The sun rose today, on independent Malta’s 59th anniversary, with the majority of Maltese adequately fed, clothed and housed – and yet feeling destitute, convinced they’re losing their country to a gang of money-launderers, hustlers and grifters, thanks to the ineptitude and lethargy of the boobs, poltroons and gravitasses who ought to be standing up to them.
On these anniversaries some bore always says that Malta still needs to mature politically. Greet the platitude with the open derision it deserves. Our politics aren’t immature. They’re in an advanced state of decay.
Consider the evidence. The first sign of political decadence is when words no longer mean anything and our reaction is to shrug.
We have a prime minister who declares himself a socialist and then shows complete ignorance of what it means and total indifference to his ignorance.
Nothing captures Robert Abela’s Labour better than Pledge 904 of last year’s electoral programme. It promised ‘a national strategy against corruption and integrity’. (Yes, against integrity.) That pledge was part of a section called ‘Governance and serious accountability’.
Now, note your reaction to both the typo and the brass neck. Chances are you’ve shrugged and quipped: “Well, at least they’re keeping half that promise.”
Consider the second sign of decadence: leaders with no strategic sense of the country’s needs and options.
Whatever you think about Giorgio Borg Olivier, Dom Mintoff, Eddie Fenech Adami, Alfred Sant and Lawrence Gonzi, they had clear ideas (whether right or wrong) about the country’s long-term constraints and wiggle room for manoeuvre.
In the first six years after independence, Borg Olivier acted purposefully on the presumption that Malta’s national development lay within the framework of western Europe but that there also needed to be a stable relationship with King Idris’s Libya (the very first non-European country he visited). In the UN, he promoted the need for an international environmental law governing maritime resources, the challenges of an ageing society (decades before its impact on government finances were felt) and Malta as a centre of higher education for postcolonial States.
Mintoff had to deal with a different set of circumstances. By his time, Libya had switched from a conservative monarchy to a radical revolutionary regime. He recognised the significance of the imminent international recognition of communist China. And he also saw that the Cold War in the Mediterranean needed to be addressed internationally.
Fenech Adami’s policy in favour of membership of the EU was developed as a strategic response to the end of the era of British bases in Malta.
Sant’s “partnership” with the EU idea was a chimera; but, though his proposal was fantasy, the problems it was meant to address were based on real understanding.
As for Gonzi, he recognised what fundamentals needed to change – from the smooth adoption of a new currency, the euro, to the setting up of six new areas of major economic activity – for the country to reinvent itself as a successful EU member State.
It obviously isn’t possible to admire all these strategic solutions, since some are incompatible with others. But it is certainly possible to respect each leader for the effort to devise a national grand strategy joining up geo-politics to international markets.
Our politics aren’t immature. They’re in an advanced state of decay- Ranier Fsadni
Since then, the sense of public interest has disappeared in the shadows of private interests.
Our current finance minister is someone who, in a previous incarnation, urged the fatalistic, wholesale laissez-faire importation of foreign labour, seemingly without noticing that investment in infrastructure had to keep pace with the rise in population.
Faced with the reckless spending of his colleagues, he mouths empty strictures. And, having awoken to the fact that the post-2013 economic model is unsustainable, he speaks as though he’s announcing a discovery, when the country had begun to speak of the need for a shift a generation earlier.
Now, in case anyone is in any doubt that the government is bankrupt of ideas, he appeals to the private sector to come up with ideas for a national strategy.
But, with all the best brains in the world, the private sector cannot come up with a strategy. It can make business proposals driven by profit. But those proposals will include, as in the past, more golf-courses (even though environmentally crazy), Malta as a six-star destination and a whole range of glitzy but incompatible business ideas.
Only a government can decide on strategic trade-offs based on geo-political concerns. A minister who speaks as though he doesn’t know this is either being disingenuous or else he’s out of his depth.
A third sign of significant decay is the widespread sense that the current situation is unsustainable – the plundering, racketeering, impunity, institutional demoralisation and mounting deaths caused by a zombie State’s failures. And many of us think there is little that we can do about it.
The opposition offers condemnation of the present but no articulate, principled alternative. The corruption has undermined faith in our fellow citizens. We’re just waiting for the bill to arrive and saddle our children with the steep cost of ineptitude and recklessness
It’s tempting, in such a predicament, to express disgust by withdrawing from democratic participation. Wide experience of corruption elsewhere shows, however, that low levels of civic participation play right into the hands of the bandits.
Withdrawal is not an assertion of personal independence. It’s merely self-exile. We declare our independence, and political maturity, by doing something to end this pornocracy – each one of us.