Archive for the “Local Affairs” Category

Well this is a right mess. The transportation workers have decided to go on strike, possibly inspired somewhat by their counterparts in Europe. Busy roads came to a standstill, the city was besieged and the shopkeepers felt rather lonesome. Tempers flared and acts of aggression, intimidation and vandalism took place in the presence of locals and tourists alike and many opted, voluntarily or otherwise, to remain at home.

I am of two minds about the strike. While on the one hand I despise the fact that the transport workers took their protests to the general public, their peers and also the tourists whom we owe a happy holiday (lest we forget that they actually pay to visit the Islands), and while I do not feel that the liberalization of the hearse sector warranted anything of this sort, I have heard rumours that the Nationalist government had offered promises not to liberalize the transportation sector during the election’s eleventh hour. It seems that the transportation drivers are in possession of a letter signed by Mugliett supporting this claim… and I personally do not take kindly to deceit or broken electoral promises. If this claim is indeed true then it would be more than safe to say that the wrong party is in power today, having won an election upon the wings of deceit and misinformation. If true then Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi should both call an investigation and either relinquish a seat to the Opposition in the spirit of stepping up to the plate of accountability or, if he would like to continue dancing the ballad of unaccountability, call for a vote of confidence.

However… a few comments about the Government’s handling of the protest. I am of the opinion that the daily slash in subsidies was an extremely efficient if slightly heavy-handed approach to seek to end it. The setting up of alternative forms of transportation was also commendable, even if it has hit a number of speed bumps due to resistance. While I also commend the initiative to set up an alternative taxi service for chauffeur-driven vehicles I would suggest that € 15 is a ludicrous price for any but the longest journeys upon the Islands, and is in fact a step backwards.

Lastly I would like to point out the obvious. Any situation where drivers own the vehicles is a situation where drivers likewise have a lot of clout. If one were to remove this privilege then the driver would no longer have the protest dynamic of a small entrepreneur but of a regular employee. Hence it would only be a matter of hiring replacements on a short term basis until resolution.

A spokesperson for the EU border security agency Frontex has stated that Nautilus is not the solution to Malta’s illegal immigration. The general feeling gotten is that it is Libya that is to blame for the failure of Frontex to solve the problem. This spokesperson then went on to compare Nautilus with the sister project Hera in the vicinity of the Canary Islands and how relative success was achieved there thanks in no small part to the cooperative efforts of Senegal and Mauritania.

This may indeed be the case and Libya may very well not be cooperating with Nautilus but there is a fundamental question that nobody in Europe seems to be asking. Why should Libya bear the weight in responsibility for the mass illegal migration from an entire continent? Is this truly a productive or constructive attitude towards solving the problem or is it merely provoking the very same stonewalling that Libya is accused of?

Libya is every bit as much of a victim in this matter as Malta is and likewise has every bit as much of an interest in solving the problem of illegal immigration from their own perspective. Libya unofficially has some control over the flow of illegal migrants from its shores; it is almost unfathomable to imagine it being any other way considering the highly engineered flow of immigrant, waxing and waning to conveniently cater for political events.

However how different is this strategy from the concept of “burden sharing” brought up in the run-up to the previous election? It may sound good on paper and I am pretty sure that Josie Muscat had done his homework on the matter (which compares favourably to the Nationalist’s non-plan of action in both its previous term and its current term in government) but I feel that there remain a number of logical flaws, some of which are pungently, if effectively, highlighted through comparison to Libya’s own brand of “burden sharing”.

Returning to Libya as a topic, let us attempt to identify its relationship to the issue at hand, illegal immigration, and classify it accordingly. Firstly Libya is not a source country but a country of transit, just as some people claim that Malta is. Secondly Libya is criticized for its treatment of African immigrants within its borders – it is not a picture of harmony. Therefore to attempt to ‘solve’ illegal immigration from a purely pan-European perspective would be an exercise in futility as too many essential pieces of the puzzle are disregarded.

We will get absolutely nowhere if we continue regarding our closest southern neighbour with this degree of suspicion and disregard to their own interests. Once we successfully adjust our egotistically-geared nationalistic perspectives to more communitarian-geared nationalistic perspectives, where benefit within a neighbouring nation is deemed a positive not only to that nation but to one’s own nation, especially if prominent in its adjacency, then I feel that we would have taken a second crucial step to solving the illegal immigration issue.

Well it is painfully clear who took the last election with a little help of media deceit (withholding information and offering an incomplete picture is a form of deceit), propaganda and the legal texts crafted and amended by… ‘drum rolls’ those who took the last election. What was the previous year a restrained flow has now amplified and, with the Summer being such a favourable time of year for travel, the Maltese Islands are seeing dozens to one or two hundreds of illegal immigrants on a daily basis.

It looks like we may very well be setting a record in illegal immigrants received this year. Perhaps we should apply to Guinness for the dubious honour of ‘record illegal immigrants retained per capita in the World’ and also for the equally dubious honour of ‘record amount in welfare paid to the upkeep of illegal immigrants per capita’. Indeed together anything is possible when it comes to scraping the bottom of the barrel in ludicrousity. Do we truly plan on waiting for another five years to demand our votes back?

