This week, I came across a voice recorded interview that Daphne Caruana Galizia had given to a Finnish radio station in 1998. Before I pressed the play button, I had to pause and jog my memory because, let’s face it, a mere two decades ago the world was quite a different place.

Mark Zuckerberg was still at secondary school and Facebook was still just the name for the booklet of alumni graduating from American universities. If anyone said ‘Twitter’, the only thing that would have crossed people’s mind was ‘sound of bird’. And if you said ‘Instagram’, the reply back would have been a baffled: “‘Um, do you mean ‘telegram’?” ‘Google’ was just baby babble, “goo-goo, gaa-gaa, goo-gil”. And if you wanted to know when the man first walked on the moon, you had to reach out for the encyclopedic tome ‘L-M’.

The internet was then quite a new wonder, it was mostly used to send e-mails (or IRC messages to strangers) and no one really ever imagined how it would take over the world and how it would reshape us all. In 1998, we still had no concept of an online or virtual world as a different one to the real world.

I was, at the time, working at the short-lived tabloid newspaper The People. Then, just as now, Malta was under a Labour government and on the verge of an imminent election. In this 1998 interview, Daphne, then only 34 and already the most read newspaper columnist on the island, did not talk politics; she talked about the self-censorship of the Maltese press and the clash of cultures that it was embedded in.

Now, many attribute the phenomenon of the ‘two Maltas’ to the language question and believe that Malta is divided into two groups: English-speaking people who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth and Maltese-speaking people who needed Dom Mintoff to save them from the gutter of poverty.

“My nanna was so poor she could not afford to buy books,” is something that socialist people often cite to show how, er, socialist they are. And to that I always want to reply: forget my nanna? My parents could not afford to buy books when we were little. We went to the national library every fortnight and came back home with a stack. That’s how it was for white- and blue-collared families, irrelevant of the language spoken at home (Maltese in my case).

And herein lies the interesting argument that Daphne put forward in 1998. The divide is not PN-PL or north-south or poor-rich, neither is it a divide of what language you speak at home. It is not a language question but a reading question, she said. 

This country cannot stay stuck in 1998- Kristina Chetcuti

“On the one hand,” Daphne told her interviewer, “you have people who are exposed to foreign news media, reading magazines, newspapers and constantly absorbing American, British, Italian and French ideas and so are used to the way things are done out of the island.” On the other hand, you have another cultural block: the non-reading one, people who listen to local radio and television and are not exposed to print media from beyond our shores. In short, this is a group with no access to global ideas, brilliant literature and, therefore, no aptitude to change things.

This is ultimately what caused, and still causes, societal confrontation. With the advent of Facebook and all the social media on the face of the earth, you’d think this would change. It hasn’t. Non-readers congregate on ‘Laburisti sal-mewt’ ['Labour till we die'] or ‘Ħa naraw kemm se nsibu Nazzjonalisti’ ['How many Nationalists can we find'] Facebook groups. They don’t read articles, they don’t form their own opinions but just repeat whatever they are brainwashed to say and then they troll, insult and abuse journalists, bloggers and columnists.

It’s Leli ta’ Ħaż-Żgħir meets Groundhog Day, a convergence of those who are only concerned with staying insular and those who seek broader horizons. It pays the current prime minister to lord over a Ħaż-Żgħir Malta, simply because it is so much easier to control and to keep on winning landslide elections.

Robert ta’ Ħaż-Żgħir calls the shots of the insidious machine of Super One TV,  which methodically dehumanises any government critic and fills non-readers’ brains with utter tosh.

All he has to do “to leave a modern country” for our children is far more simple than a Christmas election budget. He simply has to have the balls to switch off the political party television stations once and for all. This country cannot stay stuck in 1998.  

The energy minister, in charge of the negotiations of the Electrogas power station project in 2013, was none other than Konrad Mizzi. The project has since become a monument of corruption with Mizzi allegedly receiving kickbacks from the deal and Electrogas identified as the possible motive for the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Its director, Yorgen Fenech, is charged with masterminding her murder.

And yet. Yet, when Mizzi is summoned in front of the public inquiry, he refuses to speak; when he is summoned by parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, he refuses to turn up. He is a walking example of how to “populate the assets” of impunity while holding to ransom the course of justice.

Someone, please, strap Mizzi to Alex Dalli’s ‘punishment chair’. I’m sure that,  after eight hours, he’ll find his voice.