Every time a privatisation takes place, cries that we are selling the family silver arise, as if the authorities governing us are profligate spenders who are flogging all the silver we have accumulated in our dressers with much patience and sacrifice.

The reality, however, is exactly the opposite. By selling the family silver, the State is turning our silver assets into gold. The State would be derelict in its duties to take care of the national patrimony if it were to keep, huddle, protect the national silver and not allow it its natural vocation, which is to turn into gold.

Not all privatisations have been done in the same manner, and not all have had equal success. We have had popularisation, such as at Bank of Valletta and Maltacom phase 1, and these have widened the number of shareholders and brought in a culture of share-ownership, which is not a bad thing in itself.

Then we had a series of privatisations where the search was for a strategic partner – Mid-Med Bank, Malta International Airport and now Maltacom phase 2.

For ideological reasons, which are easily discovered, there has been far greater opposition to privatisation cum search for strategic partner than to popularisation.

Reflecting on the latest privatisation, that of Maltacom to Tecom, the Dubai telecom company, but also on the sale of Mid-Med Bank to HSBC and MIA to the consortium led by Vienna International Airport, one can see better the advantages of searching for a strategic partner which has a global and easily recognisable name, the advantages of experience in the big wide world and cutting-edge technology.

For all that those in favour of keeping the family silver in the dresser may argue, one clear danger is that by keeping everything Maltese and in Malta we will never get to understand how the big wide competitive world works and makes money.

It is a proven fact that, left to our own devices, we tend to overpopulate the top levels of anything we touch, (thus ending invariably with more chiefs than Indians) and, political patronage being what it is, under every and any administration, each incoming government brings with it its own layer of top people, who then proceed to cohabit with the previous layers of top levels, each keeping rigorously to a cut and tried path. Anybody who is anybody here knows how true this is. Is this what hanging on to the family silver really means?

The results at Maltacom will not be evident for a while, but they have become clear in the case, for instance of HSBC and also at the Freeport (though without any bugles being sounded).

For price is not everything, nor should the government sell anything to the highest bidder as though the price is the topmost consideration.

To compare, then, the sale of Tunisia telecom to Tecom to that of Maltacom is completely barmy. For while the Maltese market is a mature market and growth prospects in it are limited, especially in the mobile and fixed line sectors where revenues are down, mobile and even fixed line penetration in Tunisia is far, far below the Malta average, so there are huge prospects for growth.

As a country, we are still suffering from the real after-effects of the Malta fixation of the 1970s when we just had to have Malta this and Malta that in everything. Thirty years and two generations have passed and this Malta fixation is still stunting our growth, as the low cost versus Air Malta argument shows. Just as one of Malta’s principal banks gained, not lost, through being sold to a world bank, so too will any of our economic sectors gain through being opened up to the way things are done outside Malta, and everything to lose if it is kept back to stagnate in Malta’s stagnant, inward-looking puddle.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel, nor is it true that Malta, being small and all that, has to have everything different from that which takes place anywhere else in the world. We have everything to gain by opening up to the world and everything to lose by shutting ourselves up in the make-believe world of the past generations when we thought the world owed us a living.