Musical mayors in Lilliputian disputes
Thank God the newspapers seem to have moved on from Fairylightsgate and the deputy mayor of Sliema. When somebody asked about my view of the case, my response was that it depresses me to think that I live in a country where a problem with the deputy mayor – not even the mayor – of one of 68 local councils monopolises the national news for weeks.
It’s so small-minded that I can’t even bring myself to talk about it.
Things this petty should be dealt with only with a sense of humour. Gravitas should be saved for grave situations. If the deputy mayor of Sliema, petty corruption and a failed attempt at forced resignation are the most serious problems we have to contend with, then truly, God bless Malta for it is paradise.
I’ve never been a big fan of local councils anyway, and I don’t vote in local elections. I thought from day one that they would serve only to encourage our predisposition towards petty scheming, small-mindedness and corruption, and I haven’t changed my opinion since but only had it reinforced.
The idea behind them seemed to be that devolution of power would reduce the scope for corruption, but really, any fool should have been able to see that it widens it by putting decision-making powers into the hands of more people who are less open to public scrutiny.
But anyway, they are there now and we have to make the best of a bad job. I keep asking for information on how local councils have improved our lives rather than sucking up millions of euros in terms of running expenditure and the hefty cost of elections, and all I get is ridiculous answers about traffic, parking, skips and rubbish collection.
And I am sure it is just as horrible and demeaning to have to petition your local councillor for rights that get treated as favours as it was when you had to petition your local MP or go directly to a government stooge.
It makes me want to lie down and weep. What sort of place is this if the rubbish collection of what amounts to a town of 450,000 people can’t be centralised?
But let’s leave that. We love the idea that we can organise ourselves on the scale of a country with a population of 20 million and do so even if we don’t have to.
At first, the petty disputes in local councils were entertaining. Now they are just demoralising. You either get hoovered up into it and end up thinking just as pettily as the rest (Oh my God! My mind is shrinking!) or you despair at having to make your life in this sort of environment – i.e. where a mayor has to resign and finds himself facing criminal prosecution because his daughter used his council laptop, which was sitting on his desk at home, to check Facebook. Sad, pathetic and shameful – and I mean the police action.
Now we have more ridiculous behaviour in Gzira, where the deputy mayor has been forced by his party to resign because of criminal charges he hid when accepted as a Labour candidate. But the mayor, with whom he has quarrelled – leading to the exposure of his criminal case – sees no need to resign even though he is defence lawyer to the members of a gang which mugged people in Gzira some months ago, and on whom he, in his role as mayor, promised to clamp down.
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Three words: vera qeghdin sew.
We desperately need tabloids but they will not succeed as they’d have to compete with the venerable established press… The local newspapers are only filled with opinion, passive, sort of factual reporting of events and gossip. We don’t have journalists but hacks…
Been thinking long and hard on this. The only way we can get out of this impasse is if the government strengthens reporting laws and covers blogs and citizen journalism. Concerned citizens who are knowledgable about specific subjects have a big hurdle of entrenched interests to get read. We need to copy Iceland and Norway not Italy, the UK or the US in this regard. I don’t have high hopes though.
If we’re more interested in censoring adults from watching a play what do we do to the real news?
In the US the big reputable newspapers have been scaling down their bureaus heavily with the result that important federal agencies issue detailed reports on their work and there’s nobody to read it or if there is it’s a journalist juggling many other things and lacks the experience to understand it. Newspapers are resorting to sensational journalism to cover their lack of insights on the subject at hand and have been doing so for a decade at least.
At this point you get better news on specific subjects by reading trade blogs and professional journalists who self-publish or wait for the occasional exposé on how the media missed the boat yet again…
Regarding local councils I understand your point but your experience is not the same as 90% of the local population. You have interests, access and contacts that are much wider than the shores of Malta, let alone a fraction of an already small nation…
Local councils are very important to the people who live daily in the locality and use the services there. I think the balance struck is about right but I’m no expert in this, it just feels right to me.
A cogent comment, Mr. Borg. Your fifth paragraph aptly points out why we follow Daphne’s blog and articles. A professional journalist who pulls no punches and tells it like it is.
The issue with the laptop is ridiculous. However I do not think there is anything ridiculous about the Sliema mayor incident. A mayor asks for his cut, admits asking for bribes, proceeds to deny the charges and accuses the police of criminal behavior. I think it is all one big mess and far from being a petty incident.
[Daphne – I’m sorry if you thought I dismissed the actual corruption as petty. It’s the media coverage that’s petty: blowing the matter totally out of proportion. We’re talking about a deputy mayor of a town of a few thousand people asking for commission on – was it fairylights? Now if he were a minister taking a cut from a state tender, then I would understand the wall-to-wall red lights and screaming, but honestly…]
Also, these incidents are showing us black on white the mindset of many politicians. Local councils are used as launching platforms for those who want to make it into national politics. How can someone who cannot even be trusted handling small local projects be trusted to decide on larger national issues?
