Seriously, Abela?

Prime Minister Robert Abela has turned vestal virgin over fuel smuggling and offshore bunkering, simultaneously dancing the dance of the seven veils with allegations that the PN’s fuel hub proposal was devised by “the country’s biggest fuel contrabandist.”

The truly astonishing part is not that Abela is suddenly pretending to discover corruption around fuel operations near Hurd’s Bank. The astonishment arises from the fact that allegations about it come from a Labour government elected in 2013 on a relentless campaign about oil procurement corruption.

Do you remember them screeching about “the oil scandal”? They rode into power, portraying themselves as the fearless avengers of corruption.

And yet here we are, 13 years later, with Malta still internationally associated with dubious bunkering, offshore fuel transfers and smuggling allegations around Hurd’s Bank. With prosecutions either non-existent or so ineptly carried out that they’re nothing more than a joke.

And with amnesty deals being concocted to allow tax dodgers and facilitators of graft to walk away with a big grin, cuddling their exotic pets.

Abela, with the insouciance of the truly entitled, has the bare-faced cheek to mutter darkly about criminals being behind the PN idea, thinking that this will galvanise voters into thinking that he is anything but a drag on Labour’s efforts to stay in power.

He knows that unless they gallop into power with anything but a stonking majority, his magnificence will be terminally dented. So, anything goes.

If Abela genuinely believes these shadowy figures (not the ones his government is protecting, the others, of course) are linked to serious criminality, then the real indictment is of his own administration and of the one that preceded his, the one he protects as if his life depended on it.

Labour has been in power since 2013. They control the police. They control the enforcement agencies. They are the bosses, the Capi di Tutti Capi, you might say, though I certainly couldn’t and yet, nothing.

This is what makes Abela’s latest performance so grotesquely cynical. He wants us to believe he is exposing something scandalous while simultaneously asking us to ignore the awkward fact that his own government has spent over a decade emasculating the institutions supposedly responsible for tackling it.

You cannot govern continuously since 2013 and still speak like an outraged outsider who has just discovered the existence of corruption. That excuse expired years ago.

Consider, randomly, the still-revered King of Corruption, Vitals; the Panama Papers; the endless stream of other scandals; 17 Black; the collapse of public trust; the international reputational damage; the culture of impunity that became practically institutional policy, and so on and on, and sadly on.

Abela really does need to spare us the theatrical grasping of pearls and swoons about fuel smugglers. If Labour truly believed these people were criminals, why were they not prosecuted years ago?

If the state had evidence, why was action not taken? And if I could make so bold a suggestion, where does Abela get off insinuating that he had been approached with the idea and, like a blushing maiden, said ‘no’?

The fact, stark and inconvenient as it is for him, is that it was the PN in government before 2013 that was approached by Paul Apap Bologna about what became Electrogas. Then-prime minister Lawrence Gonzi, whose boot laces are not fit to be tied by any of the current bunch, told them to bugger off, only for Joseph Muscat to welcome them with open arms a couple of seconds after scuttling up the steps to Castille.

That Abela has no new ideas and keeps snaffling the PN’s is a given, but this is rich even for him. After 13 years in power, he no longer has the luxury of blaming ghosts from the past. The system he condemns is his system. The failures are his failures. The thugs’ impunity is his impunity.

After 13 years in power, outrage is no longer a defence. It is a confession.