When it finally happens that the public says it has had enough of corruption in government, we may be surprised at how insignificant the straw that breaks the camel’s back might look. If you consider that they abandoned three public hospitals to rot in an international conspiracy for bribes allegedly paid to a prime minister, and that didn’t annoy the public enough, you’d expect the last scandal of the Muscat-Abela era to be enormous. That won’t necessarily be the case.
Robert Abela feels the heat. You can see it in his behaviour because he’s a poker player who keeps his cards face up.
His panic during the Clayton Bartolo debacle was palpable. The thought would have occurred to him that as wooden shutters fell from the windows of abandoned wards at St Luke’s Hospital, Joseph Muscat had never been in as much political trouble as when one of Abela’s ministers arranged an undeserved salary boost for his girlfriend.
In the grand scheme, Mrs Bartolo’s salary bump for continuing to be her boyfriend’s secretary is materially insignificant compared with the grand corruption we’ve experienced during the last decade. Even the kickbacks she is alleged to have received from a contractor working for her husband’s department are a drop in the ocean of squandered and misdirected monies in the procurement of Electrogas, the kickbacks paid over passports sold to Russians, and, of course, the millions siphoned from the public health budget.
There’s an analysis to be made here that risks sounding elitist. It is not easy for most people to conceive of a theft of hundreds of millions. When, over months and years, people are told what was wrong with the procurement process for the energy contract that
Yorgen Fenech’s consortium won, most won’t have a clue about what the proper way to do it would have been like.
When experiencing overcrowding and long waits for hospital services, it is easier for most to blame the brown immigrants crowding a waiting area than the ministers who took bribes and let entire hospitals fall into disrepair.
Most people can’t conceive of stolen millions because most people can’t conceive of millions. It’s just more than they’ll ever see in their lifetime.
But people understand what most secretaries earn because most people earn around the same. They perceive the unfairness of Mrs Bartolo’s salary supplement because they can see she’s paid more than them for the same work they do. They can see that the effort of putting themselves or their children through university education has little value in comparison with catching the minister’s eye.
Some people are university-educated teachers, nurses, or police inspectors. They worked hard to obtain their qualifications. They do tough work on the front line of the government’s mission to serve the public. They take risks, facing bullying, infectious diseases, and angry, violent people. And they’re on less than half of Clayton Bartolo’s secretary.
Of course, this story attracts obvious attention because Bartolo made his secretary his girlfriend before he fixed her big salary boost. There’s a lot of unfortunate misogyny in the pregnant suggestion of what she must have done for him – besides typing and pencilling his diary – to earn her fat contract. Bartolo didn’t help her. When he made his public defence that “university degrees are not everything” to justify his wife’s rapid promotion, the obvious retort was, “Yeah, becoming the minister’s girlfriend might be”.
Robert Abela defended this in his by-now habitual, incoherent, and paradoxical manner. He insisted Bartolo had done no wrong but that he, Abela, had fired Bartolo’s wife from her overpaid position. Wherefore did you so?
People understand what most secretaries earn because most people earn around the same- Manuel Delia
Abela recognised that Bartolo had “breached ethics” but that wasn’t a resignation matter. How dare we expect our ministers to conduct themselves ethically? Abela had fired Bartolo’s wife from her job (implicitly because she was not entitled to it), but he didn’t think any crimes had been committed.
When Repubblika asked the police to investigate whether there had been embezzlement of public funds and prosecute whoever was responsible for that, Abela stepped in, shouting to a crowd that he would defend his colleagues from extremists. It is extremism to ask the police to investigate a publicly acknowledged crime.
But then, thanks to Times of Malta reporting, Abela fired Bartolo over an ostensibly separate kickbacks scandal.
I say ostensibly because, once again, the wife is a funnel for misdirected funds that originated in the husband’s department. The only difference is now there’s more money making its way to the Bartolos’ household.
The prime minister handled that like a child. Realising he had no way out, he told the press he had fired Bartolo but would not tell them why. He dodged questions and tried to hide behind journalists as if he’d hired them as spokespersons. Of course, he did.
For even he realises that if you defend a minister for defrauding the government he works for, so his wife takes money she’s not entitled to, you’re protecting a rotten thief utterly free of ethical restraint. They’ll be stealing something bigger.
We saw that in reverse in the case of a predecessor of Bartolo in the tourism ministry: Konrad Mizzi, who lost his job over the grand Panama-17 Black imbroglio but gave himself a consultancy contract not unlike Mrs Bartolo’s just so he could continue stealing from the public purse even while temporarily unemployed.
Abela also stepped in to terminate that contract heroically. It was one of the first things he did when he took office four years ago after the fall of Joseph Muscat. That’s what he’s been doing since then, playing a game of whac-a-mole, managing weekly corruption scandals by flipping through his arsenal of contradictions: he speaks on good governance, protects corrupt ministers, attacks magistrates, threatens civic campaigners, ignores journalists, denies corruption exists in his ranks and congratulates himself for being effective against it.
Reading this piece, looking for his name, is Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri, who helped his colleague Bartolo cover up Mrs Bartolo’s phantom job. Camilleri will be relieved he got away with the same “ethical breach” that cost his colleague his job, for it was the double whammy of two scandals in a month that sank Bartolo’s boat.
Indeed, even Camilleri must realise that the public has it up to here. The weekly shit show of sleaze and embezzlement is getting on people’s nerves. And before even Abela knows it, some small swindle somewhere in his government’s ranks will be the last he’ll have to defend weekly.