Two university students kicked off the new academic year with a statue to the patron saint of cement. More than a stunt, the sculpture aimed to foster better knowledge of the country’s construction woes among the university cohort.

Santa Cement was built on the theme of ‘Escape’, that very same thing many consider in a bid to find a better, more peaceful quality of life away from the constant concreting of our country.

There can hardly be any criticism of the duo who took their aptly-aimed satire to Freshers’ Week, which is meant to greet new students into university. Their welcome is made of competitions, giveaways and promotions; as if the highest educational institution of the country were a massive shopping mall.

In fact, one such statue to consumerism with much concrete was built right outside the lecture halls by an established group of builders. In recent years, the university Freshers’ Week has seen some ludicrous competitions where students were made to crawl and topple over each other to collect free-falling cash.

Against this background, the KSU has waded in by censoring an activist group for its pro-choice merchandise at the university. To be fair, the council acknowledged its mistake and apologised.

Back in 2019, overzealous security officials intervened to stop students from a wearing a mask depicting Transport Minister Ian Borg during Freshers’ Week.

Luckily, the KSU didn’t intervene to censor Santa Cement, which probably ruffled a lot of feathers.

But it’s telling indeed that, in 2024, students must remind each other about the need to speak out and foster a culture of activism in university, which, by definition, should be the hotbed of free thought and speech.

There lies a profound contradiction in all this. The university’s student council is elected via an outdated first-past-the-post system, where the winner takes all available seats.

This can hardly be classified as “democracy”; it’s an outdated mechanism which ensures the misrepresentation of a huge number of university students, and the lack of interest in renewing this system is a means to maintain a political status quo.

What happens in university is a reflection of the national political scenario: power is concentrated within one group, which claims to represent all the student population but selectively chooses to censor discord whenever it falls foul of the desired narrative.

There’s a message in Santa Cement that goes beyond the aesthetics and the greyness to which our country has been subjected by a relentless construction drive: and that message is to stand up, without fear, to power.

That a creation like Santa Cement makes the news in 2024 is quite ironic, considering that foreign universities have been the catalyst for protests leading to changes as far back as the 1970s. But we live in hope.

In Malta, however, the culture of omertà is way more widespread and manifests itself in these censorship incidents, as if power expects students to cower and comply until their graduation date.

And there’s reason to protest for many students: the construction spree has left 66 per cent of Malta’s youth unable to buy their own property, despite the sheer volume of new residences built in the last years.

It is turning Malta into an ugly, polluted slum, demoralising communities and individuals alike, leading some to escape abroad in hope of a better future.

Santa Cement will not kick-start revolutions but we need more of it. Satire, if not activism, should, however, become a mainstay of Freshers’ Week.