Owen Bonnici wants a gold star

Minister Owen Bonnici’s latest ode to Prime Minister Robert Abela is not so much an astute political analysis as a performance review written by an individual who has learned that enthusiasm, when smeared on liberally enough, can pass for insight.

It has the breathless tone of a smarmy pupil sucking up to the headmaster, hoping that repetition of approved phrases might earn a nod, a smile, a pat on the head, perhaps even a gold star.

Bonnici assures us that Abela offers the country  “competence, peace of mind and resilience”, an elegant little triad, polished and tongue-licked to within an inch of its life.

“Competence. Peace of mind. Resilience”: These are not arguments. They are bumper stickers, which we’re expected to support, willy-nilly.

Bonnici’s piece would survive, if being consigned to the dustbin of history is survival, as being merely cringe-inducing if it were not so representative of Labour’s governing culture – one in which image substitutes for delivery, loyalty to the script trumps evidence, and political communication is mistaken for political achievement.

This underlying philosophy is also why figures such as MEP Alex Agius Saliba and MP Silvio Schembri (they’re not the only ones, by a long chalk) can continue to declaim confidently, at home and abroad, about Malta’s “direction”, remaining all the while serenely insulated from Malta’s daily experience.

Indicating direction is easy; achieving outcomes is just a little harder.

In the Malta described by Bonnici, projects exist because they have been announced. Parks exist because they have been rendered as an artist’s impression. Reform exists because a consultation document was once circulated before plunging into oblivion.

In the Malta everyone else inhabits, “parks” are often decorative strips of green wedged between lanes of traffic, projects stall indefinitely once the ribbon-cutting photograph has been banked, and reform is something perpetually promised but never structurally delivered.

This is the core deception of the Labour years, leaving aside the rampant corruption that permeates the very fabric of governance: Governing intent is endlessly showcased, while governing results quietly evaporate.

Bonnici parroted the assurance that competence brings peace of mind, ignoring the fact that daily life for those not driven to work is defined by low-level dysfunction. Roadworks appear without warning and linger without explanation. Traffic is no longer a problem to be solved but a permanent condition to be endured, perceptions perpetuated.

Public services function just well enough to avoid open revolt, but never well enough to inspire trust. To be fair, many civil servants try their damnedest, but they cut lonely figures, buried in the mounds of effluence that “persons of trust” create.

Peace of mind, it turns out, is not something you experience; it is something you are told you have, and if you gainsay that, you’re politically suspect.

Resilience, meanwhile, rebrands itself as public stamina. If citizens have learned to tolerate worsening congestion, shrinking public space, uncontrolled development, and a steady drip-feed of corruption stories (as if we had a choice), this is framed not as systemic failure but as national strength. We are resilient because we survive despite this.

What Bonnici and Labour’s outward-facing communicators more generally carefully avoid is any serious discussion of ‘State capacity’. The party in government does not truly believe in strong, independent institutions. It believes in managed loyalty.

Public bodies are not empowered to function; they are managed to behave. Accountability is treated as a reputational inconvenience rather than a democratic necessity.

The obsession with optics explains everything. Ministers are everywhere, yet systems improve nowhere. Announcements multiply while delivery stagnates.

Every failure is “complex,” every delay “unprecedented,” every criticism “negative.” Reality is managed not by fixing problems, but by narrating around them, by the minister being in touch with the authorities, as if he or she were not the one with the buck stops.

Alex Agius Saliba is emblematic of this model. Confident and permanently outward-facing, he imparts stability on international panels while remaining untouched by the consequences here on the ground. When Labour figures speak abroad about resilience and peace of mind, they are not lying – they are simply describing a Malta that exists at conferences and roundtables, but not at junctions, clinics, classrooms or building sites.

Bonnici’s article may have earned the leadership’s approving nods. He’ll get a good report, probably first in class. It follows similar previous efforts where the article ticks every box, repeats every favoured phrase, and never once risks the inconvenience of truth.

Gold stars will be handed out, but governance, like schoolwork, is ultimately marked not on enthusiasm, but on results, and here, gold will not be the colour.