On a personal basis, Francis Zammit Dimech is a likeable man. He can be witty, and is laid back enough to be able to blend in the most disparate of backgrounds. He is also a keen political animal with a political background, not very dissimilar to that of Joschka Fisher, from the far-off days of the 4Ts to the respectability of a ministerial post.

However, there comes a time when a person must understand that, for that particular post or in that particular time-frame, he has given his all and has seen all he undertook turn to ashes. That is the time to offer to stand down and rest, and recuperate.

These are hard days for our tourism. Despite all our efforts, the attractiveness of Malta has paled and the incoming industry is in a free-fall, partially masked by the numbers of young English language students (with their accompanying problems) and cruise liner passengers.

The industry as a whole is suffering, not just hotel operators and owners (in the three- and four star category most of all) but all those who benefit from the industry’s wide spill-over effects.

Ever since he inherited a ministerial responsibility already in crisis, the minister has worked hard to try and turn things around. But anything he touched has turned out to be a greater failure than what it set out to replace.

Mainly, one could say, the minister tried to change things from the top downwards, from the office outwards. He has thus found himself in the same situation that led Romwald Lungaro-Mifsud to conclude he had better resign than stay on. The story of his repeated failures is instructive: you cannot change a government body by asking for a report and then, (well, according to MHRA at any rate) not implementing it. Nor can you change a body just by changing its top management.

Of course, Dr Zammit Dimech has been let down by others, for whom he is carrying the can. He has been let down by the adamant resistance inside Cabinet to the entry of low cost airlines, the fear that the arrival of Ryanair or EasyJet will gut Air Malta to death, and this government’s and its predecessor’s belief in creating vast money-guzzling authorities that then become yet another round of red tape, yet another burden on the beleaguered entrepreneurs. Like other authorities, MTA is too vast, too expensive to run and nothing much more than a further complication.

Then there are his very own mistakes to consider. To fly in the teeth of a clear government decision that a chairman must not be CEO carried risks. To accept the chairman’s resignation and continue to pay him till the end of his contract was insane. To allow certain mistakes, such as the Brand Malta gimmick and the CNN advertising spend certainly did not contribute to turn the situation around.

Where the minister really failed was his almost disdain to address the issues down at ground level, at that level where they impact on the tourists’ perceptions of Malta: the chaos at the Valletta Waterfront whenever a cruise liner berths, the souk-like appearance of City Gate, the many pilferages that a tourist is subjected to from taxi drivers to bus drivers and so on; and to really listen and be sensitive to the concerns of the operators and entrepreneurs in the industry, especially those who are being called in by their banks.

Time and again, the country has yearned for the only man who has been a success in this ministry, Karmenu Vella. Now that is a man who did everything that Francis did not do and nothing that Francis did. If Dr Gonzi has any statesmanship left in him after these turmoil-filled two years, he should approach Dr Sant and get his approval to appoint Mr Vella as a sign that tourism is far more important to be left to partisan politics, for, if anything goes wrong in it (as it is going wrong now) all Malta will suffer.