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What happens if a company you head, supervise, or administer loses something to the tune of Lm 26 million as the Air Malta group did? No problem, you are awarded in one of three ways, either by getting elected as a Euro Parliamentarian, or appointed President of the country or better still asked to represent Malta in far away Brussels.
26 million Liri is no joke. It is nothing compared to the retainers of those lawyers who after having channelled public funds to build their own private firm only to turn against the masters that chose to appoint them in the very first instance.
The responsibility for the financial fiasco at Air Malta lies with the Fenech Adami government. And the Minister that administered it, Prof Josef Bonnici; and the chairmen that were appointed to supervise the company.
To his credit minister Austin Gatt is trying his very best to tackle the situation even though he is acting as if it was another victory kitchen (government) that cooked the gaxin.
The last chairman as we all recall was Louis Grech who we now know, thanks to some leak from the MLP to the PN, was a Lm300K earner - albeit over several years.
Grech insisted with me on several occasions that he did what a good chairman is expected to do.
Not everyone wished him well. I remember one PN journalist with a good GRIP who wanted me to carry a front page story because Mr Grech smoked and purchased Toscani cigars when on official visits. I have no idea if it was true, but so what?
Mr Grech is now representing the Malta Labour Party in Brussels.
His electorate is obviously an undiscerning bunch that blame everything on the Nationalists and see Mr Grech as a victim, not responsible for any of the mistakes at Air Malta.
The Platinum prize, is being dumped on Josef Bonnici’s lap, the man who once told me that he was the most competent of all ministers. A comment that was followed by silence and then a swift rush to the mute button on the telephone, as I died laughing.
It isn’t only the former Prime Minister and his long list of appointees that are responsible for the mess at Air Malta.
But the political appointees on the Board including illustrious figures such as Richard Cachia Caruana; effectively Malta’s only cabinet minister who has never stood for a national election, but still gets to feel like a minister.
Losing 26 million I would imagine is technically more painful than losing your virginity and I would expect that you would see it coming.
There are no unexpected and unwarranted encounters in the middle of the night. No flashing bras from housewives, chairwomen or police women.
No, just management accounts with red and auditors with beads of sweat rolling down their foreheads. It smacks of incompetence and a general disregard for the country’s purse.
For my sins I have had to repel the nasty talk of another part time journalist. Not a healthy thing to do, but necessary. Needless to say, the mud slinging will not stop. Even so, I will try hard to behave myself.
In an effort not to believe that everything I see on telly and in the newspaper is not part of a strategy I could not help noticing one small detail.
The other day a kind soul passed me a photograph of a St Aloysius class, and there t my amazement it was the picture of two particular boys.
So far so good, but what was very interesting is that these two boys have now grown up and today hold important positions in the two major political parties.
One is a loyal servant to Alfred Sant and the other to Mr Joe Saliba.
Which is why the material passed on to the Labour Party, to rightly or wrongly to nail one of their kin, is just a case of coincidence and has nothing to do with back stabbing and flirting with the enemy.
The other day, I received an email about the use of ‘sexist’ words. The unit run by Sina Bugeja warns journalists that the use of chairman, housewife, policeman is effectively contravening the law and should be replaced by chairperson, housekeeper and police officer. There were other examples.
I emailed back saying that this was ludicrous and that if someone is called a chairman, then chairman he or she will be called.
This led Sina Bugeja to remind me that the law is there to be enforced and to wittily point to an editorial that I wrote on the subject where I admitted that boys and girls need to have less gender differentiating and endearing education.
Which leads me to declare that I take everything I said about gender back. In the circumstances, I feel it is more important to defend the right to common sense than to the loony directives from public funded units with nothing better to do with themselves.
And since we are at it, Sina Bugeja could kick off by noticing the difference between a housewife and housekeeper. Housewives are the majority of Maltese women who take pride in the Maltese household. Housekeepers are the hundreds of maids who work in Maltese homes without a work permit, do not pay tax and maintain the flats, maisonettes and villas of those women who choose not to remain housewives and leave home to work and earn a living. We call them by the derogatory term, sefturi or else ‘dik li tnaddaf.’
I recall a feminist group once calling on an editor in Britain to refer to prostitutes as sex workers.
One does not change realities by changing words, but by transforming actions and lifestyles.
MaltaToday is all for equal opportunities but not at the risk of changing the meaning of words and trivialising the use of language.
The next thing Sina Bugeja will be asking us to do is to refer to the Christian God as a Chairperson, St Joseph as the housekeeper and the Virgin Mary… not that one please!
Correction
Some weeks ago I wrote suggesting that Roamer's column was a septuagenarian man residing in Mdina.
I am now informed that this is not the case.
My apologies to the man from Mdina and Roamer himself who remains an enigma to me.
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