‘What an honourable Prime Minister ought to say about power cuts’ – a tech entrepreneur’s view

Families have sat in the dark, the elderly have suffered in dangerous heat, people have lost sleep. These are statements which Investor and technology entrepreneur Simon Azzopardi believes an “honourable Prime Minister” should be making about the power cuts.

Malta is in the middle of a heatwave, with temperatures having reached a record of 43.3 degrees Celsius last Saturday, but several localities around the country have been experiencing power cuts.

Residents have taken to social media to express their feelings about the situation, expressing anger over sleepless nights, the impact on their work, the effects of the heat and more.

Reacting to the country’s situation, Simon Azzopardi has posted a fictitious speech which he believes “an honourable” Prime Minister should make about the power cuts currently plaguing the country.

This is the speech

"I want to speak to you today not as a politician managing a crisis, but as someone who has looked at the evidence and concluded that we owe this country the truth.

“Over the past weeks, families across Malta have sat in the dark. The elderly have suffered in heat that is not merely uncomfortable, it is dangerous. The sick, dependent on equipment that requires electricity, have been placed in situations that no citizen of this country should ever face. People have lost sleep. Businesses and homes have lost produce. Parents have worried about their children. These are not statistics. These are the real, daily consequences of decisions, and of the absence of decisions, that have accumulated over years. I am here to acknowledge that. Without qualification. Without deflection.

“We have grown this country's population, its tourism, its commercial activity, and its ambition, and we have not grown our infrastructure at the same pace. We have attracted demand without first asking whether we had the capacity to meet it. That is a serious failure of planning, and it did not happen overnight. The lesson we needed to learn years ago, we are learning now. I am sorry it took this long.

“Malta is a small island. That is not an excuse. It is a constraint that demands more discipline in how we plan, not less. We cannot continue to say yes to growth and no to the hard questions that growth demands we answer. How much can our grid carry? How much can our roads absorb? How much pressure can we place on our water, our land, our air, and still call this a good place to live?

“The answer to those questions must come first. Not in response to blackouts and public anger. Before we make promises. Before we sign agreements. Before we approve another development, another surge in arrivals, another layer of demand on systems that are already strained.

“Effective immediately, I am committing this government to a different approach. We will map our actual capacity: energy, infrastructure, environment, and public services - with discipline, honesty and rigour. We will build a plan that is anchored in what is sustainable, not what is expedient. And we will only attract and approve what fits within that plan. Growth that degrades the quality of life of the people already living here is not growth. It is a transfer of burden onto the most vulnerable.

“Sustainability is no longer a policy preference for this government. It is the framework within which every other decision will be made. Energy. Infrastructure. Environment. People's right to sleep well, to feel safe, to live with dignity in their own homes. Politics exists for one reason: to improve the lives of the people it serves. That is not an aspiration. It is the entire point. Somewhere along the way, too many of us in positions of power lost sight of that, seduced by the pace of growth, the optics of progress, the ego that comes with good headlines. That ends now.

“I will demand nothing less than that standard from every person who holds any power to impact the life of any Maltese citizen on these islands. Every minister. Every authority. Every decision-maker. The bar is not 'better than before.' Merely better was never good enough. It should never have been accepted as adequate. We owe you more than that. We owe you the country this could be. And the honesty to admit we have not yet built it. You deserve better. We all do."

But this, he said, is a statement that was not made.