The statement released last Wednesday by the inter-diocesan Commission for the Environment (KA) with the full backing of the Justice and Peace Commission (an important detail ignored by the media) is perhaps the most holistic, crisp and pungent criticism of the proposal for the construction of a University in Żonqor Point, Marsascala. Appropriately titled ‘All that glitters is not gold’, it shows that this is a proposal bereft of a clear vision and totally lacking any strategy, except that of making money for the investors.

It is important to note that the statement is the work of an inter-diocesan Commission. It combines together the dioceses of Malta and Gozo. Therefore it is not a tweet by Archbishop Charles Scicluna but a relatively long critical statement that was given the green light and has the backing of both our bishops.

Contrary to some of the senseless comments scribbled by the ill-informed beneath the story in times­ofmalta.com, KA has been taking strong positions on environmental issues since its setting up.

Its credibility is based on a strong track record, as any Google search would show. The present statement reminds us of its criticism of the so-called rationalisation exercise of 2006. That exercise may have helped the Nationalist Party to win the 2008 election as it took the wind out of Labour’s similar pre-electoral private promises to many people, but it did not help the cause of the Maltese environment.

The statement by KA is holistic, because while strongly emphasising the destruction of a very large outside development zone, it goes beyond it. KA speaks of the need to “draw up a strategy for the development of the tertiary education sector in Malta”. The basic question is whether the proposed university will enhance our tertiary education system or whether it is just an attempt to milk money from North African and Arab students.

It seems that the latter option is the project’s preferred one. This is not an initiative by some well-known university that will enhance our country’s prestige in the educational sphere.

This is an initiative by a Jordanian contractor. It is not an educational project but a commercial one. It does not serve the Maltese students but just targets foreigners.

The emphasis on the need of a strategy for the development of tertiary education, I believe, is a new perspective in this discussion. The KA was quite kind when it described as “simplistic” the Prime Minister’s comment that “another university will create competition to the University of Malta”. The Prime Minister surely knows that such a comment, together with his other comment about monopolies, is both unfair and untrue.

The so-called American University eliminates no monopoly as it is a business venture available only for super-rich foreigners, mainly Arabs. In the light of all this it is inflammatory and bullish for the Prime Minister to describe the University of Malta as “a closed shop system lorded over as it is by the few, for the few”. Dom Mintoff must have been greatly pleased by Muscat’s salvoes at the University as such vicious and classist vitriolic is vintage Mintoffian. We have to wind back to the heyday of the 1980s to find a similar diatribe.

Muscat’s appeals for suggestions about alternative sites is just a ploy

The drawing up of a tertiary edu­cational policy has to be followed, according to KA, by a land-use planning process. It is within this context that KA criticises the choice of ODZ land for this university.

It also quite rightly asks how on earth the government can justify giving away such a large tract of land to one individual and, to boot, without any call for expressions of interest. The government issues tenders for small parcels of land, said KS, but “in the case of the Żonqor Point project it has decided to choose an investor and grant 90 tumoli of land without any kind of competition”. It is not only the KA that is surprised, although basing ourselves on the track record of these past two years, one should not be surprised.

On top of this gift-offer, the government changed Maltese legislation and lowered the standards needed for the setting up of a university. As a result of these changes an institution that offers just four undergraduate degrees will now be called a university. In a perfect example of double-speak the authorities told us that criteria were changed to up the standards.

Now Muscat’s Commission for Higher Education will, quite naturally, solemnly decree that the new university satisfies the new lowered standards and bless the project. It is no wonder that given this preferential treatment the Jordanian contractor said he did not take more than a minute to decide to come to Malta!

The holistic approach taken by the writers of the statement of KA enabled them to steer away from the Prime Minister’s red-herring about proposing alternative sites.

This is a government project and it is nobody’s responsibility but that of the government to find a decent place where the project can be housed. Muscat’s appeals for suggestions about alternative sites is just a ploy. He will keep on torpedoing all the sites that will be named in the hope that people will get so tired in the process that they will desist opposing.

The KA also takes Mepa to task. “Is Mepa oblivious to its own local plan policies and regulatory obligations?” KA should not have been “baffled by statements by Mepa that it [Żonqor Point] was found to be so [the most suitable site] after a prelimi­nary assessment”.

It is a publicly known fact that the wish of the political masters is the cate­gorical imperative that drives the former guardian of our environment now sacrificed on the altar of rabid over-development.

KA concluded the whole saga very well when it stated that:

“Unfortunately, the whole process in the proposed project has been opaque, very insensitive to the environment, and its lasting impacts are not clear.”

The present family silver and the inheritance of our future generations should not be dispatched so cheaply and so shoddily.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt

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