Measuring Greatness

6^th July 2007

The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

Politicians make regular claims to greatness. We heard all too often, whenever there is a change of government, claims for a new beginning, a new dawn, a time when the sun will start rising again after the darkness of the former party in office.

The latest claim to greatness came from the government with regard to the Mater Dei Hospital. The biggest project ever done in Malta proclaimed billboards and other advertising media tasked to impress us with the greatness of this project.

How does one measure greatness in order to justify such claim? I cannot find any criteria which corroborate such claim.

If one measures by the cost of the project, I doubt whether this is the biggest project ever undertaken in spite of clear evidence of over-spending and inadequate planning that pushes up cost without adding value.

Probably the Marsaxlokk harbour project eventually turned into Malta Freeport cost in monetary terms much more than the Lm250 million claimed for Mater Dei. In real terms, it cost much more given that most of the investment was made between 1981 and 2000 when money had more value than it has today. My estimate is that over all these years, an investment of between Lm400 and Lm50 million was sunk into Marsaxlokk/Freeport project.

Or does one measure greatness by the engineering and architectural challenges it presents? If such criterion is used, there is again no comparison between the challenge of Marsaxlokk/Freeport and Mater Dei. The former involved challenges like dredging, underwater excavation, breakwater building in deep waters and other engineering challenges that were totally absent at Mater Dei, which involved building inland on quite a flat surface. Even the Mosta Dome is probably a bigger architectural achievement than the Mater Dei.

Perhaps greatness to justify the government’s claim can be certified by the value added that the project will generate. This is hard to quantify as Mater Dei is no commercial enterprise whose value added can be measured in accounting or commercial terms. But I feel quite on safe ground arguing that a commercial resale value of Mater Dei would not come anywhere near the commercial resale value of Freeport or even of other private-sector projects like Portomaso if its value grossed back with the value of residential and office buildings as if they were not sold.

So frankly I cannot fathom on what basis this has been proclaimed as the greatest project ever undertaken in Malta. Maybe a claim nearer to the truth would have been the longest project ever undertaken in Malta. It started in 1992 and is about to finish 15 years later, that is if we truly get it operational by year-end.
Freeport may have taken just as long but it was constructed in phases, which were rendered operational while other phases were still under development. So probably yes, Mater Dei can be proclaimed as the longest project ever undertaken in post-war Malta as I am sure in earlier days, when hand tools where the only way projects could be executed, many other projects took much longer to execute.

There are other things I don’t understand about what is going on at Mater Dei. Why was it necessary to make an official opening, take two (prior to the 2003 election there was already some sort of official opening), when the edifice is still a soulless building? The official opening of a hotel is done when it is ready to take its first guests. Why should we have a propaganda boom costing God only knows what when not a single patient has set foot in Mater Dei?

Why really do we need an official opening at all if not for the personal gratification of politicians who once proclaimed that this would be a present for Maltese people, even though unlike traditional presents, the recipients are paying for the gift through their nose?

Mater Dei is not a commercial enterprise which uses publicity from its official launch as a promotion to sell its services.

Whoever will use Mater Dei does so because he or she would have no other option. It is not an elective buy. It is a forced buy requiring no advertising and promotion.

So the promotion is not for Mater Dei; it is for political mileage.

I bet you this. By the time Mater Dei will get fully operational, we will have similar events officially opening this section and that section by the dozen, piling up the bill of this overspent project.

In the end, the taxpayers will pay for politicians’ ego trips.