SIX GLORIOUS months under the people-friendly government of big and substantive change are completed today. The foundations for the brave new banana plantation have been laid by el presidente and the commissar, who will now be able to focus their efforts on building a society in which social justice, meritocracy, fairness and compassion reign supreme.
It will be a society in which Soviet Union-educated doctors run our hospitals, Pefkios our schools, communist aesthetes our culture; Omonia will win the league championship every year and Commissar Christofias will be on TV every day and night, like a bloated big brother sermonising about raising public morals and the threats posed to civilisation by global capitalism.
It has been hard slog from day one for presidente Papa-Dop, but his achievements are there for all to see. Those who cannot see them should visit an optician in the morning and have their eyes tested. And if spectacles do not improve their vision, they would be well-advised to visit a shrink because their problem is obviously psychological.
There must be quite a few Bananiots with impaired vision and/or psychological problems, because according to an opinion poll conducted for el presidente’s spin doctors and published last Sunday in Politis, only 40 per cent of the population approves of the Papa-Dop presidenzia. Cyprus Goldenmouth announced that the government had never commissioned such a poll, did not have the results of such a poll in its possession, and was not even aware of its existence.
The report about the poll (the findings of which had been reported on Sigma TV two days earlier and had not been denied by Goldenmouth) was “groundless and a figment of the imagination”, he concluded. I fail to understand why the government gets so worked up about a lousy opinion poll, which, after all, gave it a much higher approval rating than its great achievements actually merited.
Why does it exhibit such a high degree of insecurity and lack of confidence in its work? The majority of the people, after all, have piss-poor political judgment, as we all know. How else could you explain Nikos Koshis consistently getting the highest approval rating for ministers of the previous government? And most people did vote for the Christofias candidate in the last presidential elections.
WHAT more proof does Goldenmouth need before he accepts that the judgment of most people sucks big-time? According to the non-existent opinion poll, the government member with the highest approval rating is Finance Minister Marcos Kyprianou. The economy is going from bad to worse, and the finance minister who in six months has done nothing to make things better is judged to be the best performing minister. What does old Cyprus think of that?
And what does he think of his own very high (58 per cent) approval rating? Does the judgment of the people suck or what?
EVERYONE had a good laugh at the expense of Ayia Napa mayor Barbara Pericleous this week, after TV cameras filmed her verbally laying into Commerce Minister Giorgos Lillikas because he had gone to the resort without notifying her. Barmy Barbara started shouting at Lillikas, who was resting against a bar of a pub in central Ayia Napa with a bottle of Keo in his hand.
She may have behaved a bit like a hysterical fishwife, but Barbara had good reason to be annoyed with Lillikas who insisted that he was on a private visit and therefore had no obligation to notify the mayoress. The visit was not that private, considering that he was accompanied in his tour of Ayia Napa square by an AKEL Famagusta district deputy, several AKEL municipal councillors and a posse of TV film crews, which, unlike the mayoress, must have been notified in advance about the minister’s pub crawl.
According to reliable conspiracy theorists, the visit was part of AKEL’s efforts to undermine Barbara’s authority and show Napans that they do not need her help. The mayoress, a bona fide Stalinist Akelite until the last municipal elections, had committed the cardinal sin of falling out with her party and therefore must be punished. The party wanted her to step down so it could put another AKEL candidate up for the mayorship. But the fishwife refused to play ball, stood against the official party candidate in the elections, and was elected with the help of the votes of the right wing.
By sending Lillikas into Napa, accompanied by AKEL councillors and deputies, to discuss the problems faced by restaurateurs and pub-owners the commie party was sending the message that locals need no longer rely on turncoat Babs. The party and central government would take care of their problems.
This is why Barbara flipped her lid. She knows very well how cruel the party of the working people can be when it decides to destroy an apostate.
BARBARA did come up with a gem when she was being asked by some hack about her behaviour. Every time a person decided to visit Ayia Napa did he or she have to notify the mayor, asked the hack, to which she replied: “He (Lillikas) is not a person, he is a minister.”
OUTRAGE was expressed by many wise scribblers because Barbara’s outburst took place in the town square in front of hundreds of tourists who were given a very bad impression. They should not feel too embarrassed because the tourists who frequent Ayia Napa Square are unlikely ever to have heard of Lillikas and Barbara, let alone recognise them.
They probably thought the mayoress was just another stressed out housewife shouting at her husband because he was out boozing again instead of staying at home to help her with the washing up. And it’s just as well they didn’t recognise Lillikas: what opinion would they form about our state and our government if they saw a minister drinking beer out of a bottle in a public place?
THE MAN we thought was the most sensible politician on the plantation, Nice Nik (who would never drink his favourite beverage from the bottle in public), went out of his way to prove us wrong this week when he held a press conference to announce that his party had drafted a bill which, if approved, would make any dealings of Greek Cypriots with the pseudo-state a criminal offence punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment.
The bill, which even our legalistic-minded government opposes, is aimed at preventing Greek Cypriots with property in the occupied north from seeking compensation for it from the Denktator’s recently established joke of a committee. It’s the sort of repressive legislation you would have expected New Horizontal deputy and legal eagle Christos Clerides to table, but this time the Führer beat him to it.
The bill will not be passed, but if it were it would raise several intriguing legal, philosophical and ontological issues. For instance, among its provisions it says that people who were forced to co-operate with the pseudo-state (enclaved or people involved in incidents in the north who were made to appear in a pseudo-court) would not be prosecuted.
