THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY – yes, leopards sometimes do change their spots – but some keep them!
Aesop’s Fables tell us that leopards never change their spots. Well, they do actually. Our St Paul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus changed his spots, saw the bright, shining light and from being a prosecutor of Christians, became a devoted Christian and later became a Saint.
In recent days, amongst us, we have witnessed more leopards changing their spots, going from one direction into a diametric other.
Take the case of former Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi. Yesterday he attended a “vigil” to highlight immigrants perishing at sea and took the opportunity to criticise the Government for being “hard-hearted” and “turning its back” on poor immigrants.
Very emotionally noble indeed for a man who had no qualms with hobnobbing with the late Colonel Mu’Ammar Gaddafi when he was alive, a dictator who kept his people under the rule of heel until they rebelled.
However, that is just a fractionally small part of the matter. It has to be recalled that as far as his own people were concerned (i.e. us Maltese and Gozitans), Dr Gonzi had no qualms about being hard-hearted and turning his back on us when:
His Government decided to increase energy bills to astronomic heights and he pronounced his satisfaction at having done so – adding the proviso that if necessary, they will increase even further. In other words, this is how things are now, so, stop moaning and groaning and shut up and put up;
His Cabinet behind the peoples’ and Parliament’s backs decided to give themselves an astronomic €500 weekly rise until this was outed by the Labour Party and then quickly had to be withdrawn. In the meanwhile, considerable sums were paid out. Have they all been returned to Government coffers?
When it was pointed out to Dr Gonzi that poverty was steadily increasing, he laughed this off as “a perception”. In other words, tough luck and I’m damned if I’m going to do something about it;
Under his watch, Mater Dei Hospital came under severe pressure for inefficiency, particularly in the Emergency Department. Yet his Health Minister said he often visited the Emergency Department and saw people eating sandwiches and biscuits! This slipped by with all the others too.
So, having turned his back on all these things, Dr Gonzi has now become a Good and Caring Samaritan crying over the fate of immigrants.
However, there was another conversion too – that of Dr Jason Azzopardi! Previously having been part and parcel of all the above points as well as being continually confronted by concerns of what actually happened in the Lowenbrau deal, the Fekkruna deal, the Spinola deal and some other bits and pieces, Dr Azzopardi has recently set himself up as one of the guardians of the Rule of Law.
He frequently laments the Rule of Law no longer exists under this Government, a Rule of Law that has to be followed paragraph by paragraph, word by word, all commas and full stops.
Yet, because the Government has now taken action because of alleged breaches in International Maritime Law he has been critical of the Government being “hard-hearted” towards immigrants!
In other words, we have been given to understand that the Rule of Law should prevail when it suits one, but when it helps criticise and denigrate the Government, the Rule of Law becomes elastic and can be stretched to suit the occasion and create the opportunity to denigrate.
So there it is – two startling conversions in the space of a few days! Perhaps Dr Gonzi and Dr Azzopardi are now on the road to sainthood? What’s happened to the PN declaration about backing the Government in the national interest?
Sadly, at one and the same time we have also witnessed the Bad and the Ugly.
Architect Toni Bezzina lost a libel case against the Prime Minister and was roundly chastised by Court for having lodged such a case in the first instance.
Former “Times of Malta” journalist Caroline Muscat lost no less than two libel cases filed by Patrick Dalli, the husband of Minister Helena Dalli, and was fined €10,000 over a series of articles which appeared on the Times of Malta website in November 2014, in which Muscat wrote that there were various irregularities on work which was being carried out on Mr Dalli’s property in Zejtun – all of which the Court found to be untrue.
Indeed, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly – all coming together in the space of a few days.
ALBERT JEROME FENECH
