Opinion • 07 September 2003

Exhume the past but do not forget the present

Saviour Balzan promises head banging in an attempt to uproot all that was bad, very bad, in the Mintoff years, but not at the expense of forgetting what is happening now

Often, I bump into people and they ask me.
Why are you hooked to the past?
Not that it really bothers them, when I exhume skeletons from yesteryear.
There is this great feeling about things from the past.
My answer to all their genuine concern is that we have not quite settled with the past.
The BICAL story we carry in today’s newspaper is perhaps symptomatic of Maltese culture. Reading the 1972 back issues of The Times of Malta, a cold shiver travels down my spine.
Not only because of the content of the reports, but more so because of the way events were reported.
Little do we realise how close we were to the type of reporting that is best described as notice board reportage.
The articles about BICAL bring to the fore two sides of the coin. The platitude of the press in the face of Mintoffian abuse and autocracy - a word that I had recently censored by The Sunday Times – when I referred to Dom Mintoff; and the endearing soft glove approach to Nationalist networking.
These two half measures have contributed to making our assessment of history a very limited one.
Thirty odd years later, the ramifications of the BICAL scandal are surfacing. They were around before, but very few elements in the press were willing to carry it.
Why?
Just in the same way, a magistrate is allowed to get away with an unacceptable comment about rape, in very much the same way as a scandal from the past is left unburied and unsettled.
This newspaper is often accused of being sensational. It may appear to be so because the OTHERS are so meek.
The past has haunted us for far too long. In the sixties we had the corruption scandals involving Nationalist politicians. Most of those scandals linked to building development and preferential treatment have long been forgotten.
Many have been led to believe that the only baddies are the ones who voted Labour. Hogwash!
Yes, with the seventies and eighties we had the long tortuous years of Mintoffianism. A throw back to Nasserism and ego mania.
And here too, we continued to believe that the fault did not lie with Mintoff but with his acolytes.
That untruth must be dismantled and the real truth reconstructed to prove how this intolerant politician perpetrated a culture that was nepotistic and egocentric.
The current political period is not without commentary. Here too, we continue to experience a scenario where the networking system is central to the political agenda, where meritocracy is absent from the political glossaries and replaced with blue eyed boys.
The Nationalist did not take long to impose such a way of thinking.
I remember that in 1992, the board of Enemalta and Freeport looked like MZPN and Radio 101 social clubs. Young twenty-year-olds were supposed to provide their commercial experience for the establishment of an energy policy or transhipment strategy.
The same repeat performance of blue eyed boy treatment can be said for commercial contracts, retainers and legal contracts. Ok, there will be denials, but come on, we all have eyes and ears.
We will talk about the past and try our damnest to get to know who the real culprits were but not at the expense of tolerating a present system that does little to relegate favouritism to Serie B.