Aaron Farrugia is so lucky not to have grown up under the Mintoffian/KMB governments for which his parents voted. If he had, he would have been wearing a greasy boiler-suit in some nondescript garage.

“Ghandna bzonn politici li jahsbu inqas fuq kif se jzommu l-post tax-xoghol taghhom u jahsbu iktar dwar kif se joholqu l-postijiet tax-xoghol ghal dawk li huma minghajr impjieg.”

You have to give it to the guy: he has no self-awareness.

Mintoff started out as a charismatic politician whose career morphed into that of a classic post-colonial dictator. He acceded to power when the country was craving change and in desperate need of a levelling of social disparities. Then the thuggery and dictatorial antics started which transformed the country to a Mediterranean Zimbabwe.

I insist on comparing Mintoff’s Malta to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe (which is simply a violent, kleptocractic dictatorship) not the Soviet Union. The Soviet party was dictatorial, hyper-capitalist, corrupt, you name it…but excellence in education, arts, science and technology was valued – neither Mintoff nor Mugabe ever gave a hoot about all that.

Mintoff was definitely sharper than the whole present PL lot. Unfortunately he hung around with the wrong crowd and the rest is history.

[Daphne – He didn’t hang out with the wrong crowd, Joe. He was the wrong crowd.]

“The good of the country is to have a Labour government”? Say’s who? The PN may have done mistakes and taken wrong decisions, amidst all the good that it did for this country, but we never saw the concentration of obscenities witnessed in this first year under the MLP. People feel let down by our Prime Minister who oversold and under delivered. Most of all, people are feeling used and betrayed by Joseph Muscat.

“Nahseb ftehmna.”

If ever being stupid was a job requirement, it certainly is the case in Malta. Even Gonzi, whose own qualifications stopped being respectable with the end of the middle ages, understood that the property market needed to be reined in.

Labour comes in and does the exact opposite because people who are barely qualified to be latrine attendants stand to get rich as long as the poop does not hit the fan.

And off course, we have the self made (read semi-literate, money-hungry buffoon) Sandro Chetcuti advising the government. If ever stupidity was a qualification!

Then we have Dalli back on the scene. The Bahamas man who cannot account for any of his money. The business tycoon with no discernible business apart from ‘John Dalli & Associates’.

The present prime minister has taken the culture of stupidity to new levels. Anyone he cannot work with? He promotes them. He stuffs their mouths with gold. He enslaves them with positions, a sense of importance and the feeling that they’re eating at the captain’s table – all at a cost to the public purse.

Want to get rid of Anglu Farrugia? Make him Speaker, even though he’s barely articulate. Mrs Coleiro Preca wants to leave the party before the election? Let’s get rid of her by making her President.

When I wake up for another day in Malta, my first impulse now is to hit the wall with my head. I am hoping that all the blows will eventually make me stupid and therefore qualified to live here.

I would not have done it without that, considering that my family was on the (financially) poorer side of things but intellectually on the richer one because my father bought us everything that would make us educated, books, books and books.

But there were seven of us siblings so we had to fend for ourselves a bit.

I worked summers so as to be able to support myself through university. But then came the Mintoffians who practically destroyed tertiary education and my academic progress was stopped in its tracks. I was lucky to have made it to my B.Sc. (Hons) by then.

How I wish I had had the opportunity to study further and get five degrees like this Einstein managed to get – and the irony is that it was people like his parents who put the Mintoffians into power where they set about destroying primary, secondary and tertiary education and then got to work on the church schools too.

What can I say? F**k the Mintoffians.