Oh, you’re still here?

Disgraced former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat took some time out of peddling a “fake and deeply troubling” crypto network to share more of his wisdom.

Muscat uploaded a lengthy Facebook post commenting that “anyone promising to solve Malta’s traffic problem with a magic wand is simply making things up”.

Well, guess who was promising just that on 16 October 2014?

Speaking at an event organised by the Chamber of Commerce, Muscat promoted his “proposed solutions to ease traffic”. He told the gathered audience that his “ongoing projects would help ease the situation”.

Muscat predicted “clearer stretches of tarmac in the coming months”.  He bragged that his government was aware of the traffic problems but it was finalising “a new traffic plan” which he presented as his proposed solution.

“Works like those being carried out on the Coast Road and the Addolorata Junction may be creating traffic now”, Muscat flippantly announced, “but they will help ease a lot of the pressure when finished”.

New parking hubs as well as a revamp of “underutilised” transport methods was another part of his solution.

That clearly didn’t work.

By June 2015, Muscat was still “looking into new ways on how roads are managed”.  After claiming to have all the solutions, he was forced to admit his government was still “seeking various options to find possible solutions to traffic difficulties”.

Muscat had been taking the public for a ride since before being elected into office. As Opposition Leader, he viciously lambasted the PN government.

In July 2011, when traffic still flowed relatively smoothly, Muscat condemned the Transport Ministry “for traffic mismanagement around the island”. He criticised the PN administration for carrying out road maintenance on “crucial roads at the height of the tourist season, including the road to the airport and the main road to Ċirkewwa”.

He pledged that if elected, his government would take traffic management seriously.

Yet just three years after taking his oath as Prime Minister, Muscat had given up completely.

On 9 October 2016, he told the nation that “the country’s success comes at a price, and one of the major costs is traffic – traffic is just one of the problems caused by this success”. So there you have it. Just put up with it. Traffic is here to stay and we can do nothing about it, and neither can you, was Muscat’s response.

“22,000 more people in the work force contribute to the traffic congestion issue,” Muscat insisted.

He’s still trying to ram that nonsense down our throats.

“Traffic is the direct result of economic activity”, Muscat insisted in his recent Facebook post. Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and South Korea strangely all have far greater economic activity than ours – yet they boast some of the most efficient traffic systems in the world.

To try and prove his point, Muscat commented that “during COVID, we had practically the same amount of people in Malta but the roads were empty because the economy had stopped”.

When COVID hit in 2020, Malta’s population was 516,000. By the end of 2024, it was 574,000. In just four years, the population had increased by 11%. And so had the traffic.

Muscat’s corruption-riddled Coast Road and Addolorata Junction projects were completed by 2016, but the traffic didn’t get better – if anything, it got worse.

Muscat hasn’t learned from his experience. Now, he’s defending Labour’s infrastructure projects by claiming that “road upgrades are only the first step of a wider long-term transport plan”. At least, he’s no longer predicting “clearer stretches of tarmac in the coming months”.

In his post, Muscat also said that he is curious to learn about Labour’s light rail proposal, calling it “far more realistic” than ideas mentioned in the past. Which ideas might those be? Maybe he had in mind that “mass public transportation system, that will include both light railway and underground systems” that he promised on the eve of the 2017 election?

On 8 May 2017, Joseph Muscat boldly pledged that his new Labour government would start work on the construction of a railway system immediately.

He committed himself to publish the full details of studies his government had commissioned on the feasibility of a mass public transportation system.

“We won’t just publish the designs but the full details of those studies”, he insisted, adding that “work on this transport system will start under a new Labour government”.

Of course, no work started. No detailed plans were published. Muscat was just taking the public for a ride – and not on the metro he promised.

The man who promised a mass transport system, falsely claiming that all plans were in place to start work on it, has now decided the PN’s proposed train system is no good because “it would remove parking spaces and pass directly next to people’s homes”.

So where exactly did his detailed plans indicate that his own transport system would pass through? We’ll never know, because Muscat broke even that promise to publish those “detailed plans”.

Muscat had no real plans for any transport system. Labour still doesn’t have a plan. Yet before every election, it comes up with new wild promises of another transport system which will start immediately after the public believes more of their lies and votes them back into power – only for them to shelve those plans until the next campaign.

How much longer do we have to put up with Muscat’s unsolicited advice?

He had plenty of time to fix things. He certainly promised all sorts of pie-in-the-sky. He had his chance and blew it, too distracted with trips to Dubai and shielding his Panama Papers pals.

He should do the nation and himself a favour and just concentrate on his latest crypto scam.

Or maybe he could spend his time on some self-reflection at the Azerbaijani think tank that his dictator friend appointed him to.

We certainly won’t be holding our breath waiting for his next pearl of wisdom.