Oh! Comino!

Well, it had to happen. They’ve spoilt pretty much everywhere, so Comino had to be next in line.

An application has been cooked up to build a hotel and a bungalow village on the so-far unspoilt islet of Comino. Because, as is known, construction is the motor of the Maltese economy. And the economy reigns supreme in this land of dosh and glory.

The population’s psychological well-being certainly doesn’t top this country’s priority list. It’s all a matter of private profit at public expense. By “public” I don’t mean only the State – but quite literally the public. We have to sacrifice Comino’s beauty for a few businesspeople to make easy money.

It is easy money. There’s “empty” land and you build on it. It’s not the creation of sustainable wealth-generating business, the kind that brings a continuous but sustainable stream of income. Tourism, if done properly, is a business that can generate long-term wealth and is necessarily predicated on sustainability. It has to be sustainable; otherwise, if the population ruins what’s left of the country’s beauty, the product (culture, history, scenery) ceases to attract potential costumers (tourists).

So, we’re being asked to sacrifice Comino’s natural beauty not to create a steady flow of income but to allow a few businesspeople a one-time killing... very much the story of the goose that lays the golden eggs.

We’re being asked to sacrifice the natural beauty of Comino... which means we’ll have one place less where we can go to relax free of charge. Nature in its natural state is free of charge. But for certain businesspeople, nature is an opportunity for making money – by “beautifying” nature, say, or by obliterating and replacing it with man-made structures aimed only at fleecing a docile, helpless population.

We’re being asked to sacrifice a place where we can re-charge our batteries, refuel our tanks, without having to go abroad. It won’t just be the bungalow village that’s being proposed that will gobble up Comino’s land and beauty. As the Għajnsielem Local Council astutely observed, the sumptuous bungalow village overlooking Santa Marija Bay will end up opening the door for land speculation on Comino. For how can the extraordinarily malleable Planning Authority say no to further development once it allows this bungalow village?

This is the huge problem engendered by this myopic rush to make money out of real estate. Once you say yes to one developer, you’ve got to say yes to all the others. Joseph Muscat had understood this and said it openly. Paradoxically, however, Muscat (on October 6, 2019) also acknowledged that the industry’s main problem was greed.

That was Muscat. What about his successor?

On September 28, 2021, Robert Abela reiterated his belief in the construction industry even though his Finance Minister had just wisely warned that the country needs to seek alternative paths to economic growth and wean itself off its dependence on construction.

Yes, it does sound a bit like a schizophrenic government. But by now we’re getting used to Prime Minister Abela’s way of doing things – trying to please everybody and ending up pleasing nobody.

But, truth be told, Minister Caruana was right. The country needs to diversify, to seek the creation of wealth through other industries, such as manufacturing and services. We need to be creative and gutsy. Of course it’s easier to make money by destroying nature, by raping Comino. But long-term, it’s also suicidal. We need businesspeople of vision, not businesspeople driven by greed. On this – and believe you me, it pains me to say this – Muscat was right. (At least, his words were.)

But we also need politicians who aren’t dependent on fourthfloor “donations”. To achieve this, we require the public funding of political parties.

Ultimately, political parties are rendering a service to the public. Without competing parties there’s no democracy; we’d end up with a one-party dictatorship. Funding political parties isn’t funding ego-trips of otherwise failed politicians. Funding political parties means assuring democracy.

Leaving political parties at the mercy of lobbies that seek to build (their) economic growth on the destruction of nature is a risk that, as time goes by, is increasingly becoming lethal for the country. The only way for things to change is for the “common people” to make their voice heard.

In the meantime, we nongreedy, non-real-estate-tycoons are morally bound toward ourselves and future generations to save this country’s natural beauty. Actually, as is laid down in article 9 of our so-far useless Constitution.

We need to resist the rape of

Comino, to resist the degeneration of that islet from Little Paradise into Big Obscenity.

By the bye, that’s why this opinion piece is titled “Oh! Comino!”... as a reference to Oh!

Calcutta!, a theatre piece of the 1970s some people still consider obscene.