I suppose I should wish you all a happy new year, but I get the feeling, somehow, that it’s going to be a whole lot worse than the last one. While you’re getting and spending, it’s easy to blank out the corruption and wrong-doing of those at the top, to wonder where the many millions are going from the sale of Maltese citizenship, to ask yourself why Maltese citizenship is being sold at all, to ask questions about North Korean slave workers in factories in Malta, about ‘golden residence visas’ given to Chinese people who “make a donation” (the government’s actual words) to Muscat’s government without these donations or transactions being recorded, to ask about the plundering of state-owned enterprises, about armies of cronies on the state payroll, about the gifting of Malta’s public hospitals to shady individuals hidden behind a nominee company in the British Virgin Islands, about the protection and sheltering of disgraced European Commissioner John Dalli, about the fact that the Prime Minister overspent more than €8 million on his allocated budget for 2016 alone. And that was just him. Imagine what the other ministers are doing outside of raiding expensive hotel minibars and running around with cheap women.
The fact remains that it is all so mentally and spiritually exhausting that people can’t or won’t keep up as long as they have money in their pockets and things to buy. It’s when the money and the things dry up that they begin to get angry about the corruption and the racketeering, the scoundrels in government and the robber barons that surround them. I’ve always known – instinctively, rather than by observation, somehow – that it wasn’t the violence, the corruption, the violations of human rights, the murders by those in authority, the bodies under bridges and down wells, the bombs, the church schools crisis, the burning down of newspaper buildings and Opposition party clubs, the raiding of the Opposition leader’s home, the constant onslaught of oppression, that made public opinion turn against the 16-year reign of abuse by the governments of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. No, it wasn’t any of that. It was the material deprivation.
People simply got sick of one brand of bad toothpaste, of no jam on the shop shelves, of weevil-ridden rice and foul pasta, of having to buy a Mars bar under the counter for the grand sum of Lm1, which was 1/25th of the minimum wage. The minimum wage, in 1981, was equivalent to 25 black-market chocolate bars. Imagine that. By 1986, women had just had it up to there with not being able to buy nylon hosiery with no holes or threads in it, or having to smuggle money out of the country and get on a boat to Sicily to buy even the most ordinary pair of shoes (in either brown or black), only to have them snatched by Customs officials who turned over their suitcases when they got in, looking for basic consumer goods in the same way a US border guard would look for cocaine. Burda patterns, home-sewing and draper’s shops were about the only thing ticking over, and it wasn’t because people were thrifty. It was because there were no clothes in the shops so we had to make them ourselves. You’d go to a party and find another 10 girls there all wearing the exact same Burda pattern in different fabrics.
If the Labour governments of the 1970s and 1980s, which included people in Muscat’s present like Leo Brincat, Karmenu Vella, Joe Grima, Alex Sceberras Trigona and Marie Louise ‘Fake Halo’ Coleiro, hadn’t imposed its import substitution policy and draconian exchange controls which prevented people from travelling to buy things overseas that they were prevented from buying in Malta, then it is my considered view that they could have continued to set fire to printing-presses and newsrooms, ransack Opposition party clubs and shoot civilians while their police chief murdered interrogees in his office. People would have chomped on their retail-price Mars bars and worn their nice clothes and got their hair done and travelled here and there, and shrugged off the rest of it – all the violations, corruption and abuse. Let’s face it, it took them long enough even to react with hostility to material deprivation of Enver-Hoxha-Albanian proportions.
Much of the money pouring into Malta now is dirty money, foul money, laundered money, money of suspect origins – and story by story, this is being made ever more obvious. But it is money all the same, it turns the economic wheel, it puts more money into the pockets of people doing honest jobs, and so nobody cares about the source and origin, or the inevitable consequences of soaking your economy in filthy cash, or even the fact that what you can smell now in Malta is not the scent of prosperity, but the stink of corruption.
Happy New Year.
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