I read the parliamentary reports about the Individual Investor Programme with great amusement. Despite the fact that I was only reading the newspaper reports, I could practically hear the shrill ranting coming from the Opposition benches.

The prize for the most hysterical and incoherent speech of the evening goes to Nationalist MP Clyde Puli. He managed to win this fairly and squarely by making a speech which included references to canned peas, Rużar Briffa and everything in between.

For those of you who missed out on Puli’s grand performance, here’s a brief summary: The Labour government is selling Maltese citizenship as it would sell a can of peas from the grocer’s shelf. I’m guessing that it’s been some time since Puli pushed a trolley down the supermarket aisle – he doesn’t seem to be very up-to-date with the price of canned peas. Or maybe he buys peas at €650,000 a pop.

Following the peas, Puli swung to poetry and quoted a snippet of Briffa’s poem Jum ir-Rebħ, where he described Maltese spectators at a football match singing the Maltese national anthem since it had not been played by the band present. So far, so moderately irrelevant. It began to get really crazy when Puli reminded Labour MPs how heartily they had sung along with Mary Spiteri and Renato to the tune of the rock opera Ġensna.

I couldn’t really fathom what this has to do with the price of eggs. As far as I know, Ġensna has always been laughed at by the Nationalists and dismissed as groan-inducing Socialist entertainment. As for Spiteri, it’s a bit odd for Puli to be referring to her as some PN poster girl – the same person who had said that the Nationalist government would sink like the Titanic. Maybe all those fundraising coffee mornings at the Stamperija are addling Puli’s brains.

Nationalist Whip David Agius also had supermarkets on the brain. He said that Maltese citizenship had ended up on the supermarket shelves (presumably next to Puli’s peas), that the Government had given in to consumerism. He concluded by saying that the people would rather take on more financial burdens than accept a scheme such as the one being proposed.

I suspect that Agius hasn’t sounded out the public on that one – or maybe he is privy to secret surveys we don’t know about. Either way, I’m not seeing people lining up to assume more tax burdens – least of all the employees of Medialink, who haven’t been paid for some time.

The biggest problems related to the IIP are the fact that it is a one-off donation and the opaqueness of the scheme

Kristy Debono accused the Labour Government of ruining Malta’s reputation and Joseph Muscat of being in a desperate frenzy to enact the law implementing the scheme as soon as possible. “Our country is not for sale at a discounted rate,” Debono cried repeatedly.

Oh dear. Maybe I’m not as patriotic as the Ġensna-quoting Puli or Kristy ‘No Discounts’ Debono, but I find nothing wrong with the principle of having a scheme whereby citizenship can be acquired. There are other ways besides the Individual Investor Programme by which citizenship may be acquired. For example, citizenship may be acquired by naturalisation, when a foreign spouse has been married to and living with a Maltese citizen for five years – he/she may apply for Maltese citizenship.

Now that option is clearly in place for the obvious reasons of securing family unity. But the fact that it exists means there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the concept of people who were not born in Malta being allowed to acquire Maltese citizenship.

It could even be argued (rather coldly) that naturalisation by marriage does not ensure secure economic advantages for the country, seeing that the naturalised person may not possess considerable means or assets.

I wish Puli and the rest of the hysterical Ġensna-quoting Opposition members would calm down. They should stop getting hysterical and accusing us of betraying our birthright and other such tosh and address the issue logically. As Albert Fenech said, there is nothing wrong with selling citizenship.

The important thing is that it’s done well. As I see it, the biggest problems related to the IIP as proposed are the fact that it is a one-off donation that is not linked to continuing investment and the opaqueness of the scheme.

The latter is of greater concern especially in view of the fact that the names of people acquiring citizenship in this way will not be published in the Government Gazette. I can’t see why this should be the case, especially when the names of people who acquire citizenship by naturalisation are so published.

The names of all should be published to allow for all necessary scrutiny and to ensure that undesirables who have slipped through the due diligence procedures may be caught out. If we don’t know who has acquired a Maltese passport in this manner, we have no way of getting to know or find out about a person’s background.

The Government would be amiss if it did not amend the law in this sense to prevent abuse of the system. By doing so, it would be doing the right thing and hopefully depriving Puli of inspiration for further peas and poetry speeches.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt