The Prime Minister was out in Marsascala yesterday, backed by a line-up of goons and in the company of Ray Demicoli, the architect on the University of Baksheesh project, who was looking extremely uncomfortable and embarrassed and who was the only man there properly dressed in a summer suit, shirt and tie. The Prime Minister wore an incredibly sloppy get-up of T-shirt, slacks and shabby deck-shoes (no socks), and his goons and ministers were as badly and inappropriately dressed or worse. That kind of scruffiness would be bad enough if they were young, tall and handsome. But when they are all, to a man, middle-aged, old, short, out of shape, and ugly, the sight is just plain awful. You look at them and think, “My, that’s the Prime Minister. That’s the Minister of X, the Minister of Y. Those messy, sloppy goons are running the show.”
Because this, of course, fits with the Mintoffian Labour theme: go before the public, on issues of national importance, dressed as though you’re going to spend the day cleaning out the garage. Because if it’s Saturday, then it must be a checked shirt with those short sleeves, a T-shirt, some battered slacks and a pair of old casual shoes. And come on, why bother with socks in August? I suspect the only reason none of them were in flip-flops jew xi karkur is because they probably have those fat Maltese feet and stubby toes which cause some of their wives (I won’t mention names) to leave their little toes hanging off the sides of their high-heeled sandals, popping out between the straps like cocktail sausages.
I won’t say much about Ray Demicoli’s involvement with this project – he’s a good architect, a nice man, and when you’re commissioned to do a job like this it might be a little hard to turn it down when you have an office to run. He probably hoped he wouldn’t be dragged into the political side of this massive controversial battle, but as I always tell my smart, decent, accomplished and civilised friends and acquaintances who think they can do a professional job for and with the Labour government, without having their name splattered all over the place in awkward and embarrassing situations, and without being compromised by the government’s excesses: “Honey, it’s not your work they want. It’s not even your opinion. It’s your name, your face, your prestige and the kudos of being associated with you. And once they’ve got that, they’ll proceed to use it all for no purposes other than propaganda, and drag you down in the process.”
Ray Demicoli was not commissioned by the government, but by the Jordanian building contractor Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah, whose private business this sham university is, through the Labour Party’s auditor Deo Scerri, who represents Al Salah and his interests in Malta and whose office is handling all matters connected with the project. That’s pretty convenient, wouldn’t you say, given that the Labour Party’s auditor obviously has a hot-line to the Labour leader and prime minister and a fair amount of leverage. I’m surprised more hasn’t been made of this by the Opposition and the press. To my mind (call me weirdly European) that’s one of the main issues.
I imagine Demicoli didn’t think he would end up standing out in the open on Zonqor Point, as he did yesterday, before the television and press cameras, surrounded by a line-up of shabby politicians straight out of the Mintoffian 1970s with their T-shirts and slacks and ‘qomos kexwil’, holding up his drawings to the camera while the Prime Minister stuck out his prodigious jaw and feigned understanding of what he saw on the page. But that’s what happened. And I know him just about enough to have noticed that he wished he were anywhere but there – out on his boat, for instance – or at least in the company of politicians of The Other Kind (you know the ones, the ones who bothered to get dressed in situations like that, and who we can’t mention because we threw them out and are now wondering what form of insanity possessed us).
And then Demicoli had to stand there while journalists justifiably and reasonably asked sceptical questions about whether the building was going to be a dormitory or a sneak-in-through-the-window hotel: in other words, suggesting that the architect, a professional, is party to a scam. The way this government operates – I say this because it has done it to others already – is to keep its real intentions hidden, even from the professionals it has brought on board, because it knows that otherwise they would not come on board at all and it needs their names.
The fascinating thing is that so far nobody has stuck a mike under the Prime Minister’s frighteningly large jaw and asked him to define ‘university’. Everyone seems to be talking about this thing as though a university is a building which you then fill with staff and students. I know that this island is jam-packed with ignorant and uninformed people – after all, I have lived here for 50 years and couldn’t avoid noticing it – but is it really that bad? When the controversy first exploded, the list of subjects which this sham university will teach was published. It was the most important piece of information, but it was buried in passing in one large report or another, and never referred to again. Much to the government’s relief, nobody has ever brought the subject up, so if the government doesn’t mind too much (not that I care), I’ll do so myself today.
Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah’s risibly named ‘American University of Malta’ will teach just four or five subjects, and they are all to do with business, finance or computer games. Yes, computer games. If that sounds like a university to you, take my advice and don’t say so, on the principle that it is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it. This Baksheesh Outfit sounds to me like one of those ‘business colleges’ you get in the less salubrious areas of Greater London, where desperate non-British parents with a bit of money to spare send their adult children who left school with one or no O-levels, to keep them from getting into more trouble. In other words: a pricey dustbin for stupid failures, with diplomas that are worth jack, a holding-pen for kids who would otherwise be blowing daddy’s cash on cocaine (which they probably do anyway).
Universities – the clue is in the name – cover all disciplines and have faculties of arts, sciences, humanities and so on. They are multi-faceted and carry out research. Colluding in the notion that Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah’s shifty college can ever be a university is so offensive and insulting to the intelligent and informed minority in Malta that I am strongly tempted to stand outside the Auberge de Castille and pelt the Prime Minister with rotten eggs and over-ripe August tomatoes as he gets out of his family car, which he has rented to the government for €7,500 a year, and walks up those steps to make an even bigger mess of Malta. Too bad I am no longer 18 and can’t get away with it.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com