Harnessing Gozo’s considerable potential

The recent editorial on Gozo’s “limitations” (July 11) shows a compelling concern about the delicate balance one needs to strike in harnessing Gozo’s potential. It also puts the valid question as to whether an inflated bureaucracy would be beneficial for Gozo’s progress.

However it starts from, in my opinion, the wrong premise, that Gozo’s lifestyle would suffer from an increased economic activity.

In my view this is a very narrow way of looking at Gozo’s “dilemma”. Although the economic weight of retaining the island’s allure to visitors cannot be discarded, this cannot be at the significant cost to Gozo’s future as a viable place for our young generation to make a living. The inhabitants’ well-being should surely be at the forefront when considering the balance to be struck in retaining the island way of life.

The editor also seems to be restricting the term “industrialisation”, to the manufacturing industry and the comment about the dangers of the “hive of activity” may suggest an influx of immigrant employment, presumably from the larger sister island, which, by the way, is of course anathema to the Maltese way of thinking. In any case, such jobs created in the past, on the back, let it be said, of the foresight of the Gozo Civic Council in establishing an industrial estate on the island during the 1960s, and which brought welcomed economic prosperity to many households, certainly did not harm Gozo in any significant way. Nevertheless, today we have to look upon other ways to create employment. Industry, we all know, need not mean just manufacturing, and our young and increasingly qualified generation will certainly take modern industries’ academic and technological demands in their stride. Gozo’s differentiation is an economic opportunity to be grasped for the benefit of all, and not preserved solely for weekenders.

Obviously this requires the infrastructure and the logistics to be in place for such industries to flourish. Although an effort to revamp Gozo was seen on the change of government in 1987, after the abysmal misadministration of the previous decade, this has since petered out in half botched and uncoordinated initiatives. Surely employment creation for the island’s young generation should be the prime benchmark on which policy outcomes are scrutinised, for without its young, so lovingly reared, the island will die. The truth is that we have suffered the loss, and will continue to lose, jobs in the tourist industry, either to outright closure of hotels or through the lowering of their standard. Meanwhile the industrial estate, instead of being upgraded into a technopark, is now a graveyard of workshops, and the neglect of the area has to be seen to be believed.

For anything of substance to happen, we need the will to find a solution, which of course is the crux of the matter; for that resolve can only be found if Gozo’s status within the overall context of the nation, to borrow so apt a term, is thought out properly and established. I suggest that in this context, and contrary to what The Times states, Gozo enjoys, as yet, very little status indeed. In turn, I feel that this resolve will only come about if there is an acceptance by the central planners that harnessing the island’s considerable potential will benefit the nation as a whole, and we have to move away from the notion that any initiative for Gozo benefits only its inhabitants, separate from the rest of our nation. Even if it were so, there would be nothing bad in it as Gozitans are Maltese citizens as well.

Therefore we either have to find the solution within the ambit of the central planners, or a strong Gozo administration structure has to do this for them.

In my view neither has happened yet, and the fact that proposals to strengthen Gozo’s governance structure were disseminated by a parliamentary secretary, and a Gozitan, bears this out. Indeed with all the honest efforts of the incumbent, a ministry, without the solid backing of a cross-Cabinet agenda and willpower to place Gozo on the islands’ economic map, cannot do the job on its own.

So it is not what shape or form the structure of Gozo’s administration should have that is important but the clout with which it is vested. We don’t want to punch above our weight and dominate the outcome of elections as the editorial suggests. If we did, there could be other solutions to represent Gozo in the nation’s highest institution. But we do expect more than just being considered primarily as an idyllic backwater for a quiet weekend.