Cabinet swill – Jacques René Zammit

Disgraced former Office of the Prime Minister chief of staff Keith Schembri has told the Public Accounts Committee that he left politics much poorer than when he entered. It’s a strange situation.

Keith is poorer, the quality of our politics is definitely much poorer and, most of all, the nation’s coffers are much poorer than when he wielded his (self-claimed) Midas touch.

It makes you wonder where all that wealth has gone, doesn’t it?

The triad of protagonists of the greatest government scams ever all seem to have hazy memories for one reason or another.

Whether it is Muscat, Schembri or Mizzi being grilled in libel cases or parliamentary committees, there is a selective approach to answering varying from the “I don’t know” to the “I don’t remember” and to the “I choose not to answer”.

Had these lacunae of memory been random and few and far between, they would have been forgiven and justified by the lapse of time. Instead, the pattern is obvious for all to see. Time is just another partner in the obfuscation of the truth.

And then there is this mysterious entity called Cabinet (my capitalisation).

“It was discussed in Cabinet” is the new get-out-of-jail-free card. Fine, they are nowhere near jail yet but you get the gist. It is as though this Cabinet were a real-life person upon whom to brush off all responsibility.

It is as though there is some hidden rule similar to medieval ecclesiastic immunity. Touch the Cabinet and all evil is healed.

It’s not that their former colleagues in the aforementioned Cabinet are falling over themselves to corroborate this Cabinet discussion thesis. It is increasingly evident that the Cabinet was most likely used as a scapegoat of sorts.

Plans were waved under their general noses possibly without too much detail. Cabinet was used for acts of faith in the masterminds of electoral victories who were supposedly turning Malta into a gold-plated paradise.

It was all apparently on a need-to-know basis and few seemed bothered to have really wanted to know anyway since they were busy “pigging out”, as a disgraced former parliamentary secretary put it not so gracefully in a chat with a millionaire accused of  commissioning the murder of a journalist.

That is indeed the crux of the matter.

It is a Cabinet that had mutated from meritocracy to a kleptocracy of the vilest proportions could not be expected to go much further than providing a blindfolded nihil obstat for the perpetrators of national rape and pillage.

The devil, they say, is in the detail. When we see the wider picture of the villains of the great heist relying on their minions for corroboration, we tend to overlook the masterful way in which they roped them into the deal.

It has all been chronicled by the reporters at The Shift and elsewhere.

The “pigging out” far from the lazy eye of the country’s neutered institutions took the shape of a general free-for-all that captured the system for its own benefit.

Every minister, every parliamentary secretary, every backbencher and every former member worth his or her salt was out on a mission to capitalise and monetise their position as quickly as possible in what amounts to a modern-day feudal system.

Cabinet positions were, in fact, nothing less than a partitioning of feudal estates with less concern about politics and more about profits.

It’s the age-old problem of the stewards gone wild. Platonic considerations of best government practice would quickly have dismissed the lot as a band of criminals unworthy of governing.

They will protest that our accusations are unfair and unsubstantiated.

That the web of funnels leeching public funds was apparently created by sheer coincidence. Those involved were apparently only being rewarded for their contribution to the nation and those who came before them had done the same.

A decade ago, I had been forced to blog anonymously for a while. I dug up this post from the Comino Republic blog I created, which turned out to be quite prophetic. It’s worth looking at.

50 days into the Muscat administration, the signs were there for all to see. The pigs were already busy, snout in trough preparing for that great decade-long buffet.

No worries at all: when in doubt, they would blame it on the Cabinet. It’s the will of the Cabinet…

Cabinet swill.