Benchmarking Shame

25^th August 2006
The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

I hate it when it happens to me and I regret it is happening more and more often. Whenever I visit a foreign country without many expectations, I often remain marvelled at the development and quality standards I find which put a shameful benchmark on the state of our country in spite of our greater potential.

Occasionally, when I would be returning to a country I had visited before, I can have tangible proof that other countries have been racing forward while we have been running on the spot digging the ground beneath our feet.

This week my travels took me to Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic nearly two hours flight west of the continent. It is an archipelago with a resident population of 200,000 people most of whom live on the main island and a small minority on a sister island separated by a ferry crossing that takes some 90 minutes.
Madeira is basically a mountain island where people reside on the coastal areas. There is pretty little history as the island was uninhabited till three centuries ago but it is rich in environmental scenery and fertile volcanic soil.

Its economy is almost totally dependent on tourism with visitors all year round offering hotels stable occupancy rates even though the prices change on seasonal patterns as the island attracts different a profile of tourist every season.

It is clearly a bubbly place with a healthy and stable tourism industry, which has given the island an average GDP close to the EU average even though the average of mainland Portugal is still some 75 per cent of EU average. In short, the Madeirans enjoy a better standard of living than the average Portuguese in spite of the disadvantages of living insularly without economies of scale.

What hits you right between the eyes the moment you land there is the advanced stage of their road infrastructure and the general air of cleanliness and organisation generated by strict enforcement of environmental standards, including the obligation of the private residences to keep a clean and decorated exterior façade.
Madeira must have the world record of the kilometres per resident capita of tunnels and bridges which make road transport easy and comfortable in spite of the mountainous terrain. A lot of investment, disproportionate to the size of the population, must have gone into such projects reflecting three factors.

Firstly, it reflects the generosity of EU funding at the time when Portugal joined the EU in the 1980s. It reflects also the ability of the islanders to negotiate a disproportionate allocation of such funds to Madeira probably resulting from the political role that candidates elected from the autonomous region often have in the formation of coalition government.

But most importantly, it reflects the diligent application of such funding by the autonomous administration of Madeira to ensure that such funding is not wasted in projects that have to be done and re-done or in projects which start and never finish even though they go multiple times outside the original budget, but in well-designed and executed projects which have a start date and a short finish date.

Keeping an efficient road network in such a mountainous terrain involves tremendous capital investment in suspended road building and tunnelling through granite cliffs. Even the airport runaway had to be extended by suspending it like a bridge over a deep valley. In short, in Malta a similar road network development should cost much less as the land mass is much smaller and the terrain less demanding.

Yet even in our main traffic junctions we still have to roundabout with resultant jamming and accidents. Take the Msida roundabout in the juncture leading from Msida to Gzira, San Gwann and St Julian’s. A suspended road system for traffic in directions of St Julian’s and Msida to drive through without having to roundabout should be fairly simple and inexpensive to construct and would resolve the daily routine of blocked traffic during peak hours. Yet, despite having amassed a national debt well above 70 per cent of the GDP we have not found it to give the country decent road infrastructure, even in its hottest traffic distribution points.

The same can be said of the traffic system in downtown Msida near the GWU monument. The place is crying for a suspended road system which gives straight through driving facilities to traffic coming down from St Julian’s and going to Valletta and vice-versa without having to roundabout and criss-cross with the traffic coming from Birkirkara and from Ta’ Xbiex.

We have a country which has many times more potential than Madeira. We have an unmatched history which enriches the visitors’ experience and which should attract the high-value tourist searching for more than just for a seaside vacation. We have easier access from most European mainland countries, being located right in the middle of the Mediterranean rather than two hours flight into the Atlantic. We have spent a frightening amount of money which has run up our national debt to unsustainable levels and yet we are nowhere near having an infrastructure which can sustain a high growth development that is necessary if we are to achieve European average GDP during my lifetime.

We benchmark very badly with other countries that have raised their standards during the last 20 years while we have been fiddling with petty inter-party political piques and wasting money in vote-producing clientelism rather than in planned long-term infrastructure development.

We should not be in the least surprised that the chickens are coming home to roost in falling tourist visitors, diminishing earnings and under-utilised facilities. And it is useless blaming the government, as after all, each country gets the government it deserves.

We have chosen leaders on the strength of their words, arguments and short-term electoral tactics and discarded leaders with vision who were delivering unpalatable programmes of reform that in the long term are needed to deliver the real growth that can give us a better standard of living based on production and earnings rather than on debt and consumption.

A mea culpa from each one of us is a good starting point towards charting a more promising way forward.