Living on a small island probably causes genetic loss. Particularly in the eyesight. Some people stop seeing things rationally, and get engulfed in an emotional vision of the world. There are many terms for this, but I won’t be getting into that discussion. Instead I’ll focus on those who are behaving sanely, and the others.
The Sane, the Insane, and the Ugly
Among the sane people on the island one finds the Malta Employers’ Association and other entities representing the business community, the leaders of which have been warning for some time now that the country’s facing institutional meltdown.
I think they’re right. The country is indeed experiencing institutional meltdown.
On the one side, we have a party in government mired in an incredible morass of moral, political, and possibly criminal misdeeds. The assassination that made headlines all over the world is obviously the biggest misdeed of them all. Then there are all the other misdeeds, possibly of a smaller magnitude, but heinous in nature nonetheless. The latest example is the “disappearance” of the Memorandum of Understanding related to the three hospitals the State handed over to be run by what seems to be a dubious organisation. There’s possibly so much dirt behind the deal that the “disappearance” almost looks like an admission. That such a sensitive document should “disappear” is a matter of resignation! How can the State “misplace” such a document?
And then, something miraculous happened! The Prime Minister ordered that the document be found! I wish I could give such orders when I can’t find something… The lost document was indeed found, and before the deadline imposed by the Prime Minister. Obvious question: was the document lost… or hidden?
Or was it… re-drafted? Journalist Christine Amaira’s service for NETNews was eye opening. She asked the Prime Minister where the document was found and whether it would be published. He didn’t answer. So we know that the document was “found” because the Prime Minister ordered that it be found (!) but we know nothing about why it had been “lost” in the first place and where it was found! This would be hilarious were it not so tragic!
Ms Amaira then pointed out that former Minister Konrad Mizzi wrote on Facebook that the MoU should be published. There’s a huge story there, waiting to be written, but the country’s attention is focussed elsewhere.
International observers – and there are such people and entities, irrespective of what short-sighted or couldn’t-care-less Maltese think – will reach only one conclusion about the country: the impression is that it’s amateurish and most probably not to be trusted.
On the other side, we have the main party in opposition entangled in a tragedy of its own making. It’s taking very long for the PN to resolve its internal issues and, in the meantime, the Government’s getting away with its misdeeds, the public’s attention has stopped focussing on the corruption festering in our midst, and the country keeps getting sucked in the quicksand of inefficiency.
One competitive advantage of a small country is that smallness gives rise to efficiency and speed. At least on the surface. On a deeper level, it’s not just a competitive advantage: it’s a survival strategy. A small country doesn’t have the luxury of being inefficient; for a small country it’s be quick or be dead. Big countries can survive crises at the top levels because they have big, almost-autonomous civil services and bureaucracies, and institutions that don’t depend on politicians to do their work. Small countries don’t have such massive infrastructures and therefore don’t have the luxury of taking their time: they need to be quick and agile if they want to survive.
The State can have, at least, two roles: a supervisory role when it isn’t itself supplying a service, and a service-providing role. In both cases, the State supervises service provision, either by supervising the private sector or by supervising itself. Let me suggest just one example of the country’s inefficiency.
A letter sent to Malta from another EU Member State took forty-five days to be delivered! But a letter from Malta to that same EU Member State got delivered in just five days! A sender in the UK sent books at the end of May to Malta and these have still not been delivered; the same sender sent books to Australia at the end of June, and they were delivered ten days later. Clearly the problem is on the Malta side.
For the country’s economy to flourish, the country needs a State that functions in the manner of first-world States. This is what worries the Malta Employers’ Association and the other representatives of the business community; this is what worries all the other sane people on the island. For a State to function properly, the fire of grand-scale corruption has to be extinguished, the Government has to be held accountable at all times, and the Opposition has to be strong and focussed. Anything else will be the country’s undoing.
The PN…
… needs to embrace different people. It has to stop thinking that a miracle will save the PN – a miracle of the votes that mimics the miracle of the five loaves and two fishes.
