One failed minister

 If there is one incompetent minister in Robert Abela’s cabinet it is Aaron Farrugia, Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Capital Projects. He has failed miserably in every department under his responsibility.

Traffic congestion is one of the most frustrating issues that drivers, Maltese and foreign, face daily, day in and day out.  In 2014, Audrey Testaferrata de Noto, an Infrastructure Malta official, made a name for herself when she described traffic congestion as ‘a perception’.

The minister went one step, if not five, further. After blaming infrastructural works and school transport for the delays, with a straight face, he blamed local village feasts for causing the daily traffic pandemonium.

Farrugia even suggested that the Maltese should choose whether to promote feasts to tourists or drive without traffic and avoid Malta’s traffic problems. Daily grid-locked roads have become the order of the day, with frustrated drivers stuck for hours with mounting road rage.

Farrugia is responsible for infrastructure, and here again, he failed miserably. Roadworks throughout the island are done without planning, causing chaos.

The Kirkop project is a case in point with passengers leaving taxis and walking to the airport. Even former PL leader Alfred Sant was very critical.

The Għadira road has been partly closed for the past two years, and there is no sign of a completion date. And to make matters worse, it looks like it will be with just one lane both ways, creating another bottleneck.

Residential roads are, simply put, a disaster. While spending hundreds of millions on major thoroughfares, little has been done on residential roads. Most of the village roads are full of potholes to the irritation of drivers.

Yet the minister is unfazed as he is driven in his Tesla.  A few years back, the government, with much pomp, proposed a €700 million project to build anew all residential roads. Driving in villages is proof that this was another big lie.

Earlier this year, Farrugia launched a national road safety programme to lessen fatal accidents on our roads. But apart from raising traffic fines, nothing happened except that figures released by the statistics office show that during the first three months of this year, accidents were up by more than 6% over the same period in 2022.

Likewise, traffic casualties increased by 13% over the same period last year. These figures show that the strategy failed miserably if there ever was one.

Transport Malta, under the remit of the same minister, is in a dreadful state as scandal after scandal surfaces, from corrupt practices for issuing driving licences to officers beating drivers. Yet Aaron looks as if nothing is wrong, and he still faces the media ever so often, usually to embarrassingly put his foot in his mouth.

It is unknown whether Aaron Farrugia intends to hire more consultants to help him solve all these issues. According to his reply in the House of Representatives, he currently employs 36 expert consultants at a cost of  €700,000 a year.