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Just try living on this small, overpopulated, claustrophobic island for the rest of your life.
Now, try to relax.
Then it starts. The humming of cranes, and there are dozens of them. The rubble piling up unceremoniously and welcoming you everywhere, the trucks speeding past, driven by mad troglodytes covered in white dust, the roads blocked without any advance notice, the bulldozers, tearing the land apart.
The hammering into the rock, day after day, from those yellow monsters. The grey apartments that come together to form lifeless monuments. The smoke, the dust, the smell of diesel, the dirt, the mud and the shabbiness that greets you in every corner of the two islands.
It makes you want to leave this fair land and not come back.
And when daylight is replaced by nightfall, the evening is shaken by the petards and fireworks in honour of that 7th century saint who probably never existed in the first place.
You escape to the shore, but the shoreline is blocked by an illegal lido, and the beach is taken up by deckchairs and umbrellas. And of course the rusting metal barrels sliced in half posing as dust bins. The sand is black from barbeque leftovers and the sea is murky, with plastic bags and that occasional human excrement.
And then you receive an envelope at home with the blurred words in black – BRAND. Inside the leaflet, in full colour, bulleted notes resemble a boring tutorial from a marketing geek fresh out of university. Is this a joke?
No it is not. It is the cherry on the cake. It is simply one of the better examples of how to waste your money. Angrily, you take to the roads, Mugliett’s roads, and right there you encounter a billboard with the silly, average-looking man, hands outstretched, with the slogan: “This is the brand”.
It reappears at a bus stage advert. This is simply unbelievable. A coordinated and well-organised effort in throwing away public money. If anyone had any sense they would have given the money to some London-based advertiser, or better still subsidised a low cost carrier.
The taxes collected from the salaried Maltese public are wasted and then presented to us in the silliest, most bizarre, most banal campaign, ever. A highly paid Norwegian consultant has come up with the bright idea that the Maltese should know what branding is all about. Perhaps he should return to his Fjørd and leave our branding to ourselves and keep himself busy eating smoked herring in a chilled hut.
The first thing we need to do is to take the law into our hands and simply do the right thing. The simple thing that the public wants is to get this country working, get it cleaned up, put some discipline into the system and pump money where money needs to be pumped.
The other thing is to take this country away from the politicians and contractors. Yes, the contractors, the ones who have bought our politicians and never pay taxes, who dictate to our politicians, who tell our politicians what to do and worst of all have never bothered to stop in their orgy of destruction.
Who’d want to come to Malta if this island looks like Beirut? Even the countryside is in a shambles. All country roads are tipped with rubble, rotting material and old fridges. Roads are simply not roads – they are Mugliett lanes, sort of flat surfaces with protuberances and orifices.
And when you decide to leave a country road and stroll into the little nature that is left you will obviously have to face the hunters and trappers who own the Malta and Gozo that has not been taken over by the contractors.
Julian Manduca’s last article had this to say:
“New guidelines that came into effect back in April 2005 encouraged more high-rise development, allowing penthouses to be built on third storeys and ‘setback’ third floors on small houses in towns’ inner cores. While so many visitors complained that Malta is overbuilt, joking that “it will be nice when it is ready”, it would seem the construction industry is in for a field day: more construction in urban areas, more dust, noise and disturbance that assures Malta remains in a ‘not ready’ state.”
Little did he know what was coming next.
During the whole discussion on these Lorry Sant styled development zones, two issues were completely forgotten. The first one was that a year ago, this government and its minister, no champion of the environment, sanctioned more development, this time high-rise development: the number of potential so-called penthouses about to be built is just impossible to gauge. Nobody added this number to the large amount of plots that have been created by the new ODZ.
The second point is about the massive impact of development on the quality of our lives. And of this overdependence, on the construction industry. A new way of doing politics, indeed.
To live in some peace and quiet on this island is practically out of the question unless you are gifted, like some politicians are, with farmhouses in the middle of nowhere away from your electorate. How convenient to jump into your pool and not see or smell the hellhole in which your constituent is living.
Which brings me to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, who coined the wonderful axiom about being “irrational about rationalisation” in a back page article in The Times.
Well, Jeffrey and I hope to age gracefully (although my white hairs are more distinct than his) and when we do finally age I hope we will calmly look back and discuss how irrational Georgie’s decisions had been and how they have contributed to destroying our fair land.
And then we can also measure the amount of development in the last eighteen years compared to the previous years.
Our email, sms and telephone calls are no longer sacred
Why does civil society not react to the fact that all sms, emails and telephone conversations will be intercepted by the SS, the security service?
Who trusts the SS?
Do you?
Who is checking on the SS?
And why does the Labour press refuse to pass any commentary about the Israeli company that has won the contract for an interception equipment?
Are they scared of mentioning MaltaToday?
Who knows?
Everyone should know that from now on, their emails and SMSs are being screened by sophisticated software.
If for example you happen to pass a comment on your phone that that gal is a bomba.
Oops, there you are, your conversations are tapped into.
That is how the Israeli software works and that is how the SS will work on you.
How about it?
It is not only the magistrates who should be petrified about tapping, but anyone who believes in privacy and the right to stand up to big brother.
Just for the latest news, the system offered by the company Verint was refused by the Netherlands police after it was discovered that they left a “backdoor” facility in place. That’s technical jargon for leaving a door open for the software company to access the data without anyone’s knowledge.
How very nice.
Anyway, more interestingly, is the decision by government to ignore public procurement procedures in this tendering. Wonder why we entered Europe in the first place…?
Handcuffs in Valletta
Last Thursday, I witnessed a scene that should shame all of us and our armed forces. Two black men – obviously immigrants since they were being escorted by an AFM soldier – were effectively paraded, handcuffed, through Republic Street, as the soldier ambled slowly ahead of them. That was at 11:45am. An hour later, the immigrants were still in handcuffs as they waited by Palace Square along the main pavement, while the AFM soldier sat spread-eagled on the pavement, smoking a cigarette and staring at people walking by through his sunglasses.
It was like a scene from some cruel Mexican movie. Assuming that these people are migrants, given that they were being guarded by a soldier, this was a blatant case of carefree criminalisation of migration. It was also humiliating for the migrants, who were potentially asylum seekers. Handcuffed individuals should be bundled off straight from the Courts and off to their place of detention, without having to undergo such a humiliating ordeal.
It is not blood they are after...
The news is out that Romwald Lungaro Mifsud will still be on the MTA’s payroll for some months to come.
Hoteliers and others are distraught at the news, perhaps they should put some brakes on their anger. After months of calling for Romwald’s head they now want his bones and rib cage.
There are such things as contracts and these contractual agreements are not only relevant to public funded companies. Many private companies which are more often than not run like fiefdoms proceed with changing people or asking people to leave by handing out Golden parcels.
What is good for the Goose should generally be good for the Gander. Perhaps what people should be asking is whether Lungaro Mifsud really resigned or was kicked out.
A positive note, sacking Josephine!
Alfred Sant has the habit of ending his articles with a reference to his musical preferences. My last reference has to be a positive. I am under intense reader pressure to be positive.
Let me see… oh yes, the Union, the GWU. Hurrah to General Workers’ Union for making it clear to all of us that it is in destruction mode and has absolutely no intention of continuing to be relevant! |