The PN needs to open its doors and adopt a colour-blind policy: irrespective of your previous colour, you have a place in the PN. This should be the “corporate philosophy”. It also needs a clear vision based on a clear understanding of its core philosophical values. But it seems to me that the PN has somehow mislaid its moral compass. It needs to find it, and convey the message that it can lead the country in the turbulent years ahead of us.
The post-pandemic world is going to be a tough place: unforeseen changes and unprecedented challenges will arise, and competence will be much in demand.
Despite all the glitter, Labour is not political gold. It lacks a moral compass and its competence is unevenly spread.
The Marsa junction is, admittedly, an intelligent idea. If you think about it, it’s analogous to London’s Docklands Light Railway (DLR) that takes you from the small and efficient London City Airport to The City in more or less 15 minutes. You land, 10 minutes later you’re on the platform waiting for the DLR, 15 minutes later you’re in The City. Luxembourg, another financial services centre, is fast building infrastructure to achieve this level of efficiency. At present, you land in the small and efficient Luxembourg Airport, 10 minutes later you’re on the bus, and 20 minutes later you’re in the heart of the city, where most of the financial services firms are situated.
So Malta did the right thing to emulate this model. Think about it, you land, you drive along the new Santa Luċija and Marsa junctions and in less than half-an-hour you’re at the Business Registry. Seen from this angle, relocating the Business Registry to Żejtun was a good idea.
But – and this is a humongous but – while the State is heavily investing in this infrastructure, the Government is heavily dismantling the country’s good name. Why the 5-star coop if you then kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? It’s like somebody wanting to get married, buys a house and furnishes it, pays the deposit on the honeymoon, but then starts an affair on the side.
This is Labour’s insanity which the PN has to be the cure for.
Maltese Quirks – 1
I want to start a new feature in which I will discuss quirks which I spot in the Maltese language.
I want to kick it off with the Maltese word for “scientist”, that is to say the person who studies and reflects, mostly on nature but also (by extension) on society.
Now the word “scientist” was coined only in 1834. It took quite some time for the term to gain currency. Darwin, for instance, did not think of himself as a “scientist”.
So there was a time when “natural philosophers” or “savants on nature” or “cultivators of science” did not have a one-word term to describe them. And then Cambridge University historian William Whewell came up with “scientist”, based on an analogy with “artist”: art > artist, science > scientist.
The Spaniards called the scientist “científico”, the Portuguese “cientista”, the Romanians “om de știință”, the French “scientifique”, and the Italians “scienzato”.
In Malta we seem to have two schools of thought: those who favour “xjenzat” and those who favour “xjentist”.
I will declare that I belong to the first one. And I will say why I think we should follow the Italian model.
The Italians have two words, scienzato and scientista, and they do not mean the same thing.
For the Italians, a scientista is somebody who adheres to Scientism, a philosophical outlook that originated in late-19th-century France and is still a powerful school of thought nowadays. According to Scientism, science can offer the answer to all questions that humanity has to pose. That is to say, not only questions relating to the functioning of the natural world (and society), but also to the ethics of life.
A scienzato, on the other hand, is one who studies the natural world (and society), but circumnavigates ethical discussions.
I think the distinction made by the Italians is intelligent and useful. It follows the distinction made by the French, who refer to “partisans” of Scientism as “scientistes” and to scientists as “scientifiques”, as we have already seen above. I think that in Maltese we should say “xjenzat” and “xjentist” according to these meanings.
We cannot keep having our mindset determined by that of our former colonisers. The world is wider than the British Empire.
My Personal Library (98)
In Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that culture, weather, and geography are not the only factors that determine the success or failure of a nation. They argue that “it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest”. Political and economic institutions make or break a nation.
In The World of Yesterday (1942, newly translated by Anthea Bell in 2009), Stefan Zweig wrote about the Vienna of his day, that was fast disappearing. I’m mentioning this book because of its underlying motifs: it is both a recollection of the past and a warning for the future. Zweig’s Vienna was prosperous and full of vigour. But the permanence and promise of Vienna’s golden age was only “seeming”, and when the fall came it was “devastating”.