It occurs to me that the Auditor General and the Ombudsman are appointed by two thirds of Parliament.  And still they do not act in the interests of the man in the street without fear or favour from the Executive.

For years now, I have been trying my utmost to  put a stop to the Arms / tenant state sanctioned scam.  The NAO and the Office of the Ombudsman were both absolutely useless and ineffectual, when I approached them.  Both entities are autonomous and yet there is a clear reluctance to hold the state to account at the behest of an ordinary civilian.  Even though I clearly explained the extent of the theft from tenants by Arms, it made no impression.  The theft continues even today. 

Therefore, my opinion is that making the appointment of the Police Commissioner and the Attorney General subject to the approval of 2/3 of Parliament is not going to change much.  I doubt very much that a Police Commissioner and Attorney General appointed in this way would have behaved differently to the current Commissioner and Attorney General.

How do we create checks and balances which work?   We need these institutions to act immediately when they are shown evidence that something is wrong. 

Franz Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission, recently said that politicians should welcome clear checks and balances because these would make their job easier. 

Could it be that politicians need to have this kind of mindset for our institutions to function as they should?  My opinion is that our politicians do not have this mindset.  They resist any check and balance to any (abuse) of their powers. 

I think that just as important as changing the mechanism by which heads of institutions are appointed, is the willingness of our politicians to be held under the most rigorous scrutiny. 

In a post Daphne Caruana Galizia world, how are we going to achieve this?  Even her relentless exposure of politician misdeed after misdeed was not enough to change the mindset of our politicians to one willing to be held accountable and subject to checks and balances.

 However, is it possible that more and more people are seeing the dysfunction since her assassination?  Will this heinous crime be the turning point? 

​Yesterday brought back the 80s for me.  In 1981 - when I was in Form IV - it was suddenly compulsory to have a School Leaving Certificate in Arabic if I wanted to attend the New Lyceum sixth form and the University of Malta.  It was a time of huge political turmoil – photos of women with their noses bitten off at some political rally on the front pages of newspapers, political murders, my father and various other relatives losing their jobs for a few months because they obeyed the call for civil disobedience by the Opposition…

I went from being a very laid back, successful student to one who couldn’t focus.  I lost hope and faith that I would ever get to university.  I became exam phobic and struggled through my O level and A level years.  Some of my peers took a year out to get another A in a fourth A level in order to compensate for the loss of points because of their church school attendance. 

Politics getting in the way of young people’s futures, the well-being of entire families.  Politics killing blameless young people caught in the cross fire in the wrong place at the wrong time.  A generation of young people scarred because of what they witnessed, what they lived through.

Today’s young people cannot begin to imagine what our lives were like then.  Daphne Caruana Galizia was a couple of years ahead of me at school.  She went through these times too.  They helped shape her into the tour de force she undoubtedly became. 

Yesterday was another black day for Malta.  There have been many over the history of our young nation.  In the last decade or so, we seem to have lost our way even more so.  Many derelictions of duty by many institutions that should have stepped in long ago to stop the creeping rot in its tracks. 

But the rot stops here.  Whatever you think of Daphne Caruana Galizia all of us need to be united against the monstrous people all over Facebook who proclaim loudly, with great pride, that she deserved her assassination.  The monstrous people who got into their cars and into carcades to celebrate this most heinous crime.

I try to pity them.  Because they do not see that as much as they are celebrating her assassination, they are also celebrating the untold harm done to Malta yesterday.

Yes – we should have this kind of unity.  Daphne Caruana Galizia – agree with her or not – showed no fear or favour when it came to who received the brunt of her biting criticism.  She was totally her own person.  She criticized people from both sides of the political divide.

We need to be our own people – each and every one of us.  Forget red/blue, landlord/tenant, rich/poor, Maltese/foreigner…

No more tribes. 

Let’s direct our anger at the macabre fools who celebrate.  Let’s direct our anger at the corrupt, at our dysfunctional institutions, at the tax evading, tax avoiding criminals, at the money launderers, at the human traffickers, at the drug traffickers, at the despoilers and degraders of Malta, at the egotistical, at the ‘as long as I’m all right Jacks’.

Whoever killed courageous Daphne Caruana Galizia in this, the most cowardly of ways, did so in a climate of weakened institutions.  Politics is once again getting in the way of ordinary people living their lives, dreaming their dreams.

We cannot have this.  All people of good will need to stop this.
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The rot stops here.  

After 4 days of rain, there is a stench of sewage in the air.  On our drive to school and work this morning we observed a dislodged manhole cover or two, from which a rain water / sewage mixture gushed out.  This in a country which has a booming economy.  Or so it is said.  

For decades we have ignored unglamorous fundamentals such as these.  Our attention to detail is non-existent.  Chickens coming home to roost - in the form of traffic jams, lost productivity, being late for work, school, university - take us by surprise.  It’s like we don’t understand the science of cause and effect.  There’s a disconnection, a collective autism at work here.

Our storm drains / sewage systems aside, we have many other neglected fundamentals.  Successive administrations have been negligent in their attention to these for decades.

The private rental market is another disaster long in the making.  For decades, we have had swings of draconian rent control followed by a free for all liberalisation of the private rental market.  We are on the cusp of another such swing – this time in favour of tenants. 

Anyone with any knowledge of the history of the Maltese rental market will marvel at the inability of successive administrations to resolve this once and for all, to learn from mistakes.  They will marvel at the lack of courage. 

How many times has the private rental market swung from rigid rent control to a complete free for all over its history, without as much as a pause in the middle?  How many times has the ECHR ruled against Malta in favour of pre-1995 landlords?  What’s stopping the Maltese powers that be raising the pre-1995 rents to something closer to market rents?  Why is the political class so reluctant to have some kind of middle ground, some form of rent stabilisation?  What of the means testing of people living in social housing – are they in need of social housing today? 

Our political class lack courage.  They are so scared of losing votes that they don’t do the right thing, without fear or favour.  Politicians need to stand up and be counted more.  The common good is what they are meant to be looking after.  Not themselves or their careers. 

As it happens, I am not entirely sure that any gentle rent stabilisation measures are going to be effective if this is what Minister Scicluna announces in the budget next week.  We have been on a landlord swing for 22 years now, albeit it is the last 4 years that have seen the explosion in rents.  Is it going to be too little too late?

The pity is that if we had some regulation of the rental market over these 22 years, then I believe we wouldn’t be in this predicament.

What is certain is that the status quo is untenable and unsustainable.  Minister Scicluna dismissing the 20 % as unimportant and ‘not a crisis’ is living in cloud cuckoo land.  For a Minister of Finance to dismiss 87 400 people as unimportant shows a remarkable sangfroid.

The problem may be invisible to him and many others because Malta is a tiny country.  Homeless people in Malta will not sleep on the streets because no one is anonymous here like they are in big cities abroad.  Instead they will stay with abusive partners - their children witnessing unimaginable abuse and violence.  Pensioners will do without food or heating or cooling.  Single parents will live in one room In their parents’ homes with their children.  Single people in their thirties or forties on the minimum wage or on a low wage will move back to their parents’ home (if that is available) or do without essentials…

And all the while, they live a penny pinching, miserable existence.  This in a booming economy. 
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How many different social problems are we storing up for the future for us to be surprised when these particular chickens come home to roost?