What new value are Malta’s embassies and high commissions adding to Malta’s economy in these competitive days? What are the prospects? Every new Minister of Foreign Affairs undertakes to ensure that our diplomatic missions abroad interface fully with the island’s drive to attract foreign direct investment, which cannot flag for one moment.
That objective was reset by every ministerial appointment to the post since independence. Every minister takes it to heart with feeling. Each appointee makes it sound as if he had fashioned and hammered it out himself, even if the current minister has a heavy work load with EU affairs.
There is nothing wrong with being strong in defining and asserting one’s programme of action. That is how it should be done, but without stopping there.
Unless defining a programme is followed up with determined and structured implementation, it will amount to no more than heating up of old air, to no manifest purpose.
The diplomatic outposts are burdened enough with the usual functions that go with them. These have vastly increased with Malta’s accession to the EU. So has the minister’s own formal load. That is demonstrated by the amount of time he has to spend abroad.
Relating the office to the role, one can conclude that ministerial time has to be thinly spread. The man at the top has to prioritise, or otherwise flounder.
Prioritise though one might, however, the deeper, focused effort in each country where Malta has a diplomatic mission has to be made by the head of mission and his team.
That is why the diplomatic teams have to be carefully selected, and the available scarce resources combed to ensure that the most suitable men and women are identified and appointed ambassadors or high commissioners. Each minister will have his ideas and preferences.
From time to time an incoming minister does not agree with his immediate predecessor. That is part of the political game, even when it is played with very scarce resources.
Controversies over appointments should be avoided. But that is not always possible, as we found out a few years ago through a decision to terminate the term of the ambassador to Germany. The reason, according to media reports at the time, was that the gentleman had reached the age of 63. That controversial termination had exposed a lack of consistency in the way decisions were taken and appointments made. For instance, in the case of Malta’s High Commissioner in the UK, the late and lamented George Bonello du Puis served into his 70s, and age definitely was not one of his worries during his energetic time in office.
His successor, Michael Refalo, hovered on the 70s. He took a great deal of vim, in addition to experience, along with him to London.
Incumbent ministers will have their reasons for changing and will not set about explaining them. What they need to explain more is what results come about in the context of the objective they inevitably redefine when they became foreign ministers.
Controversies provide a touch of colour. Far more interesting would be a picture framing the synergies that have to be developed between the foreign ministry and the promoters of Malta as an industrial and services centre to dynamise the national effort.
Such synergies are – or should be – sought as a matter of policy. The appointment of the present High Commissioner to the UK, in the person of Joe Zammit Tabone, is an example of that. He comes from and is well known in the financial sector. Malta, by no means least through the savoir faire of the long-serving chairman of the Malta Financial Services Authority, has made a significant success in that area.
Joe Zammit Tabona offers synergies which, through his professional experiences in Malta, go even beyond that sector. One of his objectives, I learned, is to attempt to harness the abilities of Maltese personnel serving with financial institutions in London, of who there are two score or more.
One area of the Foreign Service that is not very much in the limelight is that of non-resident ambassadors. Despite the limitation imposed on them by their non-residential status these appointees should still be utilised to project Malta’s attractions as a foreign direct investment and a tourist destination.
Whether they are doing so is another matter. Financial constraints imposed by the Ministry of Finance as it strives to reduce the fiscal deficit may be sapping their ability to be the proactive factor they should be intended to become.
Foreign Minister Tonio Borg, doubling up as Deputy Prime Minister and burdened with the priority diplomatic work brought about by the situation in North Africa has his work cut out. Even so on a longer-term view the mobilisation he must make of his foreign assets is his biggest challenge.