Nothing but the truth

The decision taken by the three Opposition MPs that are members of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee (PAC) to formally request a police perjury investigation after Keith Schembri’s PAC testimony in the last PAC meeting is a clever move.

The contradictions in the sworn testimony given by Edward Scicluna, Keith Schembri, and Silvio Valletta are too blatant to be acceptable in a country that is trying to come to terms with its not-so-distant past.

The Nationalist Party has asked the police to investigate a former minister, a former chief of staff, and a former police assistant commissioner over alleged perjury.

The issue is alleged false testimony before the PAC and the public inquiry into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia about the contract awarded to Electrogas for the gas power station.

Witnesses blatantly contradicting each other when giving evidence on something they were involved in cannot be acceptable in any democracy. For these witnesses to have held high influential responsibilities about which some must be now lying through their teeth is even worse.

The request was made following testimony before the PAC on Tuesday by Schembri, who accused Scicluna and Valletta of false testimony. The PN said that on the basis of the evidence given, somebody from among Scicluna, Valletta, and Schembri had not told the truth.

Schembri rubbished claims made by Scicluna before the inquiry. Scicluna had even told the inquiry that the big decisions by the government were taken by an inner circle that operated outside the confines of Cabinet. Schembri said that as finance minister, Scicluna would have been involved in major decisions.

Schembri also denied intervening to stop the police questioning Electrogas chief Yorgen Fenech in 2018 on the secret company 17 Black. Silvio Valletta had told the public inquiry that Schembri had rung him up to call off the questioning, alleging that Schembri had asked him: “Are you going to question someone on the basis of an article in The Times?”

Schembri even told the PAC that lots of lies were told during the public inquiry. The need for the whole truth to be known is a must if the country is to regain some level of moral standards in the way it is governed.

Unfortunately, the more time passes, the more it is becoming evident that the current administration cannot expect to be considered completely cut off from this dark episode of our political history.

The people have a right to know the full truth and the current administration cannot shrug its shoulders and act as if it has nothing to do with what happened. The people running the government today might not be directly responsible for this dark episode in our political history, but it cannot act as if it is not also not responsible for the search for the truth.   

Robert Abela’s administration cannot have the cake and eat it. It is either in favour of uncovering the truth or in favour of hiding it. It cannot act as if the truth is irrelevant, when the country’s only road back to normalcy is to acknowledge the hard facts – the truth, horrible as it might be.                             

I have no doubt that those responsible of the obscenities that occurred under Joseph Muscat’s two administrations were a small cabal of closely-knit ‘friends’. Some others were duped into making the impossible apparently possible.

Someone set up the illusion that everything was above board when it was obvious that it was not. People who are duped do not normally accept this to be a fact after the event, because that would mean they are victims of deception – men who were simply the dupes of their unscrupulous leaders.

They do not want to admit they were duped by their own colleagues:  it is a matter of pride. But they should swallow the truth – hard as it is from a personal point of view – and admit that they were duped, rather than attempting to prove their innocence by alleging that everything was done behind their back. Before they and the current Labour leadership accept the hard truth, all that the country is going to get is contradictions with people trying to refuse facing the truth and own up to their responsibility. The healing process cannot start in these circumstances.

Quenching India’s thirst               

India has overtaken China in population terms and is now home to the biggest population in the world.

Demographers are divided on whether it has happened already: the birth that tips India into being the most populated country in the world. With around 70,000 babies born every day in India and 50,000 in China, the South Asian nation is set to take the lead at some point this month, becoming home to more than 1.41 billion people.

All the details that make up a life get flattened out on a demographer’s curve. At a national level there are these hard certainties: India is bearing the brunt of a climate crisis that its population has not historically caused. Their children are entitled to a share of the carbon budget that cannot burn without blowing the Earth off a safe course for all its inhabitants.

In the short term, India’s population growth means more young people. A UN Population Fund survey in 2020 found that 25% of people in India are aged 14 and under, with 68% in the 15-64 bracket. That means more jobs, more development, more growth – and almost certainly more consumption, fuelling even more emissions.

More than 44 million people are still living in extreme poverty, and the country has a huge malnutrition problem. Development is desperately needed in parts of India but what is even more needed is that fine balance between providing enough energy, enough infrastructure for people to have a decent quality of life and checking overconsumption.

Many Indian states face acute water shortages, as demand increases and rainfall becomes more erratic and rainwater harvesting is now mandatory for new buildings in a lot of cities.

Chennai, which veers between flooding and drought, ran out of water in 2019. Now it is leading on water saving practices, becoming the first Indian city to recycle wastewater at a scale to satisfy the non-drinking needs of its industries.