Is it smart to speak of SmartCity?

I am sure that no reader harbours any doubts as to whether the word smart was used extensively or not during the last election campaign.

...the word smart became part of the Nationalist Party’s lexicon- Leo Brincat

It all began in February 2006 when Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi announced a key project in the southern part of the island just a couple of weeks before the local elections fell due. A few days later, we were told that discussions were underway with Tecom Investments to generate 5,600 new jobs, 65 per cent of which would be knowledge industry based.

The political spin was that the depressed south would be turned into the core service hub of the island. Thereon the word smart became part of the Nationalist Party’s lexicon. Or, to be precise, of both the PN and the Gonzi government, which, by now, have become virtually indistinguishable.

Many must surely remember how prominent personalities chose to endorse the government Smart Island strategy during the run-up to the 2008 election.

While Minister Austin Gatt is now blaming the delay in the implementation of the SmartCity project on the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, an entity that, according to him, the government would not dream of impinging on its independence, anyone tracking the past history of this project will recall how, following government prodding and insistence, the project had been fast tracked, primarily through Mepa itself.

Mepa, which Dr Gatt now gives the impression of avoiding touching with a barge pole, had, in November 2006, gone so far as to change the local plan to accommodate the development. They did so by also earmarking Ricasoli for information and communication technology industries while permitting residential, hotel and commercial development on the same site.

It was as a result of this plan that the way was paved for a new arterial road and for the relocation of the proposed sewage treatment plant.

For the record, Mepa approved the project in October 2008, just two months after the environment impact assessment was issued for public consultation. By any standard, this was considered to have been done in record time for any project of such a dimension.

While Dr Gatt recently tried to give the impression on Bondì + that the European Commission had based its critical remarks on delays in the implementation of the SmartCity project on malicious information allegedly fed to them by the Labour Party and another local newspaper, the small print tells a different story.

The Commission actually spoke of various ambitious government plans that are not always backed by clear and reliable implementation strategies and that SmartCity was only mentioned as one example.

Once the SmartCity CEO has chosen to claim the opposite of what the EU Commission did, it is worth recalling some other instances where the project promoters seem to have fallen behind schedule, particularly when compared to their well-spun hype. What worries me most as a taxpayer is that, through his actions and statements, Dr Gatt has officially let SmartCity off the hook because it is now determined by the government itself that the company is not in breach of its contract on the number of jobs to be generated, mainly because the obligation only kicks in when the government fulfils its side of the deal.

Forgetting for a moment the spate of resignations from key posts in the local company (CEO, CFO, senior project manager and infrastructure managers, among others) and the dismissal of a key international architectural firm, at one time the company did not only understandably blame any delays on the Dubai financial meltdown but at one stage the Libyan crisis was also brought into play.

On September 17, 2009, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech had confirmed that construction works on the project had gone through a slowdown in the first half of the year. But even then, Dr Gatt seemed to have one overriding priority in mind: to reassure one and all that SmartCity was definitely not in breach of their contractual obligations.

To my mind, what gave the project a dubious flavour from the word go was that they chose as their CEO the same guy who had been the government’s own chief negotiator on the project, apart from also being Dr Gatt’s own right-hand man. This was something that tended to remind me of the way Yeltsin-styled privatisations used to evolve. The public has every right to be kept in the loop about a project that was sold as the largest foreign investment ever made in Malta.

As far back as June 19, 2008, we were told that SmartCity was already attracting business partners internationally to operate from Malta. On that occasion, the Prime Minister, who has now conveniently slipped into a silent mode, had said that it is of satisfaction for his government and for him personally that the implementation of the project was moving according to its own ambitious time frames.

Although the minister is now consoling himself by claiming that, even if SmartCity will not happen, ICT jobs will still mushroom elsewhere on the island, two years ago he spoke a different language, mainly that SmartCity was the largest job creator under one roof in Malta’s history.

On February 26, 2008, he had told an Mcast Oracle-linked event that the government had already secured 2,600 jobs in the ICT sector in SmartCity alone, adding that these jobs were contractually secured. He had rubbished the PL pre-electoral boast to generate 6,000 new jobs in the new term when, without doing anything, SmartCity and the Freeport alone, were already contractually committed to generate even more jobs than that target.

While Dr Gatt is blaming it all on Mepa now, in March 2010, Abdul Rahman, the SmartCity CEO, had boasted that SmartCity worked well with Mepa all along.

The sad saga continues…

brincat.leo@gmail.com

www.leobrincat.com

The author, a member of Parliament, is the Labour Party’s spokesman for the environment, sustainable development and climate change.