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It is not only ‘The Times’ that changes but people too.
Joe Zahra is turning into a hero for the Nationalist Party TV station NET and yours truly becomes the most wanted man.
A year ago, it was Labour who wanted me garrotted. That year not one weekend passed without having MaltaToday stories pasted on the headline news of Net TV. Only last year I was a hero for Net TV.
Years back Joe Zahra was described as one of the ‘bullies tal-Labour’. Only weeks ago, however, he was pictured peeping sheepishly from behind the safety of iron bars at the Marsascala polling booth as Lawrence Gonzi cast his vote in what was to be the worst election result for the PN since 1953.
When former Labour crony Joe Zahra faced criminal charges earlier this month he was ignored by the Labour media.
The former Lorry Sant acolyte, bodyguard, driver, later a freemason and finally a Where’s Everybody? consultant has libelled this newspaper. His lawyer, until some days ago, was a chief canvasser for Louis Gala.
Many will say that lawyers have a job to do. If the late Fellini wanted inspiration for film plots he should have come to Malta.
Joe Zahra is the name that never gets mentioned in Sunday opinion columns of another newspaper.
And why the man who in the eighties, together with Lorry Sant, classified Nationalists as the zombies, in 2004 gets the soft glove treatment on NET – now standing as the official government gazette on the box – boggles the mind.
I can fully understand the ignorance towards history from most of the younger generation at the Pietà bunker. Many of them cannot remember the Lorry Sant days and worse still, cannot recall the men that followed him and scared the living daylights out of the men and women that stood in his path.
Memory is an important thing. It usually fades away with the setting in of senility. But for political opportunists it is another thing altogether. Some people conveniently erase memories to live at peace with themselves.
The people who run propaganda machines are specialists in erasing memory and revising histories.
Thankfully for this newspaper, there are many readers who refuse to forget the dark days that turned them into the upright men and women they are today.
The opportunists are another kettle of fish with little time for altruism. They expect something more from all of us.
We are told: ‘do not criticise the government or the Nationalist party because you are helping Alfred Sant’. In simpler terms, we are being called upon to praise the introduction of eco-taxes (after the deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg, in his wisdom, rubbished the Greens for their eco-tax policies). We are expected to praise the Brussels Malta House deal even though there is not one person in the universe apart from Albert Mizzi, Olive, RCC and the Belgian company that made millions in profits from the sale, that has found time to praise it.
This endeavour to portray Alfred Sant as being a satanic figure has now become farcical. This is not the 1933 Weimar Republic in Germany, and Alfred Sant is not an Adolf Hitler, although someone did try rather foolishly at portraying him as one .
The opportunists are fuelled by worries that their ‘interests’ will be trimmed and threatened if the current Nationalist - hold on power - is nibbled at. Hence the hysterical attack by RCC apologists who go on defending the Brussels Lm9 million home blessed by the business acumen of our service-for-free Bertu Mizzi.
Talking about the truth in Malta is easily translated into something akin to ‘personal’, ‘vendetta’, ‘obsession’, ‘grudges’ and so forth. But that is because there is little in the way of direct reportage.
True, this country is small, everyone knows everyone else and everyone thinks they should be nice to each other.
But the reality is that this country needs to change, and more so with the inbred mediocrity that persists when we stand out like a sore thumb at the southernmost point of the European Union.
The director of information, Mr Emanuel Abela, is the unfortunate guy who has had to put his name to a whole load of replies to this newspaper. He must feel like a rather odd person, always putting his name to statements that have been scripted by the Prime Minister’s office and RCC before being sent by fax, email and post.
But worse than that, it has taken weeks to get skimpy and pitiful answers from a public functionary who is starting to resemble a public spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army.
Civil servants can be nice guys if you think of them as angling partners, but not when it comes to dealing with disseminating public information. They are very boring.
The DOI today should be providing information, but as a publicly-funded entity it is acting as a very controlled and organised gatekeeper.
In the days of Fenech Adami the DOI was part of RCC’s plumbing department. Now, it acts erratically with Richard having lost some of his grip over DOI.
One of the questions put to Emanuel Abela three weeks ago was about the list of consultants working with ministers and junior ministers.
He asked us to look for the answers in the replies to parliamentary questions.
There are no such answers on consultants. I am sure Mr Abela will agree that with Labour on a long siesta, MaltaToday cannot possibly depend on the benevolence of any political party to front the PQs.
He knows that the only way to get these questions to see the light of day would be for this newspaper to ask Opposition (Labour) Members of Parliament to field questions to each and every minister.
Why should the names of these public financed consultants be withheld from the public? I can just imagine Emanuel Abela being informed on how to answer that one.
What makes me wonder is why Lawrence Gonzi allows this one to go on. Is it because he thinks there are more important things to worry about, or is it because he is supported by weak advisors?
I would have imagined someone like Edgar Galea Curmi, his personal assistant, to have acted in such a way as to combat the siege mentality reigning at DOI.
So much for open government.
The business of making news is not alien to mishaps. And if you do not mind me using the word ‘man’, I think that one should be man enough to admit a mistake. So here we go: last week, this newspaper reported that PN deputy secretary-general Angelito Sciberras’s wife had a job with the mission in Brussels. His wife has a posting in Brussels, but not with the mission.
Last Monday I issued a press release admitting to this mistake and apologising to Mr Sciberras and the other person with a similar surname, as soon as MaltaToday’s mistake was realised.
NET TV of course did everything but transmit my apology, and then all this brouhaha about me wanting to destroy the Nationalist Party. If Angelito really thinks that he is representative of the whole Nationalist Party then no wonder it is in such an awful mess.
This in no way changes the core issue at stake here, that the Brussels house purchase, and the staff complement, and the running of Malta’s Permanent Representation office is an extravagance beyond our national budget.
And it does little to endear us to the persona of RCC, the man who hides behinds the thick walls of secrecy, spin and the lacklustre machine better known as the DOI. In another country, RCC would have resigned and run away to a mountain monastery.
As I write 34 clandestines have landed at the aptly named Wied Bassasa to add to the claustrophobic conditions in the detention centres. They were hoping for a better life – they have come to the wrong place. They are flooding our small country and the xenophobia barometer is rising dangerously.
It is being aggravated by Tonio Borg’s attitude towards this problem.
Any Maltese with his head in the right place would be making a scene in Brussels and stamping his feet for immediate financial and logistical help. Instead Tonio Borg opts for good manners, handshakes and rhetoric on the back page of The Times.
If the Maltese government thinks that Brussels or the Italians are going to come to our aid it is very mistaken. Tonio Borg wake up, for your own good, and that of your country.
And by the way, what happened to that request for our reporters to visit the detention centres?
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