Scraping the bottom of the barrel

The Malta Independent

Scraping the bottom of the barrel As the mini-electoral campaign related to the March local elections intensifies, government`s shaky handling of the business of governing is falling to all-time lows as it desperately reaches out for the make-up bag to avoid embarrassment. This was nowhere more evident than in Zebbug last week. The Zebbug mayorship is always closely contested. So the PN is using every trick in the book to de-stabilise Labour in the locality. The withdrawal of Doreen Attard Montaldo for technical reasons brought to the surface by the PN, in eagerness to win points on the table rather than in the field, has deprived Labour of one of its vote-pullers. The farcical show put on by PN activists at a local council press conference is indicative of the gutter level that politics has fallen into. A project much needed by the locals to avoid rain water stagnation in some of the busiest village streets (I should know as I lived there until 1998) is being jeopardised through obstructionism. The Ministry of Justice (also responsible for local councils) has invoked the Auditor General to check whether the contract award was all in good order. A good practice by all means but, if the ministry means to stay above politics and not become a PN mouthpiece, this should have been done after the local elections. Otherwise this has all the makings of a fabrication in the time-honoured tradition of the Lay Lay scandal, skilfully fabricated prior to the 1998 general elections. It is unbelievable. A government that sells Mid-Med Bank at half price to the first offer through direct negotiations without a bidding process, involving a loss of some Lm50 million liri, has the audacity to throw the book at a Labour-led local council at the instigation of the PN general secretary. And this on the eve of a local election regarding a badly needed water flow project involving just over Lm100,000. That this was done during these very days when government has signed away for peanuts and posterity effective control of the monopoly postal service, again without a call for transparent bidding, emphatically states that the government is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Who will be invoking the Auditor General to investigate the Mid-Med and Maltapost multi-million deals` Or is it just convenience that Labour deeds are sent for investigation by the Auditor General whereas the PN prefers to investigate their own mess-ups through the government controlled PAC` All this has a purpose. It helps to keep attention deflected from the aggravating economic situation, as was further confirmed in the CBM quarterly for December 2001. Firstly why is the December quarterly published in mid-February` Maybe to keep the bad news away from the Christmas cheer` And there is plenty of bad news. Just note these: business perceptions have been negative for four consecutive quarters and pessimism is gathering momentum; the economy has contracted for two consecutive quarters and year on year inflation is up to 4.3 per cent. The result is that the Real Effective Exchange Rate for the Maltese lira is 10per cent more than in 1995, meaning that we are that much less competitive on international markets because of our rate of exchange policy and the high relative domestic inflation. But take consolation. The Minister of Finance assures that devaluation of the lira is not on the cards and the Minister for Economic Services assures that we are not in a recession.