Promising a new manna: foreign direct investment

The Malta Development Corporation (MDC) has never published any report analysing why in the past four years 58 factories closed down in our islands. Answering Labour MP Leo Brincat (PQ 36,801) Economic Services Minister Josef Bonnici gave a list of the legal consultants and legal costs of the corporation in the past four years. No parliamentary questions have been tabled recently about the MDC's core mission of attracting foreign direct investment to Malta.

In the last three months of 1998 three factories closed down. Sixteen factories terminated their operations in 1999. Another 10 factories closed down in 2000. Last year 18 factories closed down. Another 12 factories have closed down so far this year. Other factories are set to close down in the coming weeks.

The closure of so many factories should be taken more seriously by the government. What is making our country lose its competitiveness, unable to retain existing operations and unable to attract new investment? Why are factories closing down in Malta and Gozo? What new factories opened to replace them? What is happening to those who are losing their jobs? What retraining is going on to equip them with the new skills needed to move on to another job?

How are the unemployed being helped not to lose their self-esteem and their dignity and how are they being helped concretely to cope with their problems?

The world of Harry Potter

The government should have taken the initiative involving the MDC, the Central Bank, the University of Malta, the business sectors and the trade unions to carry out a serious research project about Malta's ability to create wealth in today's world. Instead, the Nationalist Party in government has chosen to escape into the world of Harry Potter, projecting its policy of locking Malta into the European Union, as a magical way out of all the problems that successive Nationalist administrations have created for the country.

The manna of the Lm100 million a year of EU funds prior to membership never came. The Nationalist Party is now promising a new kind of manna: foreign direct investment. We are being expected to believe that simply subordinating Malta to the EU decision-making structures would guarantee us foreign direct investment. Ours is not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

Economists of integrity, who have not traded their souls for government consultancy fees, are very sad and concerned about the gravity of the current and future situation. Deep down they are afraid that we are not going to make it; that Malta will continue to slide, year after year, into economic final collapse; that the wealth of many workers will be wiped out and that many people will end up in virtual economic poverty. Economists of integrity are asking these disturbing questions: Where is future economic growth going to come from: fast economic growth that allows the transfer of government workers to the private sector, that reduces the ratio of government debt to GDP, and that allows for a higher standard of living for the Maltese workers?

A gigantic children's allowance

With the current wages, prices and economic structure, can Malta really attract serious foreign investment? What is the competitive advantage of Malta, an island on the periphery of Europe, in tourism, manufacturing and services? How are these sectors going to cope with the added costs resulting from having to comply with EU full membership regulations?

Government can run and hide for some time from these questions, but ultimately our children's future depends on the way we answer these questions and on our ability to create the necessary conditions to enable this country to survive and thrive in the years ahead.

The Nationalist Party is trying to present EU membership as some kind of gigantic children's allowance, protecting us from the real world, immersed in the world of Harry Potter, where we do not have to grow up and go out to earn our living as a fairy godmother in Brussels would provide for us and we would live happily ever after.

Thirty years ago Singapore had also flirted with the illusion that the rest of the world would solve its problems. But its prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, worked hard to educate his people that such an illusion would destroy the country. In his autobiography he writes: "I was convinced our people must never have an aiddependent mentality. If we were to succeed we had to depend on ourselves." He warned the people of Singapore: "The world does not owe us a living. We cannot live by the begging bowl... A soft people will vote for those who promised a soft way out, when in truth there is none. There is nothing Singapore gets for free, even our water we pay for..."

Singapore gave up its illusion that it would solve its problems by simply joining an entity bigger than itself and left the Malaysian Federation after it found out that it was falling behind because it lost its decision-making capability. Singapore chose the road of self-reliance while building interdependent links with the rest of the world without subordinating its policy-making to decisionmaking structures controlled by others. The worst disservice the Nationalist Party has done Malta and the EU is to project membership as a free and permanent banquet with hundreds of millions of liri raining down on us from the blue starry skies of Brussels. The PN's version of membership is a continuation and reinforcement of the aid dependency mentality and the world-owes-us-a-living mindset that we must abandon forever if our country is to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

evaristbartolo@hotmail.com