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My limited budget allowed me this year to go for a week to Tunisia. For Lm230 I had my flight, taxes, transport, and seven nights’ half-board in a five-star hotel. When I worked it out, it was much cheaper than going to Gozo. Before I left I had a couple of warnings from my colleagues about the cleanliness and the quality of the water, but little did I know that I was in for a big surprise!
The first thing that struck me was the cleanliness – both at the beaches and on the streets. Beaches in Tunisia are practically all public and although all the hotels have access to their own part of the beach, the public is allowed to use these beaches. Between one hotel and the other there is always a street which goes down to the beach and which allows access to the public. In these long sandy beaches you do not run any danger of having your foot cut by broken glass or of finding any rubbish in the water or on the sand. How they do it I do not know but what I do know is that I did not see any rubbish bins on the sand and yet I found five-star cleanliness.
This does not only happens on the beaches but also on the streets. For those who still believe that cleanliness in Tunisia is only in the hotels are wrong. This may have been so five years ago but today cleanliness in Tunisia is the priority of the day. On their television station, there is an ongoing campaign for people not to throw rubbish in the streets. They have their own ‘xummiemu’ but their ‘xummiemu’ is more active than ours and is seen on most roundabouts in the streets as a reminder to the people to keep the country tidy.
I was very surprised to see Tunisia so clean and this does not only happen in the tourist zones but also in the side street I have been through in a two-hour drive which took me back to the airport from Sousse. You do not see rubbish in the streets there. The streets including the motor-ways are all clean and you do not see weeds and other rubbish along the sides of the roads as we do here. This is a country of 12 million people and how they manage to control the rubbish, at least for the eye of the tourist, is something extraordinary from which we and especially our tourism authority have a lot to learn from.
You must understand that towns and villages in Tunisia which are frequented by tourists are marked as ‘zone touristique’, that is, tourist zones. This entails that additional resources are put into these areas and the signs of ‘zone touristique’ are a constant reminder to the locals that they have to care for it so that the tourist will get a good impression of the country – and it is a system that works. It works because a lot of effort is put by the Ministry of Tourism and the local council to keep the zone tidy and safe. In Malta we have for endless times heard that tourist areas like Bugibba and Marsascala ought to be given extra effort because they are not only a place where many Maltese live but also a place for tourists.
But so far this has all landed on deaf ears and in these places we see no extra effort in the peak seasons to keep the beaches and the streets clean. They tell us that the industry caters for the livelihoods of 40,000 people but I sincerely do not know how much do we really care for their livelihoods once we are not making any extra effort to keep the basics, that is cleanliness in our streets when we know that the government has the resources but no good management to do it.
The streets are not only clean but also safe for driving. Potholes are a thing of the past in Tunisia and although the driving rates well with that of Malta, it cannot be said the same for the roads and the streets. In Malta we had to wait for us to join the European Union to get the works on the road started!
Another thing that struck me in Tunisia is their campaign against drink and driving. I thought that they have no problem of alcohol there being a country where alcohol is banned. But believe it or not they have a strong campaign going against driving whilst under the influence of alcohol and they do their campaign in a very intelligent way. They do not use a poster scattered here and there as we do in Malta. They use streamers on the pavement of every roundabout with the words which when translated from French mean ‘if you are a good driver you don’t drink’.
The safety of their people seems to be their major concern. At the petrol stations you do not see, as we do here, an isolated poster to switch off your mobile phone whilst you are having petrol. In all the petrol stations it is mandatory to have a sign in red affixed to every column where people stop to have petrol saying that for your safety, you must switch off the car engine, stop smoking, switch off your mobile phone and not to use plastic cans for petrol. These four rules are held sacred and I had to go Tunisia to discover that it can be dangerous to let your car engine on whilst you are having petrol.
The Tunisians are proud of their traditions. Influence from the West is strong and yet they have managed to keep their traditions alive. They are not ashamed of them as we are. In Malta I do not know why we do not treasure our traditions. In schools it seems to be a taboo to learn traditional folk songs and dances. It seems to be a taboo to learn our past and our history. Little do we realize that if we lose our sense of history and traditions than we will be losing our identity.
Against this background, the question which automatically comes to mind is how does the Malta Tourism Authority feature in all this? It features because so far it has proved to be a dog which does not bite. It has failed to keep the country clean, it has failed to bring tourists to Malta (although prior to the referendum the report it commissioned assured her that many tourists will come to Malta if we join the EU), and it failed to make the industry flourish once again. To add insult to injury, it has now commissioned a report to advise her on how to reduce the costs and the staff. As if the bigheads at the Authority need to pour out more money on reports to tell them what they should already know!
What they do with these reports I sincerely do not know. I cannot understand, for example, why they do not dwell into the report which told them that many tourists will come to Malta if we join the EU, and analyze what went wrong. I cannot understand why they continue to use the same contractor for the report when tEU membership has failed.
I cannot understand how the partners of MTA continue to pump in more money in it when they are not getting a good return. The head of MHRA treats the government with a velvet glove – he is always so careful not to blame the government and prejudice his business. It is ironic how they never mentioned a word about the waste of resources at the MTA and it had to be the Minister to take the initiative and tell them to put their house in order and cut the waste. How this was allowed by the private sector leads me to believe that either the MTA and the Ministry are one thing, or that at the MTA personal interests prevail over the common objective.
Either way, one thing is for sure, the system is not working!
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