Power cuts: when desperate, just lie

Prime Minister Robert Abela’s catastrophic failure has been tasted by practically every single person in the country. Malta experienced the worst, most widespread, most prolonged power cuts in living memory.

The misery and disruption can be traced to one person. Abela drastically cut investment in the power grid, the National Audit Office confirmed. In 2021, Abela spent just €4.78 million on the entire power grid.  That’s less than what he spent on one film festival.

In 2023, when Malta experienced another catastrophic summer of power cuts, Abela spent a meagre €5.74 million – which was just half of what was budgeted. That’s barely more than Abela spent on launching his ridiculous vanity project – Malta Vision 2050.

In the four years between 2020 and 2023, Abela spent a total of €25 million. For comparison, in 2017 alone, €20 million was spent on the power grid.   It took Abela four full years to spend as much as Joseph Muscat spent in one single year (2017) on the grid.

In those four years, the population rose dramatically, and the number of tourists exploded.  As the inevitable disaster looked Abela directly in the eye, Abela slept on.

The current disastrous situation was entirely predictable. Yet Abela cut investment into vital infrastructure radically and consistently even as demand surged. No wonder the whole system is now crumbling.

Abela chose to fritter away hundreds of millions of euro on propaganda, entertainment, lavish festivals, unnecessary phantom jobs for the chosen few, and massive direct orders for his business friends.  But on the power grid, he slashed spending.

In the worst year, 2021, Abela spent less than 44% of the pathetic €10.87 million he budgeted.  The total spend in one whole year on repairing and upgrading the grid was just €4.78 million. Film Commissioner Johann Grech spent that much in one week on luxury entertaining for the inaugural Mediterranean Film Festival.

Abela gave away double that amount, €10 million, to private companies to profit from mega-concerts through his Large Scale Events Support Scheme.

Those shameful figures were published by the National Audit Office.  They’re public knowledge.  Everybody knows why we have no power.  Abela messed up, badly.

Instead of taking responsibility for his incompetence, inexperience and lousy decisions, Abela made up some formidable lies to shift the blame onto others. Challenged by reporters over the damaging power cuts, Abela blamed the PN.

The reason we don’t have power now, according to Abela, is that in 2013 “the (Muscat) government of the day was faced with a situation where we didn’t have economic growth”.

That’s a big fat lie.  In 2013, when Labour took over, Malta’s GDP had grown at 1.9% in the previous year – much much faster than the EU average as Europe was emerging from the 2008 economic crisis.  That year, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Finland, Greece and Cyprus saw their economies shrink.  The Eurozone average GDP had shrunk by 0.2% that year.

Malta’s economic growth was among the strongest in the EU – six times higher than the EU average. In fact, Malta was one of the top seven EU countries in economic growth when Labour took over.

Abela wasn’t content with just one lie.  He claimed that when Labour took power in 2013, “We didn’t have any creation of jobs”. In fact, we did, according to the National Statistics Office.  Between the second quarter of 2012 and the second quarter of 2013, when Labour took over, 5,134 new jobs were created.

That’s a 3% increase in new jobs – far more than in most EU nations.  Female employment, in particular, increased dramatically.  The number of jobs in the last year of the PN in power increased from 172,375 to 176,837.

That three per cent increase in jobs between 2012 and 2013 is practically the same as the percentage increase in jobs under Abela in 2023, which stood at 3.6%. In 2025, the latest figures for Abela, the percentage increase in jobs was just 3.8%.  That’s barely more than the PN’s job creation during a worldwide economic crisis.  So when Abela claims that “creation of jobs we didn’t have”, he’s lying, again.

When Labour took power in 2013, “We had a record of power cuts”, Abela claimed. In fact, Abela holds that record.  This has been the worst year ever recorded for blackouts in Malta – and 2026 is barely halfway through. The next worst year was 2023 – again under Abela. That disaster, according to the NAO, was due to “shortcomings in planning and investment relative to rising demand”.

The next on the record books is 2014 – under Joseph Muscat – when a nationwide blackout lasted six hours after an interconnector fault. The next on the leader board is 2010, when there were several major outages lasting several hours – but nothing near Abela’s catastrophic 2026.

Instead of humbly accepting his responsibility, Abela quibbled with reporters over whether the power cuts were over weeks or just days.

“Under Minister Miriam Dalli we have a process that could have happened years ago,” Abela stated. It could, but Abela chose to cut spending on the grid, and then spent just half of the budget allocated – for four consecutive years.

His lame reply to the public’s rage over the repeated power cuts was, “We have strengthened the resilience of the grid”.

“What happened in the last days is unacceptable… the public has no fault, businesses have no fault,” Abela announced. Of course not, we know exactly whose fault this is.

“Are you confident that next month, there could be more heatwaves and more pressure on the grid, that we won’t see another week, days of these power cuts?” a reporter asked.

His reply: “I have the confidence that with the continuing infrastructural works that will be carried out in the weeks and months ahead as a completion of a process that was going on in the last three years, everybody saw the massive investment…  ”.

Abela veered off into another word salad, a never-ending sentence – but didn’t answer the question. How could he?