The land of make-believe – Joe Azzopardi

Listening to Robert Abela and his acolytes, one would think Sir Thomas More could have based his ‘Utopia’ masterpiece on Malta since Robert Abela was sworn in as prime minister on 13 January 2020.

The sun, according to Abela, rose over Malta for the first time that very day.

Robert Abela brags that here on our own Utopian island, we have full employment with just a handful of lazy people registering for work.

That is what he and his media men like Karl Stagno Navarra and Emanuel Cuschieri feed his followers – described as ġaħans (fools) by former minister Edward Zammit Lewis – day in and day out.

Of course, they do not mention the thousands of third-world nationals working like modern-day slaves delivering food, driving buses and working in construction.

They pay taxes and National Insurance contributions but are not entitled to a pension. Some of them cannot afford rent so they sleep on the street or in public gardens.

Malta’s economy as designed by the corrupt Joseph Muscat is based solely on construction.

In 10 years there wasn’t one new foreign investment, except for Vitals and Steward for the hospitals concession and the American University of Malta. And then there was Pilatus Bank in the financial sector.

We all know what the outcomes were. Labour’s vision of a new and robust economy managed to uglify Malta in just a decade with rabbit hole apartments, dust and noise pollution.

And when one speaks of pollution, one has to bear in mind that we are seeing 10 new cars on our roads every day – roads that are clogged every hour of every day leading to frustration, road rage and thousands of lost hours of work.

The government’s solution is to widen roads and eat away at fertile agricultural land but the various bottlenecks around the country persist

Reading or hearing about hundreds of thousands of euros being paid to government consultants and persons of trust – many of them former ONE Media journalists, political turncoats and party members – and the amount the government spends on media activities, one would think that we are living in a country with a healthy financial situation.

But the reality of the situation is something else.

Public debt has exploded since 2013 and now stands at more than €9 billion, double what it was in 2012. To finance Abela’s extravagances the, government is borrowing €3 million every day.

The latest news is that Minister Aaron Farrugia is employing no less than 36 consultants, advisors and experts and spending €700,000 a year in the process.

These doyens’ results? Everyday bumper-to-bumper traffic and daily delays of Air Malta flights.

But the biggest falsehood that Robert Abela is living, and is desperately trying to put across, concerns the rule of law.

When he met EU Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders recently, Abela declared with a straight face that Malta, after having ‘some difficulties,’ has learnt its lessons about good governance and now everything is just fine.

He never mentioned the lack of action from the Attorney General and the Commissioner of Police when it comes to anything involving corrupt politicians and their buddies.

And, as MEP David Casa pointed out in a recent tweet, the prime minister neglected to tell the Commissioner about his links to organised crime and how he persists in undermining justice and propagating impunity.

And Robert Abela meanwhile keeps hoodwinking his faithful.

Like on Workers Day when he promised them he would spend €60 million of their own money to send each one of them a €100 cheque as a tax refund – and they clapped, sang and cheered.