I wonder how many of this website’s readers were present at the Panama Papers protest in 2016.
I was 21 at the time. I hardly knew anything about offshore companies. I never studied accounting, economics, or law. I wasn’t a journalist, though I always did read the news.
As limited as my knowledge was at the time, I remember my jaw dropping when I first came across ICIJ’s database. More than 11.5 million financial and legal records, leaked to the international press. Among those records, two names which would bring eight years of turmoil and counting to a whole country: Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, named in connection with offshore set-ups which we would later come to know as the system they intended to use for kickbacks on the power station deal.
The government was quick to shoot down any arguments which suggested that this was the case. We were told that legally speaking, there is nothing wrong with opening an offshore company. Joseph Muscat told us that Mizzi was planning on declaring his offshore assets in Parliament. He claimed to not know whether Schembri had a similar set-up. Scout’s honour.
True to form, they accused then-opposition leader Simon Busuttil of making slanderous statements for pointing out the obvious. Nobody sets up trusts and companies in separate offshore jurisdictions to “manage their family assets”, not unless that is a euphemism for a slush fund.
I remember feeling certain that something about the whole mess stank to high heaven because of the way they reacted. Everything they’ve said since that moment has come out sounding like the kind of shit you make up on the spot when your parents catch you doing something stupid. Nobody blabs like that unless they’ve done something truly heinous.
It was that certainty that first spurred me into action. None of us were certain about just how bad it was, but the writing was already on the wall for anyone who bothered reading it.
There I was, midway through a university degree I was told I must sit through in order to carve out a better future, learning about the individuals who stole that future by selling off everything: the power station and the fuel supply that feeds it, the hospitals, our passport, our land, our sea, our air.
The embers of the fury I felt at the time are still incandescent, eight years after the flames were first stoked by the sheer fucking audacity of a band of crooks who could not care less about me and everyone I’ve ever cared for. The aftermath of the corruption we’ve uncovered over the past decade was not simply a dark cloud hanging over my future. It’s all of us – or at least, the ones who are still here.
This anger was an energy reserve I drew on when the tank was empty. Throughout my time as an activist and then, as a journalist, it served me well up until the point that it was needed.
Throughout all this, anger made sense because it is the correct emotional response to understanding that someone’s successfully pulled the wool over your eyes. It is the right emotion to channel and convey, and it spreads virulently for a reason. If there are sufficient grounds for that anger, then the sentiment won’t be restricted to just one human being. Injustice will piss off anyone who can understand it. Multiple injustices spread over years of blatant, statewide theft will eventually set a whole country alight.
But now, something’s changed, and I am writing this column not only because I feel this is a thought worth expressing, but also to make sense of it myself in the process.
I think the most concise iteration of that thought is the notion that anger can only be felt towards someone who somehow has your attention and can be considered worthy of it (for better or for worse). That snake in the grass, Joseph Muscat, definitely had our attention for a long time. Besides the obvious scrutiny elicited by a prime minister who left a trail of illicit money flows all over every deal he ever touched, there was another part to it: he was also a dangerous adversary who merited the kind of treatment one would reserve for a field full of buried landmines.
As much as I never quite expected myself to say this, I no longer feel angry at Joseph Muscat or any of his pathetic henchmen who went along for the ride, though I hasten to add there is plenty of contempt left to go around. At the outset of my journey as an activist, I was sure there would never come a day when I feel a shortage of scorn for these individuals, primarily because the crimes they’ve committed are so revolting.
And yet, after seeing these same individuals milling about in court almost every day for weeks of end, I no longer feel that anger, because they are no longer worthy of it. Shriveled men surrounded by lawyers milking them for every cent they’ve stolen, all looking ghoulish as hell, do not exactly elicit anger or fear. They only elicit disgust.
The Labour Party is not a fearsome adversary anymore. I’ve been calling it as early as January of this year, back when everybody thought that Labour’s electoral majority was still untouchable. While the actions of its representatives and the policies implemented by the government are still as odious as ever, the fact is that the Labour Party is held hostage by the skeletons in all of Mile End’s closets.
For a while, they did do their level best to conceal as much of it as possible. For a while, they succeeded.
But now, denying corruption is pointless. Trying to find positive talking points which somehow make up for the glaring faults in our country automatically gets you laughed out of the room. Trying to avoid potential PR disasters is impossible when you’ve got one waiting around every corner. How do you even begin extricating yourself from a high-court drama featuring some of your most well-known faces? Hint: you don’t.
Muscat’s harrumphing about how Barts Medical School is a real institution that exists thanks to the fraudulent, twice-rescinded hospitals concession deal that his syndicate masterminded is not only symptomatic of this shortage of positivity – it is the ultimate sign of real despair. The fact that, just a week ago, the office of the prime minister publicly shared images of Robert Abela handing over degrees to Barts’ students reminds us that the government is still willing to use every office at its disposal to legitimise this shrinking list of positive talking points.
And to be perfectly fair to both students and staff members alike who have walked through Barts’ corridors, this is not an indictment of the school itself. In this specific case (unlike, for example, that ghost town in Bormla), it is a genuine educational institution. Just because one of the many failed initiatives linked with this concession actually came through does not mean that it can somehow justify the rest of it.
Whenever I hear more of Muscat’s prevarication, I don’t feel angry anymore. What I feel is a yearning to turn over a new leaf, to finally know what it’s like to live in a functional, semi-decent country instead of one that’s rotten to the core. What I feel with renewed urgency is the desire kick these bastards out of office so we can experience real freedom.
I think there is a universally familiar truth at the heart of this shift in sentiment. We must let go of our cynicism, our despair, our fear of what might happen if we fight back; in the place of all that, we must find a new resolve. We have come so far, in spite of the odds stacked against us, in spite of all the obstacles.
To make room for belief in the possibility of a better future, we must first clear out the doubts we’ve had about everything we’ve been doing up until the present.
The incoming moment is ours to define.