It was mathematical: it was bound to happen. There’s no limit to delusions of grandeur. Once you get hooked on them, the sky’s the limit. Now we are no longer the best in Europe. Now we are the best... in the World.
This stratospherically hyperbolic statement was made during a Labour Party press conference not too many days ago. There was no hint either of irony or of any self-awareness of exaggeration. There was not even any trace of deadpan humour. The statement was delivered with faces as straight as nothing in this entire crooked country.
Seriously? Malta, the best in the world?
Let’s see how anybody with a sense of proportion could classify this second-, if not even third-rate country as “among the best in the world”.
Traffic flow is badly conceived, badly organised, badly managed... and no real solution is in sight. Roads are constantly being widened, while the number of vehicles on the road is not being curbed. It’s all very much like a dog chasing its tail.
The best in the world and there isn’t even the slightest attempt to educate a certain category of drivers, to teach them driving etiquette and courtesy on the road, and to more or less abide by the highway code. Just experience leaving Ħaż-Żebbuġ from the Vassalli roundabout exit to grasp that it’s a constant testosterone contest, not civilised driving, that marks the Malta Road Experience.
Malta’s urban environment is in a chronic state of possibly irreversible degradation. Characteristic dwellings are pitilessly demolished to be replaced by soulless, box-like hideous buildings that are ruining the aesthetics of the country. Archaeologically sensitive sites are obliterated to make way for more, even uglier buildings. Existing structures that are not demolished, collapse because of many factors: foreign manpower that is clueless as to local masonry tricks of the trade, lack of geological studies (as the clear-headed Peter Gatt has gone hoarse repeating), staff shortages at the State entities entrusted with ensuring strict observance of the laws and regulations, incoherent legislation, cowboys posing as contractors... the list could go on and on.
People have begun to live in garages – the country is plagued by a serious shortage of social housing. At the same time, a huge number of dwellings is empty. And there seems to be no political will to solve the problem of vacant properties (some of which are purposely left to rot to pave the way for demolition, bypassing certain laws).
Pensioners are finding it harder to make ends meet – but we keep hearing that the economy is growing and growing... and growing. Some elderly people live on just milk and bread. (While the Prime Minister has the nerve to call himself “Socialist”.)
The yawning gap between the well-off and the poor is not a quality of the best in the world. It’s the Third-World standard. And, to put it bluntly, it leads not only to the material discomfort of the poor, but also to criminality and, ultimately, a sense of despair which sooner or later engulfs the rich as well (unless they aspire to live in gated communities, paranoid prisoners of their own material well-being).
As if that were not enough...
Not even the health services function properly in this “best-in-the-world” country! The physiotherapy department – the only one of its kind in the entire country – is in a pitiful state. Physiotherapists have no choice but to make the best of what is available, including, according to one newspaper report, “having to use a corridor riddled with broken tiles during sessions with patients learning to walk again”. To make matters worse, “the only treadmill available in the department has not worked for months”. Is this “the best in the world”?
How can anybody believe that Malta is “among the best in the world” when the agricultural sector is rapidly fading away into a distant memory? Just listen to the people in the pig-growing industry: they simply can’t survive. And there seems to be no political will to give agriculture – a vital sector to any country – a vision for the future, a strategy to survive and flourish in the new circumstances. Agriculture, which is admittedly miniscule in Malta, is facing slow but ineluctable extinction, reducing the country to complete dependence on foreign sources of food. And this makes us the best in the world? What kind of hallucination is this?
The best in the world when our national language is treated like rubbish? When eight out of ten cases at the European Court of Justice involving the Maltese Government have been submitted in English? When government signposts and other signs in Malta are in English, as if the Maltese Government can’t grow out of the neo-colonial mindset? (By the way, where is the Maltese Language Council? Cowering down with sheer terror?)
The best in the world when the country is constantly heavily criticised by the Venice Commission for its messy judicial-appointment setup? So messy that the Dean of the Faculty of Laws at the University – renowned for his proverbial poise and containment – felt the need to qualify it as the “worst constitutional mess since Independence”. You have to have some gall to brag that you’re the best in the world when you get this kind of flak!
