Would you believe it that after only 60 years of independence, after centuries of occupation and treatment as second-rate citizens in our own country, the Maltese have had the stupidity of throwing it all away already. Today, we are back to a new form of colonisation. We are once again foreigners and second-rate citizens in our own country.
This sweet land has been raped and captured by a handful of insensitive businessmen and a large swathe of equally insensitive foreign investors and ‘residents’. Add to these the numerous foreign workers, ranging from the upper levels of managers of hotels, banks, gambling companies and fintech companies to service industry labourers in whose hands we have placed all we cherish most.
Have not our sick, our infirm, our older parents been left to the handling, treatment and care of imported Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Indian workers instead of the Maltese nannies, nurses and carers we were used to? What about bus drivers, taxi drivers, cleaners, fishermen, restaurant waiters, cooks, cleaners and receptionists?
Not a word of Maltese among them.
No wonder the normal Maltese cower in their homes, leaving the rest of the country to be slowly turned into no-go areas for us, the Maltese. I recall Tigné, Pembroke, Marsa, Cottonera and forts St Angelo and St Elmo as being out of bounds for the Maltese under British colonial dominance.
Many of us just cannot enjoy our own country as we were doing since 1964. In the last 20 years, things began to change. First with the ‘new’ business areas based upon tax evasion in the years after EU membership, when the right of establishment and the sales of EU passports started seriously. Then came the gambling industry and, finally, after 2013, the policy of growth by population-cramming drove the last nail into our coffin of independence.
I do not recognise myself on this overcrowded platform- John Vassallo
All that is left now is to bury the coffin and do away with the Malteseness of Malta. All these big events on the granaries or in Valletta kill the spirit of our once elegant city built by gentlemen for gentlemen. It has turned into a Magaluf, where teenager gangs roam each evening amid thundering music and rubbish and eat horrible food cooked in underground kitchens without windows, which make me wonder about the hygiene of what one is supposed to be eating.
Pasta dishes at €22 a plate, or fancy supposedly Michelin-type dishes imported from God knows where and all tasting alike. Yet, the foreign cooks and waiters serving the foreign clientele want to make us believe that Malta has climbed a notch or two on the kitchen calendar of the world.
One is supposed to pay €180 or €200 for a meal consisting of miniscule portions of things prepared by someone else instead of being able to order à la carte for decent prices. Just travel 60 miles to Sicily to find that there one still feels the authenticity alive and well. We have lost it.
We are pricing ourselves to oblivion.
Traditional professions like farming and fishing are dying. No one knows how to build in Maltese stone or to build a luzzu any longer. Teachers must teach in English, leaving the minority of Maltese kids in the predominantly foreign classes to struggle in the first years of schooling.
Is this independence? If that is what we voted and fought for in 1964 then I will be dashed.
I do not recognise myself on this overcrowded platform in the middle of the Mediterranean any longer. Shall we change its name?
We should hold a competition to see who can come up with a better name than Malta. Crania is one. Gamblers Den another. Babylonia, to reflect the languages, is another. When our public debt reaches €11 billion this year and €13 billion in 2025, we should call ourselves Bankruptia or Dystopia.
John Vassallo is a former Ambassador to the EU.