Saviour Balzan | Wednesday, 03 December 2008

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What do the Khmer Rouge and Maltapost have to do with each other?

There is this belief that everything referring to privatisation must be jolly good news. Or that anyone who talks against privatisation must be some form of closet communist, or a veteran fighter for the Khmer Rouge.
Well folks, I am afraid the news today is that I am to be accused of being a Pol Pot militant. The justification for this is my sincere belief that Maltapost, under new owner Joe Said, has not improved on its service but become even worse.
And to prove my point, I do not intend to refer to the hundreds who remember Maltapost in the good old days when tal-posta would deliver your mail on the same working day, but to my latest personal experience.
Only two weeks ago, I personally sent out hundreds of invitations and after randomly checking out if the invites had arrived I realised to my shock that many letters had simply not arrived.
They just disappeared.
So before I started to press needles in my voodoo doll which resembles a distinctly thinner Joe Said, I checked if I had the correct addresses.
I did.
I then proceeded to share my frustration with many of my colleagues – who consoled me by informing me that they too have very bad experiences with Maltapost.
Now, we all know that Minister Dolores Cristina saw nothing wrong in appointing Joe Said as chairman of Heritage Malta, but surely as Cabinet minister she could put in a word about stopping Maltapost from turning into an irrelevant service provider.
The fundamental in this particular example is rather simple.
Joe Said, as everyone knows, most especially those involved in the business sector, is first and foremost interested in profits. Nothing wrong with that.
But when it comes to offering an essential service, such as snail-mail, the idea that profits are at the centre of this delicate operation prove that Mr Said has missed the reason countries run a postal service.
Mr Said is of course not a snail-mail man. He has messengers to send his post; he does not, like some lesser morons like you and me who depend on snail mail, have to worry about getting his message across.
So the fact that your mail disappears and does not appear is in itself a feat that really and truly should place Maltapost at the heart of the disaster that was called privatisation.
Three cheers to the government for having sold Maltapost when Maltapost was about the only efficient thing working on time in this small country. Keep up the good work Mr Said, and if you do decide to send me a Christmas card this month, please opt for the e-mail service.
Or better still, a homing pigeon.

***

If the government is being afforded three cheers, then three-hundred fold should go to Xarabank and the PBS newsroom.
The PBS newsroom should surely come in first for having organised a programme on Bluefin tuna fishing yesterday evening and made it a point not to ask MaltaToday for its views. MaltaToday after all has only published about 52 articles on this subject and faces more than 10 libel actions.
Those who believe that PBS is a mouthpiece for this government, most especially for George Pullicino, should really be asked to have their head checked.
But another warm human wave for Joe, alias Peppi, Azzopardi for having decided to finally invite MaltaToday to the next Xarabank in which he is bound to miss the wood from the trees and focus not on Paul Borg Olivier’s blunder and inexcusable request for data from government ministries, but rather to MaltaToday’s cheek in revealing Borg Olivier’s personal e-mail to the ministers.
Indeed, how dare MaltaToday reveal the personal contents of such an e-mail which only requests the personal details of people complaining to government ministries!
I always said Joe Azzopardi has no political agenda, and anyone who even remotely suggests that he is a Nationalist stooge should really be returned to Maltapost’s nerve centre in Marsa and made to disappear!
Don’t ask me how, just ask the entrepreneurial Joe Said, Dolores Cristina’s most favourite politically appointed chairman.

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