À propos of the University. How can anybody boast that we are among the best in the world when our University – an English-speaking University, that teaches almost everything in English – produces graduates who need to prove their proficiency in English if they wish to proceed with their studies at certain British universities? (Students from Jamaica, say, don’t need to prove anything.) The University has to make up its mind, and it is ultimately the responsibility of the Government to show it the way. Either it keeps living the illusion that its entire student body masters the English language, or else it starts seriously to tackle the language problem and teach certain courses/students in Maltese. I am not saying this with any satisfaction, mind you – I would obviously want to express these thoughts in other contexts. But ideals are one thing, and reality is something else.
Panama, again
And to top it all, Malta is now among the best in the world when the Prime Minister’s right-hand man, who opened that infamous secret company in Panama, is still in office, alongside the Prime Minister’s favourite Minister who behaved in exactly the same shameful way? The best in the world when structures were created by these two gentlemen clearly to carry out shady business, shady because in the shade of the official business run at public expense? The best in the world when the reputation of the country – particularly in the financial services sector – is going to the dogs?
L-Aqwa f...
In 2016, I wrote and published a book called L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa: Il-Panama Papers u l-Poter [The Best in Europe: The Panama Papers and Power]. Now, perhaps, I should write a new book called L-Aqwa fid-Dinja: Kif il-Poter Jitlagħlek għal Rasek [The Best in the World: How Power Goes to One’s Head]. It would be a treatise on self-aggrandizement, a phenomenon which all of us Maltese should by now be experts on, witnessing it as we do on a daily basis oozing out of the different cardboard figures populating the political landscape on the Government side.
My Personal Library (48)
Since we’re discussing delusions of grandeur, would you readers forgive me a moment of mock self-indulgence and mock self-irony? Would you forgive me if I spend a few words on my own two books, L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa (2016) and L-Aqwa Żmien Għalihom (2017)?
In L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa: Il-Panama Papers u l-Poter, I tried to achieve two objectives. One, I wanted to impose some structure on the narrative of the scandalous behaviour of Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, as we were being served titbits by the media and probably we all got mixed up with so many details dished out in disorderly fashion. Two, I also wanted to make a critique of Joseph Muscat’s political “ideology”, which to me is so clearly Neo-Liberal. I devoted an entire chapter to this, arguing that Dr Muscat’s pledge to amalgamate progressivism with moderate ideas was impossible to achieve (as we have seen in practice, and as the late Lino Spiteri had acutely foreseen). I also argued that Dr Muscat had hijacked the Labour Party, moving it away from its socialist values toward a neo-liberal philosophy which views money-making as more important than the human being and social solidarity. I also argued that the country needed the Nationalist Party at the helm for its Demo-Christian values and principles.
In L-Aqwa Żmien Għalihom: Erba’ Snin ta’ Skandli [The Best of Times for Them: Four Years of Scandals]. I narrated seven scandals that took place during Labour’s first legislature under Joseph Muscat. According to one reviewer, the seven scandals I discussed follow the rationale of the seven deadly sins. I must confess that if I did do that, it was not on purpose. But, as many of you know, sometimes we do things unconsciously – it’s usually the underlying culture that seeps through our consciousness and leads us along its path.
Having received a lot of media attention, L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa was a best-seller. L-Aqwa Żmien Għalihom, on the other hand, was published only a couple of weeks before the 2017 general elections. The mood was what it was, and L-Aqwa Żmien Għalihom did not receive the same media attention, ending up not faring so well. But such is the destiny of books; it very much depends on whether they strike a chord at that particular moment in the collective consciousness and, more importantly, on whether the media take any notice, given that the media have a huge stake in moulding that consciousness. I still think that Dr Muscat’s scandal-ridden administration needs to be chronicled, not only to open the eyes of the electorate but also to bequeath a contemporary reaction to posterity.