I know that you may be tired of hearing me harp on about the hospitals concession case by now.
I guess that, as a journalist, I feel responsible for ensuring that Daphne’s work continues. Had her life not been snatched away so cruelly, I can easily imagine her sitting in the front row of the gallery of Hall 22, her eyes boring down on the backs of the heads of the accused. I often wonder how she would have described this scenario. I think of how she’d have been able to do a far better job than any of us.
The last time I thought about Daphne was last Wednesday. I’d just walked away from a gaggle of criminal lawyers bantering outside the court after an eight hour sitting. They all just walk out smiling and laughing after every hearing, as if they haven’t just spent their whole day defending individuals who robbed three hospitals blind. Everyone knows that everyone knows, yet nobody really says anything outright. It’s as Maltese as Maltese gets.
Though it may sound silly, sometimes, I like to smoke a cigarette near Daphne’s monument across the street. It helps me think. So as soon as my more sociable colleagues from other newsrooms got caught up in the chatter on our way out, I crossed over to pay my usual respects. After all, it is better to be in the company of the respected dead than the reviled living.
Beyond my sense of responsibility as a journalist, there is also the fact that this is my own damn country too. I don’t want to live in a trash heap as much as the next person, and I will fight like hell for our collective right to live a decent life. This case is crucial for the removal of the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of this objective.
So, as long as at least one of you is still reading, I shall harp on.
After all, we are talking about the biggest criminal trial our courts have ever contemplated. The rot runs deep, and there’s an enormous amount of information to sift through. Besides understanding what we do know about the case, there is also plenty of disinformation muddying the waters. In short, enough to keep me harping on about it for years.
I suppose what really keeps me up at night is the inescapable feeling that we’ve been watching a train wreck unfold in slow-motion. The hospitals concession case served as the equivalent of someone grabbing the remote and speeding up the replay.
Though progress is so slow it is almost asphyxiating, we’re almost done with the first part of the evidence gathering stage. We already know that disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat and several of his former associates and colleagues will stand trial. Next week, we will know what fate awaits disgraced former health minister Chris Fearne and the other batch of co-accused (click the link below if you are not up to speed with the latest yet).
Back in May, right before the state’s prosecutors filed criminal charges against Muscat and co., I had written an analysis piece highlighting what the most important threads of this case would be. One of the things I pointed out was that, as a direct result of the corrupt schemes hatched by its former and current government executives, the Labour Party effectively painted itself into a corner.
Fast forward a couple of months later, and that precious exfiltration point that the Labour Party so desperately needs remains elusive.
Some of the party’s most well known faces get to have an involuntary reunion in the court’s hallways on a weekly basis. Their dirty laundry is continuously live blogged by multiple journalists working in tandem to convey vital information to the public. Their credibility exists only in their imagination. Their ineptitude is evident.
Everyone from the prime minister to the lowliest of civil servants is getting flak because a system that rewards the greedy and promotes the faithful instead of the competent is bound for collapse. You cannot have functional infrastructure, good governance, fiscal stability, a solid reputation among fellow European member states, and a livable environment when you are living in an idiocracy.
Unable to resolve its problems, the Labour Party must settle for the next best thing: wear out the resistance and hold onto power for dear life. The gamble is that our attention will turn elsewhere by the time we’re anywhere close to justice, which is exactly what they hope will happen with the hospitals concession case. The same applies for all the other major corruption scandals, both those that are known and those that are yet to be discovered.
But what does one do in a war of attrition? Does one simply wait it out, hoping that their constitution is tougher than the enemy’s? Is it merely a contest of who can survive longest while both sides do their worst?
Wikipedia suggests that the word attrition comes from the Latin root “atterere”, which in modern English would more or less translate to “grinding down”. The entry for ‘attrition warfare’ describes it as “a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel, materiel, and morale.”
Well, fortunately for us, civil society is renewable, but corruption isn’t.
Humans will always dream of a better life. It is how we are programmed to think and feel. We are innately curious creatures with a phenomenal hunger for more. And thus, movements of various shapes and sizes will always grow and fade away over time, irrespective of who is in power.
That phenomenal hunger drives us to commit atrocities as much as it drives us to pull off miracles. That hunger forces us all to make a choice: work together to facilitate everyone’s existence or tear each other apart to hoard resources as individuals. The former is sustainable, the latter isn’t.
By definition, a war of attrition is won by those who are least likely to be worn down, by those whose “personnel, materiel, and morale” can be reliably replenished with fresh stock. Though the general public’s support can be incredibly fickle, civil society has plenty of fresh stock at its disposal. A corrupt government that can’t even keep the lights on doesn’t, and it shows. Corruption can only perpetuate itself until its corrosive influence has all but destroyed the same system it is dependent on. It is a parasite that kills its host.
And before anyone dismisses this as the idealistic scenario that will never happen because people are perfectly happy to vote for corruption, always remember that history repeats itself. Not because of some vague, presumptive notion like ‘humanity will never learn so history is doomed to repeat itself’, but because of the fact that we never managed to radically overhaul the dominant order of ‘the rich take all and the poor die trying.’
People aren’t happy to vote for corruption. They are happy to vote for whatever they think will make their lives easier in the shortest amount of time possible, and corruption happens to be a great shortcut if that is your only priority. What we need to really work on is the idea that just because something does not provide instant gratification does not mean that it is not worth your vote, the understanding that if we don’t work together to find long-lasting solutions to the problems we’ve created, nobody else will.
If we work together, then the war of attrition is all but ours to claim.