The cumulative effect

A new scandal every day. And sometimes more than one. Is this due to a hard core of activists and journalists sworn to bring the Labour government down?

The range of claims of corruption is a very wide one – there is practically not one area of government that can boast that no allegation of corruption has been levelled in its direction.

The courts of law, as usual, filled with various court cases which pile up on top of each other and render the administration of justice a cumbersome process, are further burdened by court cases caused by the allegations of corruption.

People involved in one way or another in just one of these cases naturally focus on this one case, but the country as a whole gets the overriding effect, the cumulative effect.

There comes a point where most citizens, except the most blinkered, come to see that the government is weak and easily bent, that some people have benefited from their party allegiance while others, who may be from the same party, got nothing at all.

Maybe we have come to this point; maybe we are almost there.

The government, like the preceding Muscat administration, is getting tainted, seen by Maltese and by foreigners as well as being a byword for corruption both big and small. This government battled to extricate Malta’s name from the FATF’s so-called ‘grey list’ and managed to do so, but the scandals kept coming, and others were added.

The overriding effect, the cumulative effect, is just the same. We may be back to square one.

Malta must undertake to get back on the virtuous road, and the only sure way of doing so maybe is not by tackling the whole country as a whole but by beginning to clean it up sector by sector, and choosing leaders or managers that will not succumb to pressure and then back them up when they come under pressure. Tackling the whole country as a whole, experience teaches us, can be counterproductive.

Tackling corruption is not easy, but it can be done, and it has been done, at least in other countries. However, it requires approval and support from the very top, and we, or I at any rate, cannot say we have noticed.