The pace of progress in this country is truly astonishing. When I was a civil servant, what we called ‘procurement’ was a fairly solemn State matter. If you needed paperclips and the department didn’t have them in stock, you couldn’t just pop down the shops for a box. You had to research the best prices, and then you had to fill out forms. Many, many forms.

Major purchases – things like a stapler, or a printer toner – were believed to put big dents in government’s finances. If your rank gave you privileged access to your own stapler, you’d cherish the thing and keep it safely stored away in a drawer. If you were transferred to another department, your stapler would move with you like a beloved pet.

But all of that is now history. Forget paperclips and procurement, in L-Aqwa Żmien the State thinks nothing of bussing its employees around in private jets.

Part of me feels sorry for Johann Buttigieg. The Planning Authority boss has been left alone to face the difficult questions. Even as he thrashed about to salvage the unsalvageable, the real architect of it all was in New York, dishing out global babble at the UN General Assembly.

More on that later, but I must first get back to Buttigieg. However much of a fall guy he may be, he’s also a willing and handsomely-rewarded one. He does, after all, take home over €100,000 a year for his pains – not bad for someone who held the relatively junior rank of case officer until the dawn of the age of meritocracy in 2013.                  

I suppose the whole point of Buttigieg’s interview with the Times was for the government to put a face to the db disaster. The message was that the Prime Minister was too busy saving the world, and that this was our man. Ecce homo, shall we say. Trouble is, the interview was an even bigger disaster than the infamous board meeting at which the project was approved.

First, you would have to be exceptionally thick to believe that the decision to fly Jacqueline Gili in on a private jet was taken by Buttigieg. It was, except it wasn’t. No government employee, no matter how many staplers they had in their drawer, would take such a decision without first consulting higher powers. Buttigieg wasn’t lying when he said that the decision was taken by him. It’s the obvious bit he left out that really matters.

You would have to be exceptionally thick to believe that the decision to fly Jacqueline Gili in on a private jet was taken by Buttigieg

There was something else about the interview that I found profoundly disturbing. Buttigieg referred to past board meetings and said that Ms Gili was flown in so as to avoid another dubious vote. We cannot but conclude that the massive towers and various other monstrosities taking shape all over Malta were based on, in his own words, dubious decisions.

If we took his word for it, we would have to revisit all the decisions taken at board meetings at which one or more of the members were absent. That effectively means each and every meeting in the past several years.

Third, Buttigieg suggested that the db meeting was a particularly important one. I hadn’t realised that Silvio Debono was such a first-class citizen, to the extent that planning decisions that concern him require board members to be flown in on private jets funded by taxpayers. As of now, I’d be really insulted if I were a developer and a board member was absent at a hearing for my project.

Still, all of that’s small change compared to the really big one. When asked by the Times if he would do it again, Buttigieg said that, now that the Prime Minister had publicly disagreed with the decision, he would be an idiot (his words, not mine) to ever go anywhere near a private jet again.

The contradiction is painful. On the one hand, Buttigieg is defending his (make of that possessive form what you will) decision as conducive to a healthy planning process. On the other, he is saying he wouldn’t repeat it. Why? Because the Prime Minister thinks it was wrong.       

Thing is, the Prime Minister never told us why he thinks it was wrong. Nor does he have to, because we know. I spoke to three staunch labourites in the past few days, and they all told me that they found the matter obscene. I spoke to many more of the kind Joseph Muscat is really interested in, and they said much worse.

The truth is that the Prime Minister doesn’t care a toss about the cost and implications of a private jet. Private jets are, after all, the favourite toy of the sort of super-rich folks (“high net worth individuals”, he calls them, which makes the rest of us rather worthless) he so gets on with. He does, however, care an awful lot about his political image. The only reason why he ‘disagreed’ with Buttigieg’s decision is that he realised that the acrid smoke was blowing in his direction.

Which leaves Buttigieg in a rather strange place. He has said that the decision to fly Gili over was taken for the right reasons. He has also said that he will not repeat it, because the Prime Minister thinks it was wrong. If I’m right about the Prime Minister’s reasoning, and I’m sure I am, that makes Buttigieg Muscat’s image manager. It also makes the planning process an accessory to Muscat’s political hustling.

The Prime Minister’s speech at the UN was, after all, very apt. That podium has a long and dismal history of people who perorate about saving the planet, even as they wheel-deal about in their part of it.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece