To those persons who think that I am Cassandra who only portends oncoming doom and offers no solutions, please note that I have, on numerous occasions, offered solutions to the many problems and wrongs that Malta represents.

 If anybody wishes to see a couple of articles I have written in Times of Malta, ‘The Republic of Light’ (2017) and ‘How to embrace change’ (2018) are two such examples.

But, today, I would like to latch on to a very true statement made in another country in the EU which seems to be suffering the same fate as Malta and now Gozo.

The spokesperson for a movement aiming to save cultural heritage and the humane way of life in areas taken over by greedy businessmen and corrupt politicians, said that “economical madness takes precedence over ecological reason”.

The contra positioning of madness to reason is fundamentally what has always intrigued philosophers and thinkers ever since the times of the Greeks and Romans.

Both these cultures fell apart driven by internal divisions and by greed and mafia- like manipulation of the systems by a handful of oligarchs (a Greek word) and corrupt politicians.

Sounds familiar? I presume you all feel that this is what has happened in Malta during the last four decades. In reality, it is more sinister than just the end of an epoch of great successes, as the fall of Greece and Rome had been. Their decadence came as a result of society becoming lazy and addicted to pleasure instead of dedicated to work.

In our case, we have a society that is very young, having achieved independence only 58 years ago. We are an evolving society looking for its strengths. But we have been hijacked by a gang of people who do not care a hoot about the health of our society or the development of our culture.

Out of our voting population,  only 40,000 make a great profit with the destruction of Malta and Gozo. Their ‘economic madness’ reigns supreme.

Just look at the absurd situation that occurs in Comino each time Graffitti activists try to redeem the pristine beauty from destruction by the barbarous mad economic forces.

Not only do the ministers’ families and friends mobilise their relatives to go to Comino to pretend to be tourists wishing to use the beach and to rent umbrellas but the police turn up in force and take the side of the umbrella sellers and kiosk owners. To make matters worse then come the ships laden with hundreds of cheap tourists and drinking juveniles who are here pretending to learn English.

We have been hijacked by a gang of people who do not care a hoot about the health of our society- John Vassallo

Ecological reason is thrown to the winds and the authorities do not protect us, the majority who wish to have a natural unspoilt Comino and Blue Lagoon. They side with the scavengers who look to make a profit from this ecological devastation.

Are we all getting angrier and angrier in vain or is this rising anger among the Maltese voting, yes, voting population, a sign of looming change? If anger does not find an outpouring it will soon fill the cup to the brim and then it will overflow. In 2018 and 2019, this happened and look where it brought the government of the day. Joseph Muscat had to be removed by his own party.

That anger then brought some apparent results but this was soon outmanoeuvred by the unscrupulous madness and crafty advisers to the Labour Party.

The leadership found a clever way to pretend to listen to the anger, throw out Muscat and Keith Schembri but simply replaced them with a puppet ‘phantom prime minister’, who promised continuity of the same economic madness and runs away to his boat as the anger of the Maltese grows.

If he and his ministers do nothing to respond to this growing anger by the end of 2022 or in 2023, they might be facing calls of ‘barra’ (‘out’) once more from the crowds in Valletta.

One year after the public inquiry recommendations, these have not been implemented nor is there any sign that any of them will be. It has been five years since our heroic investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was brutally murdered by the atmosphere of impunity that the Muscat government created and by the economic interests of sections of the economically mad business community.

These two events and the pressure from the European Parliament and from the European Commission regarding changes to the global taxation regulations and a fuel tax that is an ecological reasonable thing to do, even though it does damage peripheral regions,  will rock the boat quite severely in Malta.

Our captain on his yacht in Ragusa harbour will have to stop barbecuing in his shorts and come back to face the music to respond to the angry population and to the voice of reason.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.