An uninspiring turn of events

Recently it was revealed that the Inspire Foundation – a charity catering for children with very specific special needs, and their families – has had to cease providing a number of essential services, because of unexpected cuts to the government social welfare budget.

An estimated 250 children with mental disabilities will be directly affected.

Initially, it was widely assumed that these cuts were part of a general downward revision of government’s budgetary estimates, following the European Commission’s express reservations about the government’s proposed deficit reduction plans.

This was indeed the cause of a number of similar budgetary cuts affecting the social welfare sector: in particular, the government’s own agencies Appogg, Sedqa and Sapport (which between them cater for a variety of social issues, including domestic violence, deprived children, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc.)

However, it turns out that the precise situation regarding Inspire is rather different. Unlike those affecting Sedqa, Sapport and Appogg, these cuts are understood to be the result of disagreement (though whether intentional, or simply a result of miscommunication, is unclear) between the education and health ministries.

Government’s allocation to Inspire was to be divided between the two ministries; but while the education ministry duly paid up the €800,000 to cover Inspire’s educational bill, the corresponding funds for therapeutic and related medical expenses was never forthcoming.

According to the foundation’s management, the amount of money actually involved amounts to €400,000 per annum – of which only half is to be provided directly by government.

This in turn means that government has effectively defaulted on an annual expenditure of a mere €200,000: a paltry sum, when compared to the six-digit figures routinely associated with government expenditure on other, altogether less deserving causes.

But what is striking about this particular case is not so much the presumed bureaucratic/inter-ministerial communication problems leading to the default of such a small (but significant) sum of money. Rather, it is the reaction of all the players concerned… starting with Inspire itself, whose officials are now in contact with none other than the Prime Minister himself to ‘try and find a way to solve this problem’.

Nor was Dr Gonzi the first person Inspire turned to for help. Last year, the foundation wrote to health minister Dr Joe Cassar (appropriately enough, seeing as the money was supposed to come from his ministry’s budget); and it was only in sheer frustration at the latter’s inability or unwillingness to solve the problem, that Inspire found itself having to rope in no less than the head of Malta’s entire government.

Today, several days after this extraordinary piece of news was first made public, we are still none the wiser as to whether Dr Lawrence Gonzi has actually managed to fix this particular problem: a problem which (if you’ll remember) involves transferring the modest sum of €200,000 from the Health Ministry, to the Inspire Foundation.

Whichever angle you choose to look at it from, it is not exactly a very difficult problem to solve. Indeed, compared to a forced budgetary revision to the tune of €40 million – imposed by Brussels on pain of infringement procedures – it looks almost laughably simple. And yet, its solution appears to be beyond the grasp of even the highest authorities of the land.

But this particular story does more than just illustrate the bureaucratic bungles and misplaced priorities we have now come to associate with this administration. It also illustrates a far deeper malaise, whereby ‘official channels’ are routinely bypassed and short-circuited by a Prime Minister who has a remarkable habit of simply stepping in to solve the problems created by his own underlings – without removing or replacing the underlings; and in many cases without actually cleaning up their messes.

This is hardly the first time Dr Gonzi has come charging in to the rescue, where lesser ministers have failed to deliver. In fact it is a regular, almost predictable scenario. Gonzi likewise involved himself in the public transport debacle, after all Austin Gatt’s horses and all of his men proved incapable of fixing what they themselves had broken with their ill-fated Arriva reform.

Earlier still we saw the Prime Minister taking over the Planning Authority from the portfolio of Environment George Pullicino.

In all such cases, the pattern is always the same: non-delivering ministers are shielded from all blame by their Prime Minister, who instead relieves them of part of their duties and steps in to do their work himself.

And yet, the same intrinsic problems remain unsolved. The task force that was meant to give early morning traffic priority to buses seems to have fizzled into nothing. MEPA is still associated with delays and inconsistencies, despite the involvement of the Prime Minister. And of course, we still await an announced solution to the Inspire impasse.

All along, it seems not to have occurred to Dr Gonzi that in each of these cases, he has placed his own political credibility on the line: tying it irreversibly to problems ranging from the very to simple, to the deeply insoluble… for all the world as if he were a ‘Super Prime Minister’, endowed with ‘super problem-solving capabilities’.

Recent experiences suggest that he is nothing of the kind. One can only assume it is a matter of time before this impression becomes irreversibly fixed in the public imagination.