Smart city, smart move
Matthew Vella
It is only a day since Austin Gatt announced a Lm110 million investment promising 5,600 jobs – a Dubai-type internet city, which arrives a timely fortnight ahead of the Nationalists’ local council elections test. On Friday, Kalkara mayor Michael Cohen receives a phone call from Gatt’s secretariat: “They want to meet me next Friday to discuss the project,” he says about the internet city earmarked for the derelict Ricasoli industrial estate, in Kalkara.
You would think they would have informed the town mayor some time before the good news.
The minister spearheading Malta’s IT revolution now brags about one of his greatest triumphs yet, attracting the creators of Dubai’s own ‘Silicon Valley’ to Malta, the first investment of its kind within the European Union. “We are making a political statement,” Gatt bellows: “we want to move investment towards the south, we want to move the services industry and tourism towards the south.”
Gatt’s political statement comes late in the day. Smartcity@Malta may well be the best news in ages for a region disregarded by endless Nationalist administrations.
Ricasoli itself is a failure for the government: neglected for years upon end until it practically turned into a rubbish tip, the site had once been even earmarked for an engineered landfill.
And that is because the south is home of a lot of undesirables: the Sant Antnin waste recycling plant, fish farms, and the Delimara power station. And apart from hosting the highest unemployment rates, the south is a Labour stronghold.
Only this time, the opposition is also coming from within the PN’s former ranks. Josie Muscat, the former Nationalist MP from the old guard of the 80s, is fielding his own list of independent candidates in Marsaskala, a hotbed of disillusionment for years.
His estrangement from party politics couldn’t be made more succinct. Last week, he told this newspaper that “a lot of shit is coming to Marsaskala”, the seaside locality once earmarked as the south’s main tourist resort. Today, it is no longer considered by the authorities to be a tourist zone. Muscat suspects government might include an incinerator alongside the recycling plant: “They keep this hush-hush as if we are stupid people. They treat us like imbeciles.”
So Gatt’s new crusade for the south is indeed timely, as the PN faces great opposition in a region that has become a glorified dumping ground. Unabashed, the minister acknowledges that SmartCity@Malta, whose heads of agreement with Dubai’s Tecom will be signed next month, will be boosting the Nationalist’s position in the upcoming elections:
“I think so… I don’t know of any other party in government which has attracted this sort of investment, or jobs.”
At heart, Gatt’s internet city is also Labour’s comeuppance for their barrage on the minister’s failed negotiations with an Austrian textile firm that would have absorbed 700 redundancies from Denim Services. Gatt is blunt about the stark difference between Labour’s logic of industrial development, and his vision of a centre of excellence for IT:
“It’s about time we stop trying to defend the textile industry,” he states about the vicissitudes of the industry created by Labour in the 70s. “We’re not in politics to see ourselves earning as much as Chinese or Tunisian workers,” Gatt says, “but to get four times their wages by getting those industries which pay these wages.”
Many sceptics have yet to be convinced about the Nationalist’s new pledge for the south. The Cottonera waterfront was one such hollow promise, a stone’s throw away from Kalkara. Birgu’s waterfront, transformed from a dilapidated remnant of the Order of St John’s naval force, may have now turned into a playground for gamblers and yachtsmen. But far from the 400 jobs promised by the leftovers of wealthy spenders, all the Cottonera people got was boats pumping fuel out into the creek.
“The only jobs the Cottonera people got from the waterfront was a small percentage of what was promised,” Labour MP Chris Agius, who hails from Bormla, says. “I am committed to any project which will give the south what it has been denied for years. However I also expect that the people are geared towards the ICT job demand, and that means they have to be educated.”
That will require vision. The University of Malta produces an average of 40 graduates every year with a Bachelor of Sciences in IT alone, but the number of is growing every year. This year there have been 100 entries into the course. “Considering the resources we have at the moment, it is an unfeasible task to produce so many IT graduates,” Dr Ernest Cachia, from the department of computer science and artificial intelligence, says. “There is certainly going to be a demand for IT specialists, but we are already stretched here, so we need more lecturers otherwise we’ll see a decrease in quality.”
Michael Cohen hopes for the best. “It is still too early to see what concrete guarantees we have from this project,” the Kalkara mayor says. “Honestly, I haven’t even met with the secretariat and I hope this project won’t turn into a burden – we had been promised Lm300,000 to enact government’s e-government policy, only to end up paying for the PCs they actually gave us.”