Memo to government: stop insulting our intelligence

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 14 May 2015, 07:54 Last update: about 10 years ago

Three cabinet ministers – the Minister for the Environment, the Minister for the Economy and the Minister for Education – called a press conference post-haste yesterday and told the press that building in an outside-development zone is justifiable if it’s for the purpose of education. Leo Brincat, remembering for one second back there that he is supposed to be defending the environment, said that you know how it is, he’s not super-keen on using that kind of land for building development, but when you have no choice and there’s no other suitable location, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. After all, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, San Anton and San Andrea schools were built in the countryside too and he understood that there wasn’t any alternative.

Who do these three stool-pigeons for a Jordanian millionaire think they’re fooling? I’m beginning to wonder at what point the government and its satellite speakers will be done with insulting our intelligence. Back in the day, I used to listen to their hero Dom Mintoff feeding the crowds a constant stream of codswallop (while sneering at their stupidity) and could have wept at the ignorance, the fruit of deprivation and a bad education, that led them to suck it up in awe. But things haven’t been that bad for a long time. People still believe lies and are unable to see through well-designed machinations, as the last general election demonstrated overwhelmingly, but the structure of those lies has to have a rational basis. Transparent insults to even the most basic intelligence are seen for what they are and people react badly to them, as well they might.

What these three frontispieces of a shabby and corrupt government told us yesterday is that Maltese people should give up a huge tract of their public land for the education of Middle Eastern people. To which the only possible response is: if Middle Eastern people want an American University, Hasni Hasan Naji Salah can ruddy well build one for them back home in Jordan, where there is so much spare land that he has built a real-estate empire on acquiring it.

I can’t believe – really, I just cannot believe – that not one of the journalists present asked the only question that comes to mind when hearing cabinet ministers say that using that unencumbered and protected land for education is justifiable. “WHOSE EDUCATION?” they should have chimed in unison. “WHY SHOULD MALTA GIVE UP ITS LAND TO EDUCATE THE CHILDREN OF RICH JORDANIANS AND SAUDIS?”

That is also why the Environment Minister’s comparison with San Anton School and San Andrea School was so very fatuous and deceitful. And here, too, the reporters should have pounced. Those two schools were built for the education of Maltese children, not for the college-training of Middle Eastern rich kids whose parents will pay the fees to get them into the European Union’s Schengen zone on a student visa issued by the Maltese Ministry of Home Affairs.

There’s another reason why San Anton School and San Andrea School were built: because dreadful Labour government policy on church schools in the 1980s meant that they were no longer permitted to charge fees or choose their pupils. So suddenly, they had no fees and their pupils were drawn by lottery – a game of chance that has largely spelled the destruction of the personality of those schools. The parents who would normally have sent their children to a private school now could not do so, because the private schools were no longer private except in terms of ownership, and you had to enter a lottery to get in.

So a group of Maltese parents used their own initiative, raised the funds and did the seemingly impossible: set up a real and proper independent, co-ed school that is still going strong almost 30 years later and which led to other independent schools being set up in a similar fashion.

To compare this magnificent, cooperative effort of Maltese parents for their own children and the children of others down the generations, with the business plan of one Jordanian millionaire who wants to build a for-profit college for children like his own and those of his extended network back home in Jordan and Saudi is beyond insulting.

We are not “back to the 1980s”. We are back to the days of King John and Robin Hood, where the serfs are lined up and told by the agents of the king that they have to give up their land because the king wants to give it to a rich and powerful associate of his to build a palace in which to entertain his friends. The only difference, of course, is that in King John’s case, the rich and powerful friend would have been English, and not from Barbary or Venice.