‘Beam me up, Georgie…’

I’ve often wondered how long it would take for Malta to recover from the hang-over of its post-colonial trauma. 50 years? 70 years? 200 years? Never?

I don’t know, but it is becoming increasingly clear that we are no closer to achieving that aim today than we were in the Malta of my childhood: i.e., a Malta that was dominated by the aggressive paternalism of Dom Mintoff.

Back then, it was always il-Gvern that was responsible for everything. Watch the eight o’clock news back in the 1980s, and all you ever got (apart from a blow-by-blow account of every minister’s most obscure bowel movement) was an undisguised panegyric of the glorious Gvern and its constant struggles against the evil imperialism of the ‘Europe of Cain’.

And while we could all recognise this as blatant propaganda even at the time, it remains a fact that the same underlying ethos was imprinted onto our own consciousness, too.  Il-Gvern came to be regarded as the sole arbiter of all events: the dispenser or withholder of goodies, the Father Christmas (or Babaw) by whose generosity or parsimoniousness we all either thrived or languished. Need a job? You have to have a government contact for that. Applying for a trade licence? Better get into a minister’s good books, etc.

Conversely, if your sympathies lay with the Opposition, the same dynamic merely repeated itself in reverse. Can’t get a job? It’s the government’s fault. Business doing badly? Blame Il-Gvern. And on it went.

On it went well into the 1990s and beyond… long after the Mintoff administration had faded into a distant memory. Watch the eight o’clock news at any point in the next two decades, and… oh look: this minister addressed that conference today, and uttered this particular load of irrelevant tripe. Meanwhile, that minister attended a charity dinner in aid of the Kerygma volleyball marathon… and by the way, Il-Gvern has just signed a bilateral agreement with this or that country … which is hugely important, for reasons we can’t be arsed to actually explain (and which, let’s face it, you wouldn’t understand anyway). So all together now: aren’t we all jolly lucky we have such a responsible and benevolent Gvern to see to all our needs, etc.?

Paradoxically, the advent of pluralism in the media only exacerbated this latent sense of political paternalism all the more. Whereas the only voice ever heard before was that of the Master – relayed to us through State television, to which we listened like little dogs to a gramophone – suddenly we had stations representing the vested interests of both parties, and (naturally) no one else. So the essentially Jekyll-and-Hyde character of the same Gvern was inflated beyond all limits of plausibility on both sides. For years we had Net TV ironically carrying on the Xandir Malta legacy of Gvern-glorification, while Super One made superhuman efforts to do what the PN had done for years in Opposition… and just rubbish everything Il-Gvern ever said or did.

But it was only with the advent of the Internet – with its unique capacity for shedding light on readers’ and viewers’ reactions in real time – that we also got a glimpse of how this same paternalism is actually expected and demanded by a people who still seem to think of il-Gvern as the plenipotentiary Master of the Universe: to be praised or blamed for the use it makes of its clearly superhuman, Godlike powers.

And though it seems obvious to me now, I didn’t automatically make the connection with Malta’s preceding colonial experience until fairly recently. As a child of independent Malta, born after 1964, all that was outside my ken. I have no memory of the British presence here. So it didn’t strike me as inevitable that a country which had for centuries depended on a foreign-imposed supra-state for its most basic needs, would inevitably transfer that childish sense of dependence onto the local government when the foreign one no longer existed.

It is however becoming difficult to escape that notion today. Consider how the Saviour Brincat case was reported in the news and online portals this week. Brincat is a Maltese oil worker employed by Nageco (the only Maltese employed by that company) and until last Monday was stuck in the Libyan desert some 1,000km from Tripoli. He had been trying to leave the country since July 15, and succeeded in doing so only three days ago, purely on his own steam.

He now blames Il-Gvern for failing to somehow spirit him out of the Libyan desert, as (naturally) we all know it is fully empowered to do at any point, by simply waving its special magic wand.

That, at any rate, was how the matter was reported. Listening to the man himself as he spoke to journalists at the airport, a slightly different picture emerges.

Brincat was fairly explicit in blaming ‘both governments’ (because of course there were only two, ever) in his irate comments at the airport on Monday: one for failing to evacuate him today, and the other for failing to evacuate him in 2011. Strangely, though, the second part of his account was bleeped over by virtually all those who responded along the lines that… well, what did you expect from a Labour government? This is what you all voted for, remember?

These voices seem to have forgotten that we also voted (in far lower numbers) for the Gonzi administration in 2008. If it is so shocking that Foreign Minister George Vella failed, on this occasion, to summon the Starship Enterprise and have Brincat beamed up to safety by Scotty, it should be equally shocking to discover that the preceding government had likewise failed the same litmus test.

Actually the shock should be even greater, for the Gonzi government had been widely praised for its handling of the 2011 evacuation. Not the evacuation of Maltese nationals like Saviour Brincat, of course – we now know these were not evacuated at all – but of the British, Chinese, Filipino, American, French and German contingents… using, for the most part, assets made available by those countries.

OK, perhaps this sort of permanent hypocrisy is only to be expected, in a country as permanently hypocritical as ours. What I find truly shocking, however, is the pervasiveness of the belief that governments such as those headed by Lawrence Gonzi and Joseph Muscat can actually solve problems like Saviour Brincat’s at the drop of a hat. As if it is the easiest thing in the world to locate someone in the middle of the Libyan desert – at a time when the country is crawling with homicidal militias – and then provide the means to transport him out of that area and into safety.

Interestingly enough, the people who seem to believe this is possible never actually told us how it could be achieved in practice. Perhaps they think the Maltese AFM have at their disposal the equivalent of the British SAS or the American navy seals. Perhaps they thought George Vella has Chuck Norris’s personal mobile number stored on his Smart Phone. Or perhaps they simply didn’t think of anything at all, beyond the same old mantra that ‘Il-Gvern is responsible for everything’ that we have been hearing uninterruptedly for 50 years.

In some cases this laughable belief was carried to extremes. Opposition leader Simon Busuttil even criticised the government for not forcing Maltese nationals in Libya to leave against their will. The government should have ordered an evacuation, he said, just like the US and European governments all did on July 26.

Small problem: those governments only ’ordered’ their own embassies to close down, and the embassy staff to evacuate the country… and they did this 10 days after Brincat first contacted the Maltese embassy for assistance. No such order was extended to any other citizen, for the simple reason that Il-Gvern - in countries like the USA, the UK, Germany and France ­– does not actually have the authority to order private citizens to leave a foreign country. They can advise people to leave, and they can assist in voluntary evacuations all they like. But to compel people to leave? To order them to pack up and go? That goes well beyond the established powers of governments in ordinary democracies.

It is only in those countries which cannot evolve from their colonial past that Il-Gvern is subliminally imbued with all the powers of a Marvel Comics superhero. So why stop at using these powers to merely evacuate all Maltese personnel from Libya, as so many people seem to think George Vella can do by merely snapping his fingers? Why not also end the conflict in Libya while he’s at it? Why not bring peace to the Middle East, and restore balance to the Force? 

After all, it is the omnipotent Gvern Malti we are talking about here. And we all know it has the power to do anything it wants…