A lack of public integrity and personal honour

When good politicians do bad things, it is sad, but when they reach the point where one can predict that they will do nothing but bad things, a deeper kind of sadness sets in, almost at the level of resignation.

In any civilized society, when a public event suffers a loss, those in charge of it accept responsibility for it and bow out in honour. As a result, the culture of accepting responsibility is firmly rooted in such societies whose leaders bear vicarious liability for whatever transpires within their functional jurisdiction even where they are not personally at fault.

The post of a government minister or parliamentary secretary is undeniably an important public position. Anyone appointed into it is expected to be properly equipped to perform well. Hence, he or she should be ready to accept responsibility for the outcome of his or her mandate. This doctrine has efficacy. It facilitates the greater principle of democratic accountability because making a political officeholder answerable for every single government decision under his or her areas of supervision can propel him or her to ensure that the right things are done under his or her watch.

Any voluntary political resignation is a gesture of honour. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility appears to be absent in our political clime. Any minister and parliamentary secretary are expected to take the glory for the ministry’s achievements as well as the blame when things go wrong. Lately, we are not seeing it work out in that manner in our country. Is it not long overdue to evoke the principle of ministerial responsibility which presupposes that a Cabinet minister bears the ultimate responsibility for the actions of his or her ministry? Resignations in Malta have been hard to come by.

The few resignations we had, if they can truly be so categorised, were of a low-profile type. Those who formally did, did so to move to new, more lucrative jobs. Others left in disgrace. One or two had a charade connotation. There should have been ministers who quit as they botched up their portfolios or were caught in dishonourable and scandalous situations which should have also triggered their resignation. But they have stayed on. Prime Minister Abela and ministers Byron Camilleri, Edward Zammit Lewis, Clayton Bartolo and other fellow ministers, as well as the President, did not want to go when faced with public calls for their resignations. Those public calls were not simply forthcoming from the Opposition benches but also from independent media outlets, civil society pressure groups or movements and ordinary tax-paying citizens. And why should they have gone? Was it because they had the greatest job in the country? That is a debatable point, of course. I always thought another Maltese, Professor Edward Scicluna as Governor of the Central Bank of Malta, had the greatest and most lucrative job in the country, with a remuneration of €100,000 plus perks, but this is not a time to quibble.

Many ordinary people are publicly venting their feelings and appear fed up with the many scandals that are plaguing Abela, his entourage and his Labour Party. This public malaise, mind you, is not only limited to the government and the ruling party. It ostensibly extends to what is going on within the Nationalist Party and on the Opposition benches, too. That malaise could also be felt when we still had one or two nationalist ministers in office who were entangled in equally damaging political scandals and, yet, defied the odds and brazenly decided to stay on until they were voted out of power in 2013.

Down the line, we have a good number of individuals occupying public, sensitive and high-profile offices and positions who in their own way also continue to defy the odds and stay on in power, leaving by the wayside any vestiges of a resignation mentality. This mentality has become politically contagious. We recall the continuous public calls for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Attorney General and the Commissioner of Police, for example, to just do the honourable thing and resign in the wake of a number of failures and shortcomings attributable to their offices.

Joseph Muscat ostensibly stepped down for his own personal reasons. Yet he had become politically toxic, an embarrassment to the Labour Party. By exiting the political scene, his fellow Labourites hoped to improve their party’s performance at the next election and give their policies a new lease of life. They did for a while. But the Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, Rosianne Cutajar, Carmelo Abela and other criminally tainted corruption scandals came back to haunt Robert Abela at the helm.

In a different country, all of their ilks would have been told that they were embarrassing and had to resign. Indeed, when it first came out that the core allegations against Mizzi and Schembri were true, many political observers thought this would happen. Instead, Abela rallied his Cabinet behind him and Labourites stood by them all.

Why are we throwing overboard our political system whereby any elected or appointed officials holding public office would throw in the towel when they shamefully and damagingly lose the confidence of the people they were elected to serve? The point to be made is that to honourably quit is not a sign of guilt, rather it is a sign of accepting responsibility as a leader.

“Many ordinary people are publicly venting their feelings and appear fed up with the many scandals that are plaguing Abela, his entourage and his Labour Party. This public malaise, mind you, is not only limited to the government and the ruling party.”