Forget Covid. Forget the incessant bickering between the two great parties, the two spent forces living on memories and spin, on clientelism and mutual accusations of corruption, graft and cover-ups.
The reality is we have made our country, small as it is, a wasteland. We have destroyed any future our children could have had. We have, we are, squandering the meagre resources we might have had.
Land is the only real resource of this country and we have been suicidally wasteful about it to this Very day.
The figures speak for themselves.. Never in the long history of our island has land-grab been so voracious. Where up to a generation or two back each village had its own identity, they now, except the really remote villages, form part of one big conurbation.
The number of empty houses and apartments is so high that nobody can, or dare, count it.
And yet we keep building and building. When the country ground to a halt during the pandemic, the construction industry kept going. It has been proved that the number of construction companies has shot up. Every person in the industry now thinks himself a developer.
They have pounced on successive weak governments, and in Malta all governments are weak, even this one with such a huge majority, and by threatening to withdraw support, got these governments to widen the development zones, weaken Mepa and its structures, create so many exceptions to rules and ease enforcement that have allowed all the rules to become so elastic as to be flimsy in the extreme.
This is the Malta of today.
And then because we insanely continue to allow cars in, we then take up more land to widening the roads. So our small country has become a country criss-crossed by motorways while traffic still grinds today to a halt at the worst times of the day.
Now we have stumbled on a new ruse – land-grab as is happening at Nadur. You think you are safe in the house you have bought and you suddenly find your land belongs to another. It’s what happens in the Amazon.
Also on the Brazilian model, big companies get bigger and bigger. They can benefit from economies of scale unthinkable to the ordinary householder.
Also on the Brazilian model, large swathes of our coastline have suddenly become private property and no-go areas with fences and warnings “for safety”.
But at the other end of the social scale a land-grab of huge dimensions has long been going on as people arrogate to themselves the right to build a caravan on public land and they even get connected to the electricity and water grids.
This is the Malta we are bequeathing to our children, a small island that is continually getting eroded not by natural causes but by man-made ones, just as destructive and seemingly irreversible.
The construction industry I have spoken about cannot not keep growing. Technological developments have opened up huge opportunities, facilitated work and enabled, as I said each builder to believe he’s a developer. Thanks then to the widespread entry of third-country nationals doing the heavy lifting, many at very cheap rates, whole areas of Malta have been degraded to shantytowns where the forces of law and order struggle to keep control.
All this is known but we relegate it to the backs of our minds. We then proceed to tie ourselves more through our insane confrontational attitude to anything and everything. Government succeeds government and each new bunch redraws the rules, brings in its own, usually incompetent, people, focuses on its own projects and lets what the previous one did fall in disrepair.
No government follows up the projects and principles of the preceding one and each behaves as though the sun rose up when they came to government.
Hence on a macro-economic level, the country moves by fits and starts, with U-turns after each change of government, losing precious time in the process.
Each government makes redundant anybody connected to the previous one, losing valid persons in the process and encouraging those on the government payroll to use their time in power to build a nest for their future.
We never learn. Our own rhetoric forces us to repeat the same mistakes. Meanwhile our neighbours, our competitors, today on the other side of the earth, move on ahead.
Yet we all believe Malta is the best in the world, as long as we were in power and the worst in the world when the other lot was on top.
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