[Daphne – That’s precisely why the Nationalist Party kicked him out and insisted he resign his post. But what was the reaction? Malta Today defends him so passionately that for a moment there I thought he must be related to the man married to Saviour Balzan’s sister, Mariella Dimech, but he’s not his brother, no. And as for one of my whining fellow columnists, this was her reaction: “If they will do this to one of their own, what will they do to others?” Unbelievable. Imagine that: defending the corrupt to attack the government and the PN.]
I cannot agree with you more and share your despair. What are we doing with 68 councils in a country of a few square metres.
What could they possibly be doing all day long once the rubbish skips have been firmly put in place? What gets my goat is the pretentious drivel that spouts forth in the occasional mayoral interview.
It’s about time they are hacked down to not more than 10 and made subject to public scrutiny.
Local councils seem to proove the Dunning Krueger effect (link posted in an earlier blog by another contributor).
The local government experiment in Malta has been an outright failure. The whole of London with millions of residents has only one mayor. Malta with a population of less than half a million has a central government as well as an abundance of local governments and mayors. It is time to scrap the local councils – they are simply a waste of time and space.
For me, the issue is that when local government was established almost 20 years ago, the number of MPs remained, and has remained 65. This in a country of some 410,000 people. Malta does not need 65 MPs in addition to 68 councils providing local government.
I’m all for devolution and local councils (within reason). A smaller parliament means that debates on legislation will not be conducted properly. Do you have any suggestion?
I agree though that ministries should be few and very well chosen.
Fair enough, but this is a case where quantity – not just in numbers, but in individual output – has not necessarily produced quality.
If you had to look back over the past 50 years or so, how many MPs of quality can you recall compared to those who are purely party people with their interest mainly restricted to what goes on in their electoral district or who are just plain deadwood?
Debates are conducted along party lines. Joining in may be a good way of scoring points for the MP in question but it does not add another dimension to the debate.
Policy is not driven by MPs but by the top party people and gurus operating in the shadows. The technicalities can be handled very well, indeed probably better, if left in the hands of capable civil servants.
Also, Malta enjoys a free press and people are free to express their opinion. If anything we tend to debate things to death, whether it’s in newspapers, the electronic media or on Xarabank. I’m all for a smaller parliament and my view is that government at the national level should only be seen and felt in moments of real crisis.
Daphne,if you are referring to Nikki Dimech he was actually a mayor and not deputy.
Regarding the local councils,then I totally agree ,and I further comment that they are ridiculous and the government should scrap this whole idea.
A case in point is the village that I live in. We have bad roads and the council blames the government, while the government blames the council.
At the end of the day as citizens we need service; whether it is from A or B we do not give a hoot. If you had to quantify the service and works against the thousands of euros they receive, I think we have another Malta Drydocks to contend with.
The council office is only there to receive fees for getting an open skip or truck etc. or to report a faulty street light, which could and should be handled directly by Enemalta.
I’d like to add my voice to those of the anti local council partisans. I always thought local councils were a very expensive joke. In a backward country like Malta, we all knew they’d be the perfect vehicle for self-aggrandising village bullies.
First came the frenzy of “pavimentar” and old grannies breaking their ankles on the Giant’s Causeway. Then came the flurry of “Gieh Haz-Zghir” awards and 1: 1.3 scale bronze busts. Then came the Age of Aquarius and waste separation bins.
Now that every possible square inch of every village has been paved over, painted, embellished, whitewashed and had a plaque screwed over it, the sleaze and corruption that’s been there all along is finally coming to light.
So is this the end of local councils? Is it f….
Come spring we’ll have Edward Scicluna giving us the fractal dimension of the third-order Chi-square second derivative of Haz-Zghir’s electoral results. Oh sorry, he’s an MEP now, and above all this.
Baxxter, it seems that it is now the time for a wave of fairylights, perhaps to illuminate all those colourful pavements.
And maybe it is now time to start reaping the benefits of all that investment in embellishment, in the form of a “commission.”
As for Prof. Scicluna, your prediction about the spring will probably come true.
Do not forget that since becoming an MEP, he has still found the time to work out the national cost of a power failure on Good Friday. He must have done some “to the power of Hal-Kbir” in that computation.
The reporting of the Sliema issue was very telling. I understand that MT, MLP media and the desperate columnists will clutch at any straw as long as it can be used against Gonzi, even if they defend a corrupt mayor.
What surprised me (or rather shocked me) was the way The Times defended the ex-mayor, calling Nikki Dimech ” a successful young auditor” and “an unlikely hero with a conspiracy theory”. I understand that The Times needs to compete with Malta Today by jumping on the anti PN bandwagon, but that doesn’t mean that whatever journalistic ethics they ever had need to be thrown out of the window.
As a fellow auditor, I am not too keen on sharing my profession with the ex mayor. Actually, it’s quite embarrassing. I wonder whether the Malta Institute of Accountants kept him on as a member after this incident. Which lending institution would ever give any weight / credibility to a prospective borrower’s set of financial statements signed by this auditor?
Daphne, he wasn’t a deputy mayor but a mayor. I know it doesn’t make that much of a difference with regards to the crime, however, we need to have correct details. You were emphasising the fact that he was not a mayor but a vice mayor.