The entire ‘American University of Malta’ debacle that the government has, completely unnecessarily, foisted upon the country has been nothing short of an obscene charade.  This has been nothing more than a purely private business venture that the government has, for one reason or another, attempted to package as an indispensible project for the benefit of the nation.

But the fact of the matter is that this could not be further from the truth.

It has been obscene from its conception right through to Tuesday’s 15-hour marathon parliamentary session that saw the government ultimately making good on its threat to ride roughshod over the country’s environment in the interest of private business. 

The opposition should be commended for exercising democracy to its limit during that parliamentary session - fighting out what it knew was an unwinnable battle to the bitter end in the interest of its sacrosanct duty as an opposition party.

The Jordanian deal is obscene, according to the word’s definition, in that it is simultaneously highly offensive and repugnant to public morals, and a charade because the so-called American University of Malta, it transpires, is neither American nor a university. 

That the educational facility is not American at all was exposed a long time ago when it came to light that an American university had simply been outsourced to draw up the facility’s original curriculum.  The university is, in actual fact, Jordanian.

The fact that it is not even a university was delivered courtesy of the education minister himself, who on Tuesday admitted that the Jordanian owners had not even applied to be licensed as a university but, rather, as a higher educational institute.

At the end of the day, the project is nothing short of a pure business venture by a foreign company aimed at fee-paying and mostly foreign students. And apart from a handful of scholarships that will apparently be handed out to Maltese students to follow courses at this new institute, it is difficult to see how this educational project stands to improve the quality of life of the nation as a whole.

It is also difficult to determine whether the government was actually fooled by the Jordanian investors, the Sadeen Group, into believing that a top-notch university was being attracted to Malta, or if there were other factors at play here.

What can be said at this point is that the government wanted this educational facility so badly, come hell or high water, that it took on every single environmentalist in the country in its insistence to give away untouched Outside Development Zone land to what is, any which way you look at it, a private business concern.

It bent over backwards to do so and the fact that it has used up any vestige of environmental credibility that it may have had left to seal the deal with the Jordanians is, in itself, highly suspect – as suspect as the government’s unyielding and absolute insistence on allocating the facility sea views at Zonqor Point.

At first, the government had the gall to offer its Jordanian friends 90,000 square metres of virgin land at Zonqor Point.  When all hell broke loose over the suggestion and when public outcry had reached a fever pitch, the Prime Minister deftly presented his ‘compromise’: the handover of ‘just’ 18,000 square metres at Zonqor Point, coupled with the handover of a substantial portion of the Senglea side of Dock 1.

While much has been said of the project’s Zonqor element, not enough, in our view, has been said about the handover of the historic Dock 1 buildings, many of which were built in the times of the knights, and which lie smack in the middle of one of the finest urban rehabilitation projects the country has seen – the Dock 1 regeneration project, which, coincidentally, won this year’s Din l-Art Helwa architecture awards’ Prix d’Honneur.

In one fell swoop the government has bestowed upon this apparently essential ‘university’ a large swathe of virgin ODZ land with sea views at Zonqor for development, as well as a sizeable chunk of the jewel that is Cottonera’s Dock 1 which, before the Jordanian ‘compromise’, had been scheduled for rehabilitation and incorporation into the wider project.

And all this was given away for a mere pittance in monetary terms, and for a fortune in terms of the country’s environment and heritage.  The still-to-be answered question is: what, exactly, has the country surrendered these precious and finite resources for?

This government appears to excel in the art of the faux ‘comprise’ and it has, on at least two occasions, taken it strategy straight from the Haggler’s Playbook.  This was done for two of the most controversial projects this government has cooked up so far: the Jordanian educational institute project and in the sale of citizenships project.

A reminder of the origins of the highly controversial citizenships-for-cash programme is essential in identifying the government’s modus operandi. 

At first the government went the whole hog: it wanted to sell passports without any effective period of residency in Malta, meaning that new Maltese citizens would never have had to even step foot in the country before purchasing Maltese citizenship.  It had also wanted to keep the names of those who purchased Maltese citizenships a state secret.

The government backed down from both of these tantalising marketing aspects after serious objections were raised both in Malta and in Europe.  After that it backtracked and introduced an effective residency period and the publication of the names – although it must be said that the government has not lived up to either task, but that is another story altogether.

The same method was employed with the Jordanian school.  First the government tried its luck with the 90,000 square metre Zonqor proposal.  After the public at large recoiled in horror at the suggestion it benevolently whittled down the ODZ aspect and added the second campus in Cottonera. 

Given these wheelings and dealings, one must wonder whether the Cottonera campus had always been on the developers’ cards, and whether the originally enormous Zonqor campus had simply been a cleverly-contrived and pre-emptive dues ex machina.

The Jordanian school project, as said, has been obscene from start to finish, but it is reflective of the obscene times that we in Malta are living in.  These are, after all, times in which politicians facing very serious accusations are permitted to carry on as though it is business as usual.  And they are allowed to do so as the government either bounces investigations from one institution to another, or hides behind investigations instead of taking the kind of bold and concrete action required when elected members are facing allegations of misconduct, such in the cases of junior ministers Ian Borg and Michael Falzon. 

And the Jordanian deal is symptomatic of this attitude.  As environmental NGO Flimkien ghal Ambjent Ahjar succinctly put it yesterday: “Having earned Independence in 1964, Malta has  ​now ​ entered a new era of colonialism, ​​with parcels of land and heritage buildings being given away to foreign entities without the consent of the public and against the national interest.”

The onus is now on the government to ensure the Jordanian school eventually gets its university accreditation and that it turns out to be a great success.  Anything short of that would be tantamount to a farce at the nation’s expense, which will cost the party in government dearly at the next polls - and rightly so.