But what about the Greek Cypriots who show their passports to a pseudo-cop in order to go to the north? Are they not co-operating without being forced to do so? And when they stop in their car at the traffic lights leading into Kyrenia are they not co-operating with the pseudo authorities by respecting the traffic laws established as a result of the occupation?
More ontologically, though, how could you take someone to court for dealing with the authorities of the pseudo-state? If it is a pseudo-state it cannot have any state authorities or any state officials. And if no recognised state exists how can you have dealings with it?
Given our antiquated law of evidence, a prosecutor would have to prove that a state exists in the north before he can prove that an individual was guilty of having dealings with it. If he succeeds in proving that it exists, he would be legally recognising it.
Apologies for mouthing off like
a pedantic lawyer. This is what listening to the legalese of Papa-Dop, Goldenmouth and a host of deputies every day does. You end up thinking and talking like one.
IF ONLY there were more historians and moral philosophers in the government like the eloquent Commissar Christofias, we would all acquire more sophisticated and refined discourse skills. His impassioned plea last Wednesday to raise public morals was historic as it was the first time in 10 and a half years he did not blame the ills plaguing banana society on the Clerides government.
Commenting on the theft of a car from Larnaca police station he said: “Our poles of resistance as a people have been weakening for many years, because of the way the system operates.” What system he did not say, but surely he could not have been referring to the political and social system established by our political parties?
He described moral malaise as the “third Attila”, and spoke of “the offensive to destroy our conscience” as witnessed through the “spread of drug use and the crisis in the church”. Again he did not reveal who was behind this evil offensive, even though he suggested that we must not accept globalisation “in the way it is being served to us”. If we demanded some village salad as a side-dish we would be saved.
The way forward? “We must reactivate the immune system of the Cypriot people and re-introduce our traditions into our lives.” Again he did not elaborate. Did he mean that women must remain virgins until their wedding night and learn to make halloumi and trachanas at home while men spend all day playing tavli and cards in the kafenio? If he does he has our vote.
THE RESISTANCE to the onslaught against our conscience will be headed by state broadcaster CyBC under the visionary chairmanship of Andreas Aloneftis, a former defence minister who knows all about building up society’s defences and protecting the interests of the little man. As he told Haravghi in an interview published two weeks ago, “I have served in different posts in the past 25 years with vision, honesty and competence. My intention is to serve public broadcasting in the same way, for the good of the country and Cypriot society.” Despite his self-proclaimed vision, honesty, and competence, Aloneftis was fined £25,000 by the Capital Markets Commission 10 months ago for misleading investors, when he was serving the public as chairman of MarkeTrends Financial Services.
WE DO NOT know whether it was part of the new government’s programme of change, but the state-owned Cyprus News Agency (CNA) may as well be renamed the Christofias News Agency. On Wednesday alone in the space of five hours (1.30pm to 6.30pm) the Agency filed seven news stories featuring the Commissar.
Here is a list of the stories, most of which were not worth the paper they were written on: Rizokarpasso Gymnasium; car theft from police station; missing persons; address to expat Cypriots; meeting with EU ambassador, Euro-elections; letter-UN-Europarliament; Serdar Denktash; occupied area — so-called ‘elections’.
Why does CNA have to file a report every time the commissar opens his mouth? Is it modelling itself on the Tass News Agency during the glory days of the Soviet Union? At least none of the dour-faced Soviet leaders suffered from the verbal diarrhoea that afflicts Christofias.
IN THE END Cyprus Airways’ losses for this year will be even higher than was predicted three of weeks ago. Operating losses for the first six months of this year were a staggering £22.8 million. These should fall a bit by the end of the year as passenger traffic in last six months is much higher, but we are still looking at about £15 million, which would be the worst in the airline’s history.
On seeing these results a foreign business reporter asked the first question that springs to the mind of anyone with a modicum of economic knowledge. “Will there be redundancies?” he asked. We excused the man’s naivety as he does not live on the plantation. He did not know that redundancy is a dirty word here. Not only would there be no redundancies, but the company’s new chairman, Constantinos Loizides, has agreed to give all staff pay rises of 10.5 per cent over the next four years.
And what did the company secure in exchange for its chairman’s largesse? Staff will increase productivity and not make full use of their sick-leave entitlement, Loizides informed us this week. With such commendable sacrifices by the staff, the future of the company is secure. We all know that when staff take fewer days of sick leave profits soar and redundancies become unnecessary.
IN THE LAST Coffeeshop before our two-week break we had asked whether the European Socialist Party had responded to DIKO’s application to join it. The answer was given a day later by several newspapers, which reported that the ESP had turned down DIKO’s request for its Euro-MPs to join the socialist camp in the Euro-parliament.
But the party’s deputy leader, Nicos Kleanthous, vehemently insisted that DIKO had not received a response from the ESP and therefore the reports were completely wrong. Several days later, a red-faced Kleanthous was forced to admit that the response had been sent to his party a while back by e-mail, but as nobody had checked DIKO e-mails for some time he was not aware that the application had been rejected.
If rusfeti were carried out by e-mail, I’m sure DIKO employees would check their in-box more frequently.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Money isn’t everything, but it’s a long way ahead of what comes next.
Edmund Stockdale
