivers parking in the locality while waiting for business from Malta International Airport. Bonett signed those letters to his constituents not as minister but as Labour’s fourth district electoral candidate.

Bonett boasted that he had heeded residents’ complaints about parking in their locality by Y-plate drivers. Bonett told the residents Gudja “should not be used for these purposes”.

“With immediate effect we have begun implementing geo-fencing measures so that Y-plate vehicles located in Gudja will not be able to accept trips from the airport,” Bonett gleefully pointed out to his potential voters.

There was no legal notice or official statement from the Transport Ministry to advise the public or those Y-plate drivers affected by his political stunt. Those drivers only found out when they were prevented from accepting airport rides while in the locality of Gudja.

What that means for the rest of us is that we will have to pay more for a ride from the airport because those drivers will need to travel further to get to the airport. But Bonett doesn’t care. His only objective is to outsmart his fellow Labour candidates on the fourth district and to get re-elected.

Bonett was asked by The Shift to clarify the legal basis for his unilateral imposed restriction and whether the measure had been formally introduced through Transport Malta. But Bonett arrogantly failed to reply.

That’s nothing new. Bonett has a long track record of refusing to answer basic questions. When he was asked to provide the estimated and actual costs and the duration of specific road works, he refused to reply and instead used the DOI to denigrate the opposition party: “Infrastructure Malta continues to carry out one project after another… projects that pre-2013 governments did not have the will or vision to carry out.”

For his arrogance, he was rapped by the standards commissioner for breaching ethics. But the clueless Bonett arrogantly insisted he had done nothing wrong.

When Bonett took his family on holiday to Sicily in his government-paid official car, he refused to provide evidence that he paid for the trip’s cost or for the fuel he consumed while on holiday.

Bonett fails to understand the most fundamental principle – cabinet ministers are accountable to the public. That money he’s squandering is not his – it’s ours. And, someday, soon, whether he likes it or not, he will have to answer for it.

Kevin Cassar is a professor of surgery.