Well, that was a bit of a come-down, wasn’t it? All that fuss and fanfare about an American University of Malta, and then it emerges in parliament last night that what we are really looking at is the Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah Higher Institute of Business Education. What does this mean? It means that the national commission for accreditation of colleges and universities has turned down the Jordanian builder’s application to have his nonexistent outfit accredited as a university. What other explanation could there be? The man applied for university accreditation, not for ‘higher institute of education’ accreditation. And has he even got that? It wasn’t clear from what Evarist Bartolo, Minister of Education, mumbled in parliament, but it looks like he hasn’t.
That’s a turn-up for the books, isn’t it – the government of Malta parcelling out prime seaside land, covered in agricultural fields, to a Jordanian building contractor, most of whose business is back home in Amman and some of it in that wonderful place with a terrific record on democracy and human rights, Saudi Arabia, who is still trying to get accreditation for…an institute of higher education. And does Malta need another one of those? No, it does not. There are 23 already, and most of them are diploma mills turning out ‘graduates’ who don’t have what it takes to be accepted at a proper college or university. The main contribution of many of these outfits is to lower the general standard, and Al Salah’s “you give me di money, I give you di diploma” set-up is not going to be any different. This is what happens when education becomes not education at all, but just another profit-motivated business driven by the desire of the dumbest members of society to get a diploma rather than an education.
It must have been quite a shock to the government, to the prime minister especially, that their friend from Baksheesh territory had his request for university accreditation turned down flat – as we must assume happened – even though they really piled on the pressure heavily and allowed their friend to use the name ‘American University of Malta’ when he hadn’t received accreditation yet, as though it was a foregone conclusion that he would. Will he want his money back, I wonder?
I imagine they told him that it really was a foregone conclusion, that Malta may be a democratic member state of the European Union, but you know how it is, Hani, we have our own little ways here just as you do in Amman. Now they’re left with egg all over their faces and probably having to deal with a very angry Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah who has taken it for granted that he is going to be the first Jordanian builder to own a makeshift college accredited as a university in an EU member state. And his representative in Malta – Deo Scerri, the Labour Party’s auditor for donkey’s years and a Taghna Lkoll appointee to the board of the Bank of Valletta, who incorporated the company and registered it at his office address – must be absolutely furious. Come on, couldn’t the members of the accreditation commission have had their arms twisted a little harder?
You’d think in this scenario, the government would pull out of the deal. After all, it decided to grant the land to that Jordanian builder on the understanding that what he’s going to establish there is an American University of Malta (ahem). Now those parameters have changed: he is not permitted to call it a university. So if the parameters have changed, the deal has to fall through. But the government showed no such inclination and battled on Al Salah’s behalf all the way through a marathon session in parliament. You have to wonder what’s in it for them, and that’s a legitimate question given their determination to see it through even though it can’t now be a university.
I was chatting to somebody this morning as we listened to a programme on the radio about this matter of how it can’t now be a university but might be an institute of higher education. “I don’t care a fig what it’s going to be,” she said (loosely translated from Maltese). “It can be a giant pig-sty for all the difference it makes to what I think of the decision to give him all that land. What I want to know is, why are they giving him that land in the first place? If he wants land, he can buy it. Jew imur joqghod fid-desert.”
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