News that Malta has plummeted nine points in an international index of perceived corruption – the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), published annually by Transparency International – couldn’t have come at a worse time for Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi.
Apart from having to defend his Finance Minister Tonio Fenech's close rapport with prominent Maltese businessmen, Gonzi has also been placed on the defensive by a sudden backlash over his handling of the Joe Falzon case.
Although, at face value, there is no direct connection between the CPI published this week, and the ongoing controversy surrounding the internal audit office at the Malta Environment & Planning Authority, the two issues do echo each other to a remarkable degree.
Consider the following quote by Huguette Labelle, chair of Transparency International: “Stemming corruption requires strong oversight by parliaments, a well-performing judiciary, independent and properly resourced audit and anti-corruption agencies [our emphasis], vigorous law enforcement, transparency in public budgets, as well as space for independent media and a vibrant civil society.”
Admittedly, MEPA’s auditor must have been far from Labelle’s mind when she uttered these words. But they are perfectly applicable to the case of Joe Falzon: a man who has been publicly pilloried by the Prime Minister for “political interference” in the planning process – an allusion to Falzon’s critical comments of numerous questionable permits issued by MEPA in recent years – and above all, who has been starved of a functional office by an administration which appears keen on browbeating uncooperative civil servants to submission.
Apart from their immediate relevance to the MEPA controversy, Labelle’s comment also mirrors statements made by Joe Falzon himself with regard to numerous questionable permits issued by the planning authority in recent years.
By granting so many permits despite negative recommendations by the case officers in charge – and very often in apparent defiance of its own planning policies – Falzon argued that MEPA had often opened itself up to suspicions of impropriety.
As the MEPA auditor himself put it in one of his reports, under such circumstances “accusations of corruption are inevitable and difficult to refute.”
In both cases, the implications are inescapable: it is lack of transparency and accountability that inevitably breeds suspicion of corruption. By inference, then, the secret to avoiding such allegations is to strengthen the institutions that guarantee transparency in the country... and not, as the present government appears to be doing, the other way round.
And yet, in the five years since Gonzi took over as Prime Minister, several initiatives have been undertaken to achieve the opposite effect. These include the active dismantling of Falzon’s office - currently lacking any staff apart from the auditor himself – and also the present administration’s scant regard for Parliamentary Questions: prompting the Opposition to complain about unanswered PQs to the Speaker of the House.
Elsewhere we have seen subtle and not-so subtle attempts to discredit public opponents of government policy – for instance, the public lambasting of environmentalist NGOs such as Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar, which dared to criticise the St John’s Cathedral museum project in Valletta. Not to mention a wholesale crusade against the independent press, when – again, soon after Gonzi’s appointment as party leader – the entire Nationalist Party executive sued our Sunday edition over an editorial.
On another level, it is also significant that this sudden drop in our national transparency rankings – from 33 in 2007, to 45 this week – coincides with what appears to a conscious regression to the form of State censorship we associate with the 1960s, if not the pre-war years. This has included bans on award-winning international theatre performances; a ban on a campus newspaper (complete with a police interrogation of the editor); criminal charges brought against persons for wearing ‘irreverent’ Carnival costumes... the list goes on.
Admittedly these are unrelated to ‘corruption’ in the traditional sense, but nonetheless it appears undeniable that Malta has become a more paranoid and altogether less transparent place in the past five years alone.
If Gonzi wishes to salvage his reputation as a leader committed to transparency, and above all to reverse this dramatic negative trajectory in the “corruption perception” stakes, the way forward is neatly outlined in Labelle’s comment above.
Insteading of ‘shooting the messenger’ – which appears to be the current government’s standard response to any form of criticism – the Prime Minister would be well-advised to adopt a policy of tolerance, respect for freedom of expression, and above all, full transparency in the dealings of government departments and autonomous authorities.
Otherwise, Gonzi runs the risk of being remembered as the Prime Minister who took Malta back to an age of obscurantism.
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