I wonder if any of you found the reportage on a conference about direct foreign investment as fascinating as I did. According to the report, Malta got the dubious honour of being dubbed one of the best kept secrets while businessmen complained about the islands' lack of visibility in international markets.
Had the "businessmen" been made up exclusively of our local plutocrats I would have agreed with reservations while making allowances for some Malta gemgem, but this was a conference of heavyweights like the partner of the Dutch branch of Ernst and Young and the president of Fimbank. It is, in fact, what Margrith Lutschg-Emmenegger said about Malta's lack of corporate identity that stuck out a mile.
The Fimbank president declared that "no one knows about Malta". Well, well, here we are, full members of the EU, with our MPs and MEPs rubbing shoulders with the good and the great, being told that our "invisibility" is one of our main challenges. Twenty if not 30 years after the government of the day was advised to cater for the masses, to propagate the most lacklustre socialist policies and go for the cheaper and mediocre option, we have these financial Rampollini telling us that we were wrong; deeply and fundamentally wrong, and that what we should have done, which is as obvious as the nose on your face, dear reader, was to have focused "solely on an expensive, top quality service".
We had always opted for the cheaper get-rich-quick solution, one in which a long-term investment mentality, whether it be financial, cultural, educational or simply social, does not exist. We have started paying the bitter price for this mixture of folly and greed that pervades Maltese politics and now attempt turning back the clock to 1971 when the newly-elected Labour Party was faced with a tabula rasa. That will require another miracle wrought by San Ġorġ Preca.
In 1971, had Dom Mintoff taken a leaf out of what other small states were doing at the time I am convinced that today we would have really been the Switzerland of the Mediterranean in the true sense of the word. Instead, we had all the overdue social reforms being enacted in an unstaunchable torrent of ill-feeling and vindictiveness. Vendettas against the establishment, against the Church, against the Judiciary, against the British, against the banks were carried out with particular spite and malice that all but negated all the good things that came along with the flow. It was MLP contra mundum. What replaced all this was stuff bought on the cheap; more and more and more of it.
One must examine what Product Malta was and, to a certain extent, still is. The main asset is language. The fact that so many of us can speak the lingo as well as the average Londoner is invaluable in so many different types of investment, yet, all in the name of some misplaced sense of nationalism, for many, many years, English spoken in public or written in the local media has been frowned upon to the extent that the level has fallen well below the mark.
The other asset, just as important, is our heritage and history, which has been despoiled mercilessly. This is what makes us unique in the Med and what Malta is all about. Take a sweeping look at the panorama from off the Upper Barrakka and there you have Malta's entire history before you.
It is not enough to merely maintain these relics of our past. We are collectively in duty bound to perpetuate the tradition of high quality laid down by our forefathers. This has not been the case. Malta has sacrificed quality to quantity long ago, which brings us the statements made by Mrs Lutschg-Emmenegger, which, frankly, could have been made, and were, by anyone with a modicum of common sense long ago. Had we, for instance, taken a leaf out of the Monegasque book financially, culturally and aesthetically we would, I am sure, have been in a much better position than we are now. Monaco, by the way, is about as large as Comino but it is a principality run by one man whose family owns it and loves it and not a bunch of politicians who are here today and gone tomorrow. That, my friends, makes all the difference.
The private sector, according to Mrs Lutschg-Emmenegger, must be the driving force for the government to make the right moves or it would wait a long time (how about 63 years to propose an inadequacy instead of the opera house site?) to make amends. It should be the private sector that should take action. What Mrs Lutschg-Emmenegger may not realise is that it is the plutocratic private sector that has dictated terms to successive governments for a very long time in a manner that is little short of feudal. Consequently, governments have been invariably strong with the weak and weak with the strong as the case of Mepa has clearly shown.
Meanwhile, we remain firmly "off the foreign investors' radar". We simply do not exist!