It doesn’t require rocket science
An island 316 km2 in area, 27 kilometres long and 14.5 kilometres wide, with a population we now know as being 440,000 plus all those tourists flocking here – should not pose any particular difficulties to be managed well.
Instead, it does. Oh, yes, it does.
As a result, the country we call home is dirty, shoddy, and decidedly third-world in many aspects.
While we all pretend Malta is among the best, if not the best, in Europe, we seem unable to get most things right.
From chaotic traffic on the roads, exacerbated by the searing heat and by sheer lack of police on the roads, to roads that have not been cleaned for a long time, to construction workers who blatantly break the law, to rubbish dumped anywhere even when there is a system, which costs nothing, where the local council sends a truck over to take away bulky refuse…
And that’s just what one can see with some immediacy.
Then there are the failings which are not immediately apparent but which do exist and which render our lives worse day after day – the delays whenever one needs something from the State bureaucracy, the delays at court, a very inefficient police force.
We can go on and on with our list of daily grumbles. Something tells us we have always been like this and we will always be like this. Despite the periodic changes of government, despite the pre-electoral promises, despite the commitments made.
But this is insane, this is outrageous. Given Malta’s dimensions, it does not require rocket science to run a decentlyappointed small country.
For all the long words and convoluted statements that politicians make, the solutions to most of our endemic problems are very simple. And most do not require huge outlays of funds or state-of-the-art machinery.
Most of our endemic problems require a focused authority. Our suspicion is that by devolving the authority struc- tures through the creation of the local councils, we have made the problem of tackling Malta’s ills that much worse. It is one thing to devolve local authority and quite another to set up a functioning structure to tackle eg road paintings, road cleanliness, pockets of neglect, etc. What these problems need is a focused authority that has the means at its disposal and the will to tackle the problems in a way that can be seen and felt.
These structures have to have the proper means. If Malta’s roads need more police, then so be it. The worst thing we can see around us is having all those local authorities each without the funds to tackle the problems they are responsible for.
We cannot have all these multiple small authorities each starved of funds and of the means to do a good job. We used to think that Malta is so small its problems could all be solved in a jiffy. Instead, after all these years of independence, EU membership and the lot, we may have made some improvements here and there but by and large we are still a third world country by the look of it. There are countries in the Third World which have better roads and where rubbish does not accumulate on street corners.
It’s not rocket science that is needed, but a structure of authority that is simple to operate and sufficiently strong to withstand political pressures. And that is focused on the small and simple steps that must be taken to register a sensible improvement in the island we call home.