The lessons from Mgarr ix-Xini
must be taken by all.
In this day and age of consultation,
of democracy which filters down to the grassroots, it is still possible
to have our newer version of the old mad parish priest of old, who would
beggar his parish just to build a church far bigger than the village
would ever need – as long as it is bigger than the church in the next
village – or undertake similarly harebrained ventures.
We have seen it all and yet we continually find something new: it must
be the way in which power is perceived.
We first had the parish priest, who would occupy his position for some
50 years until he died, and who would be the accepted dictator of the
village.
Then came the schoolmaster, again, before the time when they change them
around just as they change the police inspectors. In those days, the
headmaster became the alternate bully of the village.
Then came the band club presidents, who, once again, enjoyed security of
tenure, and did whatever they practically wanted. It is for this reason
that we have villages boasting of band clubs that are palaces, and band
clubs that are opera theatres.
Then came the mayor – and a new growth period for marble plaques was
born. Once again, this has meant the centralisation of power in one pair
of hands accompanied by a patronising attitude towards the locality.
Hence the widespread tendency for prestige projects rather than for
utilitarian projects, hence the hoarding of money for the first two
years of any term to then splash it out on useless projects.
Many projects have been useless: one should count the immense sums of
money spent on doing and redoing and doing again so many miles of
sidewalks, especially in the village centres, while roads which are the
councils’ responsibility never get done simply because the capital
expenditure needed for them would beggar the council for long long
years.
Better the square with a slide and a roundabout for the children and a
bench for the elderly or the mothers. And a plaque, naturally.
And then you get mayors such as the Sannat mayor, who short-circuit the
whole system, and the deed is done. Ironically, probably the mayor
thought that in covering the Mgarr ix-Xini pebbly beach with quarry
sand, he was doing a favour in the eyes of the locals, who must have
found the pebbly beach very hard when going down to the sea.
That this would create the uproar it has caused probably never crossed
anybody’s mind. Nor that it would cause a major ecological mishap. Nor
that it would have to be reversed at such a cost of human work in the
heat and in the sun.
It is probably useless now to haul the mayor to court: what’s done is
done. Nor would tooling around with the law to ensure that this does not
happen again be of any effective good. What is really needed is a new
mentality of what it means to be mayor: the concept of being at the
service of the community, rather than lording it over the community.
In their own small ways, the power figures we mentioned at the beginning
still suffer from the foibles of power: they all tend to discount
whatever has been done by their immediate predecessor and to downgrade
what is done by the successor.
If these people have still not understood that to be in power is to be
of service, then what chance does the newly-arrived mayor have of
understanding it?