It is also very annoying that certain quarters are keen to play the mythologically sharpened ‘race card’ against practically any and all who would find this situation completely unacceptable. Perhaps this is why so few remain who dare to express their thoughts and concerns on the matter. Vilification within what has been emerging as a bureaucratic police state (a state where the police and mechanics of law are deemed required to retain absolute control over the populace) could have had something to do with that. After all this country has the dubious honour of sentencing a person to two years imprisonment suspended for four years, plus a significant fine, for expressing his thoughts and concerns and anger on the situation (oh yes and for “insulting ‘His Excellency the President of Malta’”).

Well illegal immigration is a major problem in Malta. I would say that it trumps and dwarfs the utilities surcharge & the rise in fuel prices combined (not to mention others) as it is ongoing, escalating and exacerbating. Furthermore the mushrooming population of illegal immigrants represent similarly mushrooming costs and the money has to come from somewhere.

But before any talk of solutions can begin, the issue has to be recognized to be the problem that it is. As Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi relatively recently and indirectly sputtered out, and as Norman Lowell had incessantly claimed before himself and Josie Muscat and practically all other individuals calling themselves politicians (including myself) the problem of illegal immigration could be likened to an ‘invasion’. So let us start to perceive it as the national crisis that it is!

Many individuals have spent the greatest part of their lives contributing to society both through the work that they have provided as well as through the taxation and securities that they have paid. Throughout the educational process when such individuals were still young, they were brought up to believe that the way to be successful in life was to perform well in school, get a well-paying, stable job in which one could contribute and earn a living, get married and raise a family and, once a ripe age is reached, the cherry on the cake would be to retire and enjoy the ‘golden years’ of their lives and live happily ever after on a state pension.

The reality has been changing and continues to change and such changes are gradually but surely sending shocks throughout the system. For one thing, the concept of the stable job is dissipating in favour of a more flexible workforce where movement is a fact of life.

Secondly, it takes about 4 working individuals to support the pension of the average retiree and, in the context of an ageing population; this is placing strain upon resources. The practice is unsustainable. Being most suited to growing (or at least stable) populations, the pinch of this reality is being felt, with pensions remaining on the low side while the age at which one becomes applicable for pensions creeps upwards. This has a two-pronged effect.

Materially, requiring the taxation contribution of four working persons to support a single pensioner in an ageing population forebodes a coming bottleneck where the functional continuation of pensions will no longer remain sustainable. Already the motions to shift the pensionable age upwards, under the convenient justification in the form of an increased life expectancy, may itself be interpreted to be a quiet admission of a system groaning beneath the weight of its own burden. A not so quiet potential sign of admission is the growing popularity and media emphasis on private augmentation in social securities and private pension schemes.

I am under the impression that this has not gone unnoticed by the general population. There is a thus far suppressed but growing awareness of the situation and a growing fear that the mandatory social security dues paid to the government under the impression that such would be going towards one’s own pension, may in fact not be honoured. One likely reason why this may not have been brought to the fore as of yet is because the engine is still grinding on and has not ground to a halt as of yet – the pensions are still being honoured so far – out of what is supposed to be the securities of the pensioners of tomorrow.

Once the reality of the situation does sink in however, the social implications may make themselves plainer to see. While it is highly doubtful that the younger generations would look upon their elders as parasites in the event of a pension crash, and would almost certainly not attribute blame in the event of a seizure, the elderly person may feel the weight of burden upon themselves simply because that is the placement that the system would have engineered them to assume in the present of any such crisis to be. As for the Government… well the Nationalists have already gotten away with rises in VAT, departure taxes, utilities surcharges (the precursor of which Labour failed to get away with a decade earlier) and who knows what more. People will still pay through the nose and the people will still blindly and unquestioningly support those who seem accountable only to themselves.

Every one of us who has ever been behind the wheel after sun-down has likely experienced it. Some of us, especially those of the younger generations, use the twilight hours to let off steam after a day of labour. Some others use them for relaxation. Whether in the chaos of a discotheque, the relative calm of a shore side promenade, in the bustle of a familiar pub or indulging in the fare of a restaurant, many tend to involve a few minutes of driving time and driving time after dark can be a rather risky affair, particularly when one needs to skip town.

When one leaves the relative population density of the population centres, the towns and the villages, we tend to find that the roads become more winding and are poorer served by street lighting. We find ourselves relying more upon the headlamps of our vehicles and the more cautious of ourselves tend to slow down to compensate. However other drivers do similarly and the impact upon one’s visibility can be very similar to or worse than that apparent in the picture. Visibility in meters decreases considerably and one is much less able to make out what lies ahead. To compound the problem, the lack of road lighting means that one has much less of an idea of what or who is lurking or walking along the road. Even worse is the tendency for such roads to lack even rudimentary pedestrian pavements.

