The latest ‘I’m In/Taghna Lkoll’ update from the US Embassy

Who has the US embassy picked for the United States International Visitor Leadership Program, but Nikita Zammit Alamango, a Labour activist with such terrific leadership skills, promise and ability that after hanging around the family fabrics business until her late 20s, she had to ask the incoming Labour government to give her a job.

She is now yet another Taghna Lkoll dead weight on the public sector payroll. Her job description? ‘Public relations and marketing’ for the state utilities billing agency – because when your business is billing for water and electricity, you really need to do a lot of PR and marketing, don’t you.

As for her academic track record – it’s bumping somewhere along the bottom. She finally graduated with a bachelor’s degree in her late 20s just two months ago, not because she went to work straight after school and then decided to return to studying, but because she just never could hack it. At one time, she even faked being a student at the London School of Economics by putting up a fraudulent ‘student at LSE’ on her Facebook page when she was taking a course at something else entirely that coincidentally had those initials.

This is all so typically Taghna Lkoll, but can this ambassador be any more transparent? I can think of a few young women with real buzz and brilliance, real promise, who would really justify a place on that programme, and none of them are Nikita Zammit Alamango. The politics are a side issue (though they’re the reason she was chosen). The real issue is that she has next to nothing going for her.

And before the standard Maltese weirdos crawl out from beneath their stones to say ‘You’re jealous’, I’ll point out that 1. I’m not in my 20s; and 2. I was selected for the programme in 1992 and I turned it down. I wasn’t working in some government office as a favour through an act of political cronyism, at the time. I was associate editor of a new independent newspaper, a post I obtained on merit. Even though I say it myself, standards for selection have really fallen.

If they wanted to select a Joseph Taghna Lkoll crony, they could at least have bothered to dig out a halfway good one.

And this is quite apart from the fact that Zammit Alamango was found to have plagiarised an entire piece written by Gillian Tett for the Financial Times and to have passed it off as her own blog-post for Times of Malta. She was quietly asked to leave.

She was also discovered to have been part of an organised Labour Party group sending fake ‘reader’ letters to The Times and The Malta Independent, using false names, pretending to be ordinary citizens who planned to vote Labour. The discovery was made when one of the group – in their brilliance – copied a journalist colleague of mine in error on the entire chain of email correspondence.

Taghna Lkoll.