When George Vella stepped in the presidential palace five years ago, he fancied himself the president who would be remembered for brokering consensus over constitutional change, the midwife of a second republic. He would make up for the deer-in-the-headlights reaction of his predecessor, Marie Louise Coleiro Preca to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. He would be the answer to the calls for reform.
That was April 2019.
By the summer of that year, the press was publishing reports heavily hinting that journalists knew the police knew who killed Caruana Galizia but no one seemed willing to arrest them.
By the end of the year of his inauguration, Vella found himself accepting the resignation of Joseph Muscat, the man who had picked him for the presidency, the man he had picked to be his party leader.
By then, even Vella realised that the call for constitutional change was a storm he could not harness.
If Malta were indeed to have had a rule book that, had it existed in time, would have been effective enough to have prevented the killing of Caruana Galizia, it would have also prevented Vella from having made his choice for party leader. Consequently, it would have prevented his election as president.
It was the realisation that is best spelt out in a science fiction novel about time travel.
If you were to go back in time and give Malta a culture and legal framework that promotes and protects legality in public life, there would never have been a government elected on the back of a plot by a small number of conspirators to capture the Maltese State to serve the purposes of their criminal intention.
Reading that science fiction novel, Vella would realise that retroactively saving the life of Caruana Galizia would have flapped the wings of a butterfly that would have made Vella, a minister in Muscat’s government, disappear.
Vella panicked. When Muscat left office in January 2020, the president wondered how he could get out of his promise of hosting and leading a constitutional convention. He needed to avoid any public examination of his own role as a prop to Muscat.
And, then, a miracle happened. COVID struck. Surely, that was no longer the time for convening anything. No videoconferencing app could be reasonably expected to host a conversation about promoting a culture of legality in this country.
Time ticked on. A public inquiry into the killing of Caruana Galizia heard evidence in public and resolved, in July 2021, that Muscat and his ministers had been responsible for the culture of impunity that allowed Caruana Galizia to be killed.
The inquiry urged the State to apologise. It was for Vella to say ‘sorry’ on behalf of the republic and he did. He went to Bidnija, where Daphne’s burning car rested to consume her, bowed his head and expressed regret.
But that needed to be that. You see, when Vella, the president apologised for the government that created the atmosphere of impunity that allowed Caruana Galizia to be killed, he needed to avoid at all costs that we remember one particular minister in that government: George Vella.
When Joseph Muscat left office in January 2020, the president wondered how he could get out of his promise of hosting and leading a constitutional convention- Manuel Delia
That was the same self-preserving inertia that has prevented the Labour Party in government from implementing even part of one of the recommendations made by the Caruana Galizia public inquiry.
Why dredge all this up again? Why can’t we forgive and, if we are unable to, why don’t we just forget?
Because while Vella relied on COVID, for long after it stopped being dangerous to sit down for meetings with people, to avoid a conversation about the constitution of our country, we postponed the work to make the changes that, had they been in place in time, would have saved Daphne’s life.
Don’t be limited in your imagination. Constitutional changes are not just about changing the rules and powers of this or that office of State. They’re not just about electoral systems, or even rules about the funding of political parties, matters of law that are outside the basic law we call the Constitution with a capital C.
The constitution of a country is also the values and the culture that give it spirit. For this country could allow a journalist to be killed not merely because of weak institutional design but also because this is a community that has divorced public service from public spiritedness, public life from public interest.
Vella couldn’t preside over a conversation that would examine the very values that brought him to that presidency. Not even if he wanted to. If he did want to, he would still have needed the willing participation of ministers, of political leaders, of leaders of institutions and community voices that would all be challenged to examine the systems and the ethics that placed them where they were.
As a new president takes Vella’s place, unburdened as Myriam Spiteri Debono is by a personal history of propping up Muscat, it feels unreasonable to expect that anyone might be able to challenge the country to examine its conscience and to, finally, make the changes we have long known to be necessary.
And, yet, reflecting on Daphne’s death, we find that “we must redeem ourselves anew.
We need to come together, as we have in the past, to make necessary changes... The fight for, above all, fair and just leadership is a continuous battle we are challenged with day after day. Our vigilance must be constant and we can never falter...
We have the backbone necessary to fix what has been found to be broken and, from time to time, continue identifying what needs to change and evolve... so that future generations can find the strong foundations they need to keep moving forward.”
Those words were spoken during Vella’s term as president. By Spiteri Debono.
We can only hope.