Without active protest, our land will be given away

More and more, it seems that people are becoming aware of just how utterly powerless they are when it comes to that mighty force called ‘money’.

When there is money to be made, everything else falls by the wayside – nationhood, family, ethics, the environment, our health and even the ability to leave unspoiled land untouched. It is a hackneyed cliché to repeat the phrase that ‘we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing’, but really that seems to be the only expression that fits.

It is like we have become so immune to appreciating what is really important, that all we can see in front of our eyes is the cha-ching! of Euro signs – you know, like the dollar signs they often show in the eyes of cartoon characters to denote greed. The problem with greed is that it is an insatiable monster.

I often wonder when I read about the same people involved in yet more development and yet another mega project: just how much will really be enough for them? Those who at this very moment, are busily carving up pieces of Malta as if it were their own personal cake are, undoubtedly, people who already have it all (if by “all” we mean monetary gain). And while they are gorging themselves and calculating how much filthy lucre they will be bringing in, the rest of us are forced to sit back and look on, helpless in the face of such powerful big business.

Politicians try to sell us the idea that all this frenzied building will have a trickledown effect on the economy, which is why the ordinary employee is often loathe to criticise any type of investment. This all means jobs, we are told, and some people actually buy into that spin. But let’s be realistic here: on an island which, due to its size and geographical limitations, can only ever hope to have a finite number of consumers, we are building mega projects which only serve to dwarf and eventually obliterate similar mega projects created in the past.

Take supermarkets. As soon as I hear about another one opening, I always wonder, just how many groceries can one family actually buy? If I regularly frequent my neighbourhood supermarket, then I am obviously not going to do any shopping at the one over in the next town. Littering the country with huge (for our size) supermarkets is not going to make me buy more groceries than I actually need, nor will it magically make the number of shoppers multiply.

As we have seen in the recent past, all that happens is that people flock like magpies to something bright, shiny and new, until the novelty wears off. Meanwhile, the same investors rashly open a chain of supermarkets all over Malta only for them to all collapse like a house of cards due to financial mismanagement. And poof! just like that, the jobs which were created, vanish overnight.

The same happens with hotels, rows upon rows of apartment blocks, brightly-lit showrooms, shopping malls, countless boutiques – you name it, we have too much of everything, for the size and population we have. Even our tourism industry, as healthy as it is at the moment, cannot provide the amount of customers needed to make all these endeavors viable. Let’s face it, the Maltese might still use their holidays as an excuse to shop until they drop, but it hardly works the other way around because most of our goods are over-priced in comparison.

This is not an argument against investment in new projects per se, but in what type of investment it is, how it is done, and where. It would not be so detrimental to the country if all this new development took place on land which is built up… why cannot contractors raze down unused, derelict buildings and build again on the same site? There is no shortage of old buildings which are crying out for renovation and which would still provide work for the construction industry which seems to have become the new sacred cow, and is completely untouchable.

The shortsightedness of those who think that all this building is a good idea because there is money to be made, is baffling. Do they think that Malta is suddenly going to sprout acres and acres of new land when there is finally nowhere left to build? Or is it just a case of ‘I want it, and I want it now’, the ultimate exercise in self-gratification? Or are there simply so many people who are somehow connected to these projects who are making money from them (from accountants, to lawyers, to architects, the list is endless) that they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them? The deafening silence on so many fronts points to the latter.

Faced by all this, it really is very easy to fall into dejection and a feeling of powerlessness. But perhaps it is high time to move beyond being mere keyboard activists. Unless enough voters actually show that their power lies in numbers by becoming actively involved in protests, this government will continue doling out parcels of land to those lined up with their grubby paws outstretched for more goodies.