The other day (9th February) I took my crippled mother to Gozo’s hospital for a CT scan – what a relief it was that a CT scanner had been installed in Gozo, saving us the usual half-day-long trip to Mater Dei. Yet the new EU-funded CT scanner sits incongruously in a hospital that is aging and deteriorating. The floor in the corridors is particularly bad: it is welting and cracking and crumbling away. On the day we were there, we saw workmen patching up the broken sections on the floor with concrete. And outside the control room of the new CT scanner, I watched as someone stepped on the fresh patch of concrete that had been laid and someone else trundled a trolley over it – now it had a footprint and the groove of a wheel. Then a doctor came out from the control room of the scanner – he is a specialist doctor from East Europe – and on seeing the marks, he proceeded to pour water from a glass on the concrete and use a trowel-like spatula to remove the groove and footprint.

I stared at that medical specialist, wearing his medical gear, on hands and knees smoothening a patch of concrete outside his office. It was an imagery that transported me somewhere else: I could have been in India, or Laos, or Zimbabwe – or any of the other broken countries that I visit in the course of my work as a writer. But I was in a European country, a country that aspires to be in the top league of countries.

Then I remembered that Gozo has political representatives with a skewed sense of priority and proportion. Now the cause of the day by our most ambitious politician is an underground tunnel between Gozo and Malta. He seems to be working in step with the big-business cabal who claim to represent Gozitans – such as the Gozo Tourism Association and other business cohorts – to foist the tunnel project on the Maltese nation. These people seem to think that a tunnel would transform Gozo into another Mellieha, and facilitate a spate of new hotels and properties and other large projects that will enrich the few. But their reasoning is flawed, for the opposite is true: Gozo’s isolation is the island’s key selling point as a destination for tourists and high-end retirees, and a tunnel would damage Gozo’s attractiveness.

On rigorous analysis, it becomes obvious that only several hundred people who work and study in Malta will benefit from the tunnel (it is of course their choice to work in Malta and live in Gozo – when I worked in Malta, I lived in Malta). As for the rest of us, a tunnel may generally rob Gozo of its character. And, more ominously for Gozitan service businesses, shops and supermarkets in Gozo will be big losers – many young people already go shopping in Malta, and more will cross over to shop more regularly if a tunnel makes it easier to pop to Malta and back.

So why build a tunnel? Is it a priority for Gozo and the entire Maltese nation? I had an epiphany when I saw that specialist-medic on hands and knees last week, using a spatula to smooth a patch of concrete. What if the money that Chris Said wants to sink into the tunnel is spent on rebuilding our crumbling hospital in Gozo and increase its range of services? At present, we have to visit Mater Dei for the simplest of consultations and operations (my mum, for example, is due for Mater Dei at the end of this month for a micro and simple procedural operation). Fixing our hospital would help a greater number of Gozitans, and also serve the whole nation as it would help relieve overcrowding at Mater Dei.

Unfortunately, Chris Said is playing populist politics, championing the tunnel in an attempt to pander to Gozitan instincts of tribal exceptionalism. In their tribal-exceptionalism – a feeling common in small insular communities that imagine they are the centre of the world – Gozitans have developed a streak of self-pity, feeling short-served by the ruling class in Malta. And it’s these emotions that Chris Said is exploiting in a bid to win votes. I am also a Gozitan – and since Said does not speak in my name – I appeal directly to the Prime Minister: please do not waste our money on studies about a hole under the sea, instead use the money to save us Gozitans from our Third World hospital.

Victor Paul Borg

Mr Borg is a writer & adventure travel specialist

www.peppermountains.com