Unfortunately we reside within a country that only considers seeking to solve problems when fatalities occur, and such is not guaranteed. Why is it that the areas where tiny shrines to the deceased are set up tend also to have been or remain poorly lit and poorly served by pavements? Why is it that a much larger portion of animals killed during the night also happen to be within areas of poor lighting? I would hazard to guess that hundreds of animals fall victim to Maltese roads every year and I would wager that the density of such fatalities would rank highly amongst EU member states, were they recorded.

Of course the countryside is not the only place that one can find poor lighting. The lighting infrastructure of the Maltese Islands, overall, is ageing, although it seems to be sufficiently maintained thus far overall. However more striking are the gaps that exist in the lighting infrastructure. Within Paceville alone there are several poorly-lit roads just one-to-two blocks away from the entertainment hub. The roads leading down to the promenade are regularly used as makeshift latrines and I would hazard to guess that they are also locations of elevated mugging and rape risk, as crime thrives in the dark.

Street lights may be costly to run, in their current outdated set up, but today (preferably yesterday) is the time to start to phase old energy-guzzling bulbs out in favour of LED-technology. While I am not certain of the suitability of the technology in high velocity, non-urban zones I do believe that they would be ideally suited to lighting up the street level of our urbanized localities, including Paceville.

Well, it was a rather typical scene for a Friday night. The music from many discotheques permeated into the streets, the different tunes and beats polluting each other as they did so, as did the chilly overflow from air-conditioning units blissfully unaware of the practical doubling of the surcharge in recent days. The cigarette fumes unfurled and reached for the sky in a futile exercise of vanity and the spent glass bottles of alcoholic beverages skittled and rolled upon the streets, long forgotten by the lads and girls who had drunken them dry earlier.

In the heart of Paceville there was a young man struggling prostrate upon the ground, his forehead bruising and bloodied and a look upon his face that can only be described as a picture of rage and anguish combined. Several youths closed in and withdrew from the crowd around him, raining down kicks and blows upon him in the most cowardly of fashions, with precious few fools stepping in to break up the fight. Bottles were broken, skin was broken, shirts were bloodied and stained long before the boys in blue, a half-dozen-men-strong, strolled in to pick up the pieces.

I do not know how this incident began but I do know how it should not have ended. I was under the impression that glass containers were barred from the streets of Paceville and with good reason. Not only do broken bottles pose a lasting danger to the exposed feet of revellers but they are only too easily converted into instantaneous potentially lethal weapons.

It is disturbing how few individuals there typically are in any crowd willing to interfere in such potentially deadly conflicts. It is indeed more convenient to stand by the sidelines and watch the show unfold but when the cost of one’s impromptu entertainment is potentially the life of another, it just smacks of something not too far removed of the evil of the act itself.

It has been reported on the Times that Minister Austin Gatt has gone on record stating words to the effect that investing in alternative sources of energy (with the exception of nuclear energy) would be more expensive compared to remaining with fossil fuels. He also went on to note that there exists a cable that leads from Malta to Sicily that would enable Malta to purchase electricity from abroad.

Yet Dr. Gatt also went on record stating that investment within a deep sea wind farm is still on the drawing board – never mind that weeks earlier it was reported that the Nationalist government was still looking into exactly how it would implement another electoral promise of energy-saving bulbs.

What was not mentioned however, is how this fits in with the earlier refusal/ stonewalling of an alternative energy laboratory several years ago to have been set up in the vicinity of what has now been sold off to the owners of Smart City.

What is also similarly confounding to common logic is Dr. Gatt’s sound judgement on the viability of alternative energy in the context of a resource as volatile in supply and in price as oil. Is his judgement not as unsound as if the Mayor of Venice were to come out and say that loss of the city to the waves would be viable comparative to the setting up of sea water barriers to keep water levels down at high tide?

What one deeply suspects at this time is that the following may be true. The undersea cable is in itself an expressed interest in purchasing power from abroad. While this may very well make economic sense, the government needs to remember that it is running a country and not a private company. They are running our lives and I for one would like to see that they don’t ruin our lives through furthering the existing dependency culture that persists throughout various segments of society.

Sure alternative energy ‘may’ be more costly in the short run, perhaps over the span of five-to-ten years, but beyond this time an intelligently set up alternative energy grid would pay off big time. We also need to incorporate alternative energy into our daily lives – our architecture – not just out at sea (which I would be wary of, not convinced of the government’s ability to properly set up and maintain such feats of engineering so far out of the discerning sight of its citizens). Furthermore one cannot neglect to mention that alternative energies tend to be greener and this in itself could have a positive effect upon pollution related healthcare costs.

It is a responsibility, but it is firmly my belief that privatizing the family silver is not going to pay up the booze forever. The government cannot continue to shun what used to be and remains its responsibilities and, if it truly isn’t prepared to face the challenges head on, then perhaps it should step aside for those who will as such responsibilities were and remain strategic interests in promoting and upholding the living standards of the people.