Sixteen Years Today

The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

Sixteen years ago today Dr Eddie Fenech Adami was elected Prime Minister for the first time at his second asking after 10 years as leader of the Nationalist Party.

What judgement are we to make of his domination of the Maltese political scene ever since culminating in the election victory of last month securing for his party an unprecedented nearly uninterrupted 20 years in government?

Based on electoral results such a judgement cannot be anything but positive. Having comfortably won four of the last five elections there should be no doubt about his ability to understand the mood of the electorate and to unite his party behind a mission that could guarantee majority support for his policies where it mattered i.e. at the polls.

So if a politician’s success is to be measured solely by electoral victories than there is no doubt that Dr Fenech Adami has not only surpassed all expectations but he has set records which successors from whatever political party will find hard to match let alone beat.

“My judgement of the man is that he is a great party political strategist but comes in much shorter at the statesman level.”

But without detracting his merits I would argue that in the long term the success of a political leader cannot be judged only through the criterion of electoral successes, but by adoption of a wider perspective of real, lasting, sustainable, positive changes that he brings about.

And it is in the adoption of this wider perspective that Dr Fenech Adami successful 16 year term gets blemished by less impressive achievements.

My judgement of the man is that he is a great party political strategist but comes in much shorter at the statesman level. Because 16 years of his administration has left the country far far behind of where competitor benchmark countries like Cyprus and Singapore stand today considering that sixteen years ago they were on par with us or outrightly behind us.

Sixteen years of his administration has given the country a false sense of prosperity and well-being built on very shaky foundations that future generations will struggle to maintain as they will have to make good for past excesses. These can best be signified in the three major structural problems which will come to face us with daunting if not horrifying stark reality.

Firstly we have the fiscal deficit problem. We still await publication of the December 2002 figures. November 2002 figures showed that in spite of Lm21 million cosmetic exercise related to MIA privatisation we were Lm30 million off the mark as at end November. Stories about attempts being made to shift expenditure from year to year to hide the extent of the deficit have been made and never convincingly refuted.

“Dr Fenech Adami’s recent electoral success is totally due to Labour’s unwise decision for the EU issue to be decided through an election not through a referendum.”

Be what it may such problems cannot be solved by cosmetics or creative accounting but by sustainable economic growth and serious expenditure controls.

The environmental faults we have developed are seriously threatening sustainability of economic growth and our quality of life. Waste mismanagement, air and sea pollution, uncontrolled urban sprawl and horrific road and transport problems are a distasteful legacy of an imbalanced administration where short term party political priorities were given precedence over the real national interest.

Lastly the unfunded pension liabilities which have been allowed to accumulate whilst taking political advantage from short-term over-consumption which fuelled and extended the pension problem, is becoming a reality that can no longer be postponed.

I have a theory that Dr Fenech Adami’s recent electoral success is totally due to Labour’s unwise decision for the EU issue to be decided through an election not through a referendum. This has placed Dr Fenech Adami in the strange situation where the more he was criticised on the domestic front, the more his re-election prospects improved through the support of the many who thought that the country can no longer do without the externally imposed discipline of EU membership.

This is fine for Fenech Adami as a party leader. But not so fine for a statesman who should have delivered the country in a good state to decide on EU membership on its merits and not through default because of the imbalances his laissez-fair style allowed to materialise.