Guess who was responsible for all those nights spent filling jerry cans and days spent chasing the water bowser?
Karmenu Vella and Dom Mintoff work out how best to put water in Sliema's taps
That’s right: Karmenu Vella.
The Labour Party is busy rewriting history and taking all its ‘bad PR’ videos (you know, the ones showing crowds waving ‘torca’ scarves and so on) off YouTube and wherever else it can get to on the internet.
Meanwhile, The Times asks in one of its leading articles whether anyone still cares about these people’s pasts. Odd then, that some of the best stories are to be found in its own online newspaper archive.
Like the report dated 2 February 1982 which told us that Works and Water Minister Karmenu Vella had signed an agreement for the purchase of two reverse osmosis plants. No BWSC scandal or corruption on commission there, I take it. Too bad Malta Today wasn’t around, eh?
And then, on 22 December of that same year – a full 11 months later – a totally lame leading article hoping that the situation will improve when those reverse osmosis plants “come into operation in a few months’ time”.
In the summer of 1986, four and a half years after Karmenu Vella the Water Minister bought those reverse osmosis plants, people in Sliema were still ‘showering’ using watering-cans and well-water and flushing their lavatories with buckets of sea-water which they hauled up from the beach.
I know because I was one of them.
According to Mr Karmenu Vella, Minister of Works and Minister responsible for the islands’ water supply, the shortcomings and the hardships, which the Maltese people have been called upon to endure over the years, will be over and done with once the two reverse osmosis pants, being built, come into operation in a few months’ time. The catchment of rainwater and the production from the reverse osmosis plants, the Minister said, will cause supply to exceed demand for the first time and the distillers will be closed down.
Mr Vella spoke in glowing terms of the present Administration’s efforts at improving the water supply situation and, if things go the way the Minister said, it would be well-deserved praise.
– Leading article, The Times, 22 December 1982
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Must have been fear….must have been….there’s no other explanation for it.
The strange thing is that these reverse osmosis plants are still in operation almost 30 years later! We still rely on outdated technology even though we have had a PN government for almost 25 years. And before you start lambasting me, I have to say that my father has a recurrent back problem from ferrying water in jerry cans up our flights of stairs from those days in the 1980’s.
[Daphne – I won’t say anything because it’s so nice to see somebody spell lambast without an end tacked on to the end, like Malta Today prefers to have it. Lambaste: you know, like it’s a new way of pouring the juices over your roast, using a lam.]
@Gerald Fenech,
Please explain how reverse osmosis is ‘outdated technology’. To the best of my knowledge there does not yet exist a better alternative that has actually been successfully put into use.
We could of course try our luck with one of the newer leading edge experimental technologies and maybe say a prayer or two to make it work, but then look at what flak Enemalta received going for a power station of which just a small part can be considered new and untested technology.
I believe lambast is the correct spelling. And I don’t work for Malta Today anymore.
[Daphne – That’s exactly what I said, Gerald: that lambast is the correct spelling, unlike the LAMBASTE which Malta Today seems to prefer.]
lambaste is the US English version of the word. Maybe they have their keyboards set to US :)
One of the recurring offences of the ‘golden age’ of Labour was the ghastly clothes. Those boxes unloaded at the Tunny Net in the golden years didn’t contain anything from the world’s fashion capitals, that’s for sure.
That jacket Karmenu Vella is wearing looks like one of the gifts the Libyan government used to donate to the Mintoff regime in the Golden Years. Mintoff himself was recently photographed wearing something similar when he paid a visit to the Dear Leader at the Centru Nazzjonali.
Right now, Karmenu Vella must be really confused about the chapter in the Electoral Programme 2013 entitled “Divorce.”
[Daphne – Maybe he’ll ring his ex-driver’s daughter and see what she thinks.]