Gozo Went Dark: Abela Was "In Contact" — With Whom?

Robert Abela was in "constant contact" with Enemalta during the Gozo power cuts, he says. The opposition, and a considerable portion of Maltese social media, has a different memory of those hours — one in which the Prime Minister was conspicuously absent, not merely physically but politically, from any public accounting of what was happening to an island left sweating in the dark.

Let me say what I think: "constant contact" is the political equivalent of a read receipt. It tells you nothing about whether anything was actually done.

The Gozo outages were not a minor inconvenience. They were a stress test of infrastructure that Malta has repeatedly been warned is ageing, underfunded, and structurally unsuited to a population and a tourism load that has grown far faster than the cables buried beneath the sea floor. The Times of Malta editorial put it plainly — "Shine here"? Tell that to Gozo in the dark — and for once, the editorial writers were ahead of the politicians rather than behind them.

Into this picture, Newsbook has now dropped a detail that deserves to sit next to the Enemalta story rather than apart from it. A cousin of Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri is seeking to build a new home on a Nadur plot that sits almost entirely outside development zones — this after obtaining a controversial permit for a small garage on the same site two years prior. The planning system in Malta has always had a talent for generosity toward the well-connected, but the timing of this revelation, landing in the same news cycle as a crisis that puts Gozo's neglect in the sharpest possible relief, has a particular texture to it.

The numbers on Maltese emigrating to Sicily are quieter than they first appear. Official figures show Maltese registered as living in Sicily nearly doubled between 2022 and 2026 — from 164 to 287. The raw count is small. The direction is not. When your own citizens begin treating your nearest neighbour as a more liveable option, that is not a demographic footnote. It is a verdict, rendered one removal van at a time.

What connects these three threads — the blackouts, the ODZ permit, the quiet exodus — is not conspiracy. It is something more mundane and therefore more durable: a governing class that has grown comfortable with the gap between what it says and what it delivers. Abela's "constant contact" claim will not be the last time this government reaches for the language of diligence when the record suggests distraction.

With the 2026 election drawing closer, Alex Borg's opposition will need to decide whether Gozo in the dark is a story they can prosecute with enough force to matter, or whether they will once again let the government absorb the damage and move on.