CHOGM, which stands for Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting, has brought to our midst a diverse array of leading political figures from all corners of the world for this prestigious event. It will be over before most of us can blink so it is imperative that it is given a more enduring meaning.

For me, CHOGM stands for Can Handle One-off Games Magnificently. Can (we) Handle Ongoing Games, Mates? This is the crux of the matter! That is our real challenge.

Of course it is refreshing to walk through City Gate and see the ceiling of the main gate properly repaired and shining white with fresh paint. That job had been going on at a snail’s pace for endless months that I can no longer count on both hands.

I can assure you, however, that the production in the last couple of weeks was greater than the production in all previous months, not just because the workers were equipped with the proper tools and scaffolding but principally because someone was measuring the actual output and a very clear target was set which had to be met, come hell or high water.

It is most definitely a huge sigh of relief to see the uplift given to the area around the War Memorial and Glormu Cassar Avenue, the main drive-way into the centre of our capital city. It is also a major walkway for cruise-liner tourists who make their own way from the Waterfront terminal to Valletta and vice-versa.

We have had millions of such visitors and never really cared much about ensuring that we give them a polished first impression to help persuade them to consider returning for a longer stay among us. Now what was neglected for years gets done in a few weeks.

This is a typical Maltese trait. Give us a challenge with sufficient motivation and the more difficult it is, the more we put in our substantial abilities and creativeness to deliver even in the most unlikely circumstances and tight time-frames. I have seen it happen over and over again.

I remember when, some 20 years back, I had a business relationship with a foreign-owned company involved in quite complicated manufacturing. The German manager in charge of production confided in me that when things are moving as pre-planned, the run-of-the-mill sort of thing, he had to make a great effort to keep everyone on track with acceptable productivity levels of output. However, when a job with a tough challenge arrived, which one would normally refuse as unrealistic, on discussion with his local workers they would come up with more creative solutions than he, with all his experience, could ever think of.

The same used to happen with larger building projects I was involved in, mostly hotels. Unless there is a fixed time commitment for switching on to live operations, the work just drags on and on. With a fixed time commitment, in the last month before the deadline, work miracles are performed before your very eyes. A month before opening you would never believe how a building site can be turned into a polished luxury hotel which will accept guests in a few weeks time.

It should not be like that. We are good sprinters but poor marathon runners. We excel in crisis management but perform poorly in ordinary run-of-the-mill operations.

The trouble is that economic winners in the globalisation game are, unfortunately for us, economic marathon runners and excellent planners. The winners avoid crisis rather than excel at handling it. We need to change.

If we can somehow make the national effort seen in the last month of the run up to CHOGM the benchmark of our ongoing efficiency standard, then we will succeed in competing, whatever our cost base. Because competitiveness does not depend solely on costs. It also has much to do with efficiency of performance on a consistent basis.

Rather than waste energy and resources in protecting unproductive jobs, we need to apply such resources and efforts into the creation of new jobs. There is no bigger social service than a reliable productive job, and the maintenance and enhancement of our social services depends on our creating many more new jobs than the jobs that unavoidably have to be lost, as improvement in our standard of living makes old jobs no longer competitive in the new environment.

Unions can organise as many street protests as they want. It is their democratic right to do so. But they will neither create one single new job nor offer any additional real protection for existing jobs and social services. These depend on new investment by the private sector and an efficient bureaucracy and regulation by the State. Private investment will, however, only be attracted when it can perceive a profit potential on a consistent basis with as few unknown surprises as possible.

Security for investors and consequential job creation depend on the social partners and government reaching consensus on the way to undertake efficient and ongoing restructuring, spreading the pain fairly by re-balancing the rights and obligations of workers across the whole employment spectrum, and dedicating saving in operational expenses into the training and retraining of employees to keep them employable, even if they have to change employment more regularly than hitherto.

Investment is attracted by reliable marathon runners rather than excellent but moody sprinters, who tend to relax unduly between one sprint and another.

www.alfredmifsud.com