The economy and the person

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat may have been too busy tweeting about boċċi or suffering from jet lag following his visit to Australia to notice a story appearing in the local media that shocked many people of goodwill. Otherwise he would have refrained from making such a sweeping comment about poverty during his latest Sunday sermon. What Joseph Muscat said – and we are quoting from a press release issued by the Labour Party media machine – was that “it is good news that the economy is growing and we have a (budgetary) surplus. But nothing compares with the best news of all, that poverty is on the decline.”

Muscat said this a few days after a story in the mainstream media in which it was reported that children are going to school without lunch, with teachers ending up having to feed them. It was reported that teachers are keeping extra food in their drawers to give to students who turn up

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with nothing, while some students are being seen sharing their lunch with their friends. It was said that teachers were buying food specifically to keep just in case one or more of their students was hungry and had no food to eat. Then comes Joseph Muscat, a few days later, boasting about what he termed the best possible news a country could get – that poverty in Malta has taken a hit, and that the government’s work to generate wealth is something we should all be proud of. Now, there could be many reasons why children are going to school without food. Poverty is one of them, but it could also be a result of neglect by the parents, couples undergoing separation or divorce proceedings, or simply a case of someone waking up late.

Still, to have a prime minister – in the same week that a shocking story such as this created so much concern among people with a social heart – come up with the statement he made on Sunday is equally disturbing.

For him, it seems that as long as the economy is fine, everyone else is too. As far as he’s concerned, the economy comes before the person. He is living the illusion that the socalled surplus is having a positive effect on each and every one of us when, it is clear, most families are finding it next to impossible to scrape through till the end of the month.

There’s another thing. Poverty is not only a lack of financial means. Poverty is also a lack of understanding, lack of empathy, lack of human feelings. And there is all of this when children turn up to school without food. Neglect of children also occurs when parents have to work two or even three jobs to make ends meet, a situation that no socialist prime minister would be proud of.

But then, the terms ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’ do no longer seem to be part of Joseph Muscat’s vocabulary.