Welcome to the bullshit factory…

The same Muscat who now gives Armier boathouse owners a 30-day deadline to regularise their position has simply ignored the fact that his own party has likewise failed to regularise its position in four times the same timeframe, over an identical theft that has been occurring consistently for years.

'By what authority, exactly, does the Prime Minister lay down precise payment schemes for defaulting citizens – in this case, an entire community – to settle their electricity bills?'
'By what authority, exactly, does the Prime Minister lay down precise payment schemes for defaulting citizens – in this case, an entire community – to settle their electricity bills?'

Never mind ‘cancer factories’. If there is a single institution that is polluting our atmosphere with an endless pall of noxious fumes – I believe the technical term for this particular emission is “bullshit” – it is not the Delimara power station, but the current political establishment.

And it seems the two parties have suddenly gone into bullshit emission overdrive. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat this week warned of a clampdown on electricity theft by illegal boathouse owners in Armier; and not to be outdone for bald hypocrisy, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil now accuses Muscat of creating a ‘cancer factory’ in the form of endless traffic congestion as far as the eye can see.

Let’s take them one by one, starting with Muscat’s sudden concern about late payments on electricity bills.

“It is unacceptable,” he said, “that boathouse owners have not paid for electricity for years without anybody doing anything about it." So he gave tenants a one-month deadline to regularise their position, after which there will be “a clampdown on theft”.

OK, for the sake of this article I will bleep over the minor anomalies in the above statement. Such as: by what authority, exactly, does the Prime Minister lay down precise payment schemes for defaulting citizens – in this case, an entire community – to settle their electricity bills? As far as I am aware that is the sole prerogative of ARMS Ltd, a privately operated debt collecting agency for Enemalta. And last I looked, the Prime Minister had absolutely no business to be dictating to ARMS the terms and conditions whereby it should pursue certain debts but ignore others.

Ah, there’s the rub. Ignore others. For the truly astonishing thing about Muscat’s statement is its sheer cheek. It was only last June that this newspaper revealed how Muscat’s own Labour Party owed at least €600,000 in unpaid electricity bills. Did Muscat ever describe this shocking fact as “theft”? Did he give his own party one month to settle those bills, or face a ‘clampdown’?

Erm… not quite. The same Muscat who now gives Armier boathouse owners a 30-day deadline to regularise their position – without any apparent legal authority to do anything of the kind – has simply ignored the fact that his own party has likewise failed to regularise its position in four times the same timeframe, over an identical theft that has been occurring consistently for years. But of course he insists that everyone else is to pay up bills on time, or face ‘consequences’.

And it’s not just Armier, by the way. Some of you may have followed the case of Ray Schembri, the meat importer who recently absconded, leaving an alleged debt trail of up to €40 million in his wake. Well, this is from one of the many press reports about the case:

“The supermarket formerly owned by Ryan Schembri, More Supermarket at Daniel’s Shopping complex in Hamrun, this morning remained closed, as Enemalta Corporation yesterday cut off the power supply due to pending bills… Sources said that the corporation demanded an immediate payment of some €50,000, to cover the arrears in utility bills.”

Interesting, n’est pas? So a commercial company which cannot pay €50,000 in arrears gets its electricity supply cut off (not to mention criminal proceedings in court, etc.); but when a political party owes TWELVE TIMES that amount… not only does that party continue to enjoy an unrestricted supply of energy… but it even gets to hold meetings with ARMS Ltd, held behind closed doors, to try and work out an amicable solution.

And the best part of it is that everybody has simply accepted this blatant institutionalisation of fraud. Certainly, nobody has ever ‘done anything about it’ (to quote Muscat once more). It is as though the entire country has resigned itself permanently to a situation whereby 1% of its population has placed itself beyond, above and outside the law… the same law it has no qualms whatsoever about enacting in full force to the rest of us lesser mortals. We have become so inured to blatant hypocrisy and double standards that it no longer even remotely surprises when these hypocrites have the temerity to endlessly accuse others of crimes they themselves have been committing (and getting away with) for years.

