Price of incompetence: 400 million and counting
A mother or a father of a family will plan ahead. They will try to anticipate the children’s needs next summer, from clothing to educational support.
Most will also start charting the road for their offspring to start a trade, a career or a profession. Same does the entrepreneur. Most, right now, are trying to anticipate life after immunity, planning finance and investments accordingly.
That ‘sagesse’, or ‘għaqal’ as we call it in Maltese, is the level of dedication we expect from our leaders too. It is up to our government to plan for Malta’s needs and to be able to grasp opportunities on the horizon as they approach. For if the elected fail to see the bigger picture, who should do that?
Yet, time and time again we come to cross rivers of troubled water we should have seen coming. Clear case in point is the missed €400 million of EU funding for the gas pipeline. The labour ‘ dream team’ was wise enough to plan everything about that well ahead of time. They opened the Panama companies and the Dubai ones and they had discussed the minute details of the deal and the prices with private undertakings with no clue of the energy sector well ahead of them being in power. Once in power, they deployed forthwith. What efficiency, what zeal, to honour ‘ the deal’. The only thing they forgot to plan for was EU funding.
For while the minister refuses to publish the letter explaining Brussel’s refusal to foot the bill for the gas pipeline, insiders have very clear pointers to the reason for refusal. Let’s put it this way. What are your chances of getting something when you apply late with confused justifications and serious allegations of corruption on all your dealings on a given project?
They did apply very late for EU funding, and they lobbied late or not at all to see it through. Certainly there were good reasons for that, right? You can understand how annoying it must be for our kind of ministers to reveal all of their plans to Brussels in time for funding. Maybe that is indeed a pointer to the failed bid. For while you can manage to keep all your aces covered with the Maltese public, it is certainly not so with the Brussels machinery.
The missed €400 million in EU funding are hence not an accident. They are the price of incompetence with possibly a pinch load of corruption, spread over time, paid in lump with interest. The missed funding goes to show the fragility of labour’s promises when, in the midst of the last two general elections, they promised everyone in the Birzebbugia, Qajjenza and Marsaxlokk area that that steel behemoth in the middle of the bay was a ‘temporary thing’, that will be rid of soon as they were ‘working’ on EU funding for a permanent pipeline.
But unlike that wise mother of the family, they were not planning ahead, at least when it comes to the EU. They fail to see, time and again, that with EU funding and with virtually anything EU related, their method of instant super one propaganda has no effect at all. There’s not much you can do when you come three years late and European funding priorities are shifting towards other areas. Is there? Well, the said priorities were decided in a Commission where we have a Maltese representative and then presented to a Council of Ministers where we have a permanent Minister, not to say the 6 MEPs that we have sitting in Brussels, including 4 labour ‘heavyweight’ MEPs.
Did any part of this machinery try to secure a little asterisk or footnote in the EU’s energy plans to foresee gas provision for isolated territories? I do have my answer to that, but maybe we should ask the minister to see if she can cite ‘sensitive commercial reasons’ for that.
I have my reasons to believe that there is a way to secure EU funding for a permanent gas pipeline, but I will return to that matter later. For now, I just hope that this massive blunder of government opens its perspective to the need to anticipate (and not run with delay) EU paths for other investments in the near future.
What I have seen these past weeks does not reassure me at all. In a launch of a Digital Strategy intended to make Malta a world centre for innovation, Minister Silvio Schembri, of Blockchain Island fame missed any mention of the mammoth drive of EU funding for the digital transition. The €9 billion EU funds for robotics, AI and internet of things simply did not feature in the minister’s view of the world. You can understand that his speech is cut out for that 3 minutes of PBS fame, which is followed through obligingly and without questions. But still, if it’s nowhere in the minister’s speech, I guess it will not be anywhere in the 7 year programming that the Government should now be finalising to tap into the Brussels manna. Another ‘temporary’ tanker in sight…?