Colonising a concrete jungle

Funny, isn't it? People have for years wanted the bombed theatre in Valletta to be rebuilt, some as an exact replica, others in a more contemporary style. Various excuses, mainly about money, politics and other priorities have stopped it happening.

Now we are ending up with a new building as you enter Valletta; not a building for the arts but a building to house parliamentarians more comfort-ably!

So the entrance to Valletta is defined by a Parliament? In a way, the ultimate symbol of we-know-what's-good-for-you-because-you-voted-for-us.

We wanted a building for culture and instead got a building for Parliament!

But the worst aspect has been that this is a total departure from the options being discussed for years. Yet, it is going to be imposed from above with no mandate to do so, really.

Renzo Piano may be an excellent designer. He may produce a good building, but an open-air theatre? How often can that be used? I remember a couple of windswept nights there watching dance. It certainly wasn't ideal.

If we really had insufficient funds, it would have been better for the entrance to Valletta to have been a wonderful garden. The island, which has grown uglier by the year despite a, we hope, democratically-enlightened Nationalist government, despite Mepa and despite having a Prime Minister who is responsible for it, remains over built. So Valletta could have presented a different image.

Instead, we are having a little bit of garden, ruins turned into an open-air theatre and a grand building for Parliament, which none of us wanted or were asked whether we wanted. Why wasn't it discussed prior to the EU election if the government wanted feedback, that is?

So much fuss was made about excavating beneath St John's Co-Cathedral, in Valletta. That project was stopped. Will all the pro-Malta groups get together now or are there so many opinions there will be no effective opposition to it?

It seems the Prime Minister is missing the spirit of the times. The spirit of the times is not very endeared to the political classes and, yet, millions of euros will be spent not only to house parliamentarians better but to place them where we can't miss them, at the very entrance to our beautiful capital city.

And just like a colony, we are being told we have to accept it. Is this the same as the Iranians having to accept the electoral result where more votes were cast than the actual population in certain areas?

If this is the knee jerk we-will-listen-to-the people reaction after the drubbing in the EU elections, Malta is going to have a very interesting four years.

A government that has to depend on the support of a character like Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, the Mistra disco king, in order to remain in office will simply make believe it is listening when it wants to and steam roll ahead when it doesn't. We really have exchanged one set of colonial masters for another. At least, the Brits left us with nicer buildings than the concrete jungle that has defined the last 20 years of this Administration and which was started, we must not forget, by the rape of Sliema by Dom Mintoff in the 1970s.

Will we never learn?

m_micallef@sky.com