Over to the other side of the House now; and the most that can be said for the PN at this stage is that it (wisely) resisted the temptation to comment on the above case. It has its own reasons to keep quiet, of course. Where Labour owes €600,000, the PN has racked up an unpaid water and electricity bill of a staggering €1.9 million. So for once, Busuttil had no option but to keep his trap firmly shut.

But does this mean the bullshit stopped pouring out of the Stamperija in Pieta’? Hardly. The latest to emerge from this bullshit factory is that Muscat is somehow directly responsible for the current, intolerable traffic situation.

“The real cancer factory is not the BWSC plant that Joseph Muscat spoke of, but in reality, it is the growing congestion of traffic. The government is creating a cancer factory as it is allowing drivers to suffer from the poisonous fuel and emissions,” Busuttil said.

Ah yes, of course. Because the traffic situation that is poisoning us all has only just sprung into existence in the last 22 months. Before that, Malta’s roads were entirely free from congestion. But no sooner does the Labour Party win an election, then hey presto! Suddenly there are miles upon miles of traffic jams as far as the eye can see…

Hm. Evidently, Simon Busuttil needs to be reminded of a few small details. There are after all very obvious factors that go into such phenomena as traffic congestion. One factor concerns the number of licensed cars on the road: which in this country increases year in, year out, in step with a growing population. Another is the road network itself, which determines (and in many cases restricts) the flow of traffic. Yet another factor concerns the availability of decent public transport alternatives to encourage people not to use their cars.

And guess what? On all fronts, today’s unmanageable traffic situation can be seen to arise directly out of the flawed policies and spectacular failures by the Nationalist administrations over the past 25 years… of which Busuttil himself has been an active member since at least 2005.

I’ll bleep over the importation of cars factor, because as an EU member state it would be blatantly illegal to impose restrictions on private sector imports. (Even without this consideration, it would be at best undesirable for Maltese governments to start imposing communist-era trade restrictions). But in terms of managing the traffic infrastructure, the PN’s efforts over the years have been execrable.

Malta’s explosion in licensed vehicles began in the very late 1980s under Eddie Fenech Adami, who regularly cited car ownership statistics as an indicator of economic well-being. The incoming PN government therefore encouraged car ownership to buttress its own vision of a ‘modern’ country; and so successful was this ploy that by the mid-1990s, the same Nationalist government had to commission German experts to cope with the problem it had created.

Their advice was to narrow roads wherever possible, and to introduce a strict system of single-lane traffic routes that automatically clogged up arterial thoroughfares… thus producing an even greater traffic congestion problem than the one they had set out to solve.

We all drive through the results of these endeavours several times a week. The Rabat road as it leaves Attard remains the most glaring example: a previously wide thoroughfare was throttled by the introduction of ‘centre-strips’ and ‘roundabouts’ that could easily accommodate a medium-sized village. Other equally arterial roads such as the Naxxar bypass were similarly re-dimensioned to restrict traffic to a single-lane, snail-paced queue. 

If we were talking about blood flow through a human artery, the result would be an immediate heart attack or aneurysm. We are however talking about the flow of traffic… and oh look, the consequences are practically the same.

This brings us to public transport, and we all remember the results of the PN’s efforts in 2011. Mayhem and confusion that took around two years to be slowly brought under some form of control. Buses the size of a Brontosaurus that couldn’t actually turn corners without getting stuck and causing never-ending traffic jams in all directions. And all along, a growing cloud of noxious fumes and exhaust emissions that steadily enshrouded the entire country: contributing to our proud record of the country with the highest rate of respiratory disease in Europe.

Busuttil has either forgotten all this, or was too busy spouting bullshit in Brussels to even realise that if there is one entity that is in any way responsible for Malta’s cancer-inducing traffic insanity, that is the Nationalist Party he himself now leads.

So of course, he blames Joseph Muscat for failing, in two and a half years, to solve a problem that his own former government took a quarter of a century to create.

On one thing, however, Busuttil is right. There is very clearly a cancer factory in our midst: an institution that poisons the very air we breathe with an incessant expectoration of unbelievably hypocritical tripe. I’ll leave you to guess for yourselves where the real cancer threat lies...