It s not just about the design and placing of the Monti and its stalls, is it? Just as it wasn’t about the tent put up outside Mater Dei, or John Role’s transfer away from the fostering care service he had established and managed so well.
You might ask what the heck the Monti, Mater Dei and fostering have to do with each other. The answer is quite simple – all three were initiatives which were taken, found out by the public, and after a negative outcry, Joseph Muscat rides in on his white horse and saves the day by reversing decisions which had been taken by whoever had taken them.
Decisions were taken (on the basis of only God knows what criteria), money was spent out of public coffers, a service was decimated by the transferring out of a public-spirited official and then, when the proverbial S… hit the fan, the Prime Minister stepped in and announced that he had sorted everything out.
What do these incidents tell us however about the much-vaunted new style of governance that we had been led to believe was coming to these Islands? They point at a political party which was very good at collecting electoral wastage from the Nationalist Government, pampering to every want, and sympathising and promising redress for every slight, whether real, perceived or simply made-up, suffered under the previous administration.
These incidents indicate a different reality altogether however when it comes to the serious task of governing. Almost two years in, we are still faced with these seemingly minor incidents, which being merely tips, tell us a lot about the massive icebergs of incompetence and lack of planning that lie below. The road-map was not ready and is not at all drawn-up. It is being scribbled along the way, as the materialisation of the corner stone of pre-electoral rhetoric, the gas-fired power-station, continues to dominate the political scene by its absence.
Fuel prices were at astronomical highs, and once again, it had to be public outrage, following some responsible and laudable initiatives by the Opposition, that yet another reversal, albeit small, was forthcoming.
All these, and so many more are indicative of a government functioning on trial-and-error basis. First the Government tries to pull a fast one, then when its engine stalls (pun totally intended) trying to surmount opposing heightened public opposition, some sort of partial patching up is effected by the Prime Minister himself.
Is it not absolutely ludicrous that we have resorted to such a state, where the Prime Minister himself has to ‘save the day’ by not accepting ramshackle stalls for the open market to be placed plumb centre in the magnificent project decorating the entrance to Valletta? He has intervened on the smaller matter of the design of the stalls, but is perfectly happy to go ahead with the defacement of such a project, just because it was somebody else’s idea and initiative. How puerile is that?
We have now come to wake up every day wondering ‘what’s next?’. Some new brainwave will definitely emanate from one of the many éminences grises recruited for some phantasmal duties post-March 2013. It will once again undoubtedly need to be reversed by our boy wonder of a Prime Minister. I’m sure that we are all familiar with the saying that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
In the cases referred to earlier, there was absolutely no need to break ‘it’ in the first place! I would therefore take some licence with the expression and stress that – If it ain’t broke, don’t break it, then you won’t have to fix it!
