Gozo: When vision ignores reality

Alex Agius Saliba’s frequent hymns to Gozo’s potential read like a glossy brochure left behind in an empty show flat. Everything gleams. Everything promises. Everything is just around the corner.

Any engagement with the reality faced daily by the people who actually live on, work in, or attempt to cross to and from the island is purely coincidental. Or accidental, even.

Those issues are left to Clint Camilleri to sort out, by “keeping in contact” with the relevant people.

Agius Saliba’s vision is so idyllic, on the other hand, that he yearns for his commute to the northern island, from whence he is elected. I have no idea if, as an elected man of the people, he gets to jump the frequent queues, a privilege that used to be extended to the honourables.

While he sketches a future of capital projects and strategic governance, Gozo is choking. On traffic. On overdevelopment. On the slow, corrosive frustration of being trapped on an island whose political cheerleaders refuse to accept that limits exist.

Joe Public’s troubles start with the most basic necessity: crossing to and from there. The Gozo ferry is not a minor logistical detail. It is the island’s lifeline. And yet it is routinely overwhelmed, brittle, and spectacularly unfit for the volumes being forced upon it.

Recent scenes at Mġarr and Ċirkewwa were not just scurrilous attempts to portray the inconvenient as something almost dangerous. Kilometres of stationary traffic. Confusion over queues. Cars cutting in. Tempers flaring.

One man was hospitalised after being caught between vehicles, thankfully without major injury apparently. This is not an aberration. It is the new normal foisted on the paying public by an administration that frankly, m’ dear, doesn’t give a damn any more.

We are told, instead, that this is progress. This is “a good thing”.

The problem is not that Gozo has traffic. The problem is that every single planning decision taken over the past decade has assumed that traffic is someone else’s problem.

Apartment blocks replace fields. Hotels replace tranquility. Roads are widened not to solve congestion, but to funnel more vehicles into the same ferry choke points or resorts, themselves becoming Benidorm wannabes with every minute that passes.

Every permit rubber‑stamped is another car heading for Mġarr. The arithmetic is obvious. The refusal to acknowledge it is willful.

And with congestion comes something else – irritation turning into aggression. Anyone who has sat for hours in a stationary queue knows how thin the veneer of civility becomes.

Gozo, once sold as Malta’s pressure valve, is now importing Malta’s worst habits wholesale. Road rage. Shouting matches. Physical confrontations. When systems fail, people crack.  Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

What makes Alex Agius Saliba and his like’s essays particularly galling is not that they are hopeful, but that they are entirely consequence‑free. There is no mention of carrying capacity. No recognition that islands are, by definition, finite. No acceptance that growth must generate within corresponding infrastructure, the alternative being reckless rampant ambition and resultant chaos.

True leadership would start by saying uncomfortable things: that the ferry system is no longer coping; that development has outpaced infrastructure; that quality of life is deteriorating, not improving. It would acknowledge that you cannot market Gozo simultaneously as a construction site and a sanctuary without lying to someone and everyone.

Instead, we are offered sunlit prose and future‑tense promises (how about a bridge, or a tunnel, while we’re about it?) while people sit in their cars for hours, engines off, lives on hold, waiting to be allowed off or onto their own island.

Gozo does have potential. Obviously. And it has the undeniable right to develop beyond the bucolic image of decades past.  But this will never be realised by pretending that gridlock, overdevelopment and rising tension are mere teething problems.

Vision that refuses to confront reality is not vision at all. It is delusion.