It is 2.30am and there is a foul, acrid smell in the air, probably from the sulphurous fumes being vented from the chimneys of the Marsa power station. I go on the roof to breathe some fresh air, but there is none.

The plants on my roof garden in Cospicua are coated with a fine, black powder, while the massive electricity generator on the oil rig by dock number six is humming noisily away, as it has been doing for the last eight months or so.

Laser beams play against each other in the night sky celebrating Malta’s 50th independence anniversary. Malta’s big shots celebrated with champagne and gave medals to each other, while we, the lower class workers are still crying for justice. We feel like insects being crushed under the feet of those we elected.

“They are all the same. Nothing has changed,” many voters are heard complaining these days. And we are the fools who voted for them.”

MPs who chased us and pleaded with us for our votes while promising us heaven on earth before the last general elections are hard to contact, as we plod on trying to cope with our monetary problems. We are left behind trying to cope with our daily problems: the heavy traffic and its pollution, the miserly low wages, police inefficiency, nerve-wrecking court delays, intense competition of every form and shape in an never-ending rat race, a lack of green space, fish farm pollution, foul smells in the air, aggressive behaviour by certain lawless neighbours and the shooting of Europe’s beautiful birds.

This does not augur well for Malta’s next 50 years. A much bigger effort has to be made by the government. Discipline and setting a good example ought to be the norm. Those ‘professionals’ who became wealthy during the last 25 years or so must be made to pay the taxes they evaded. All past injustices must be corrected and those aggrieved compensated.

Many of us are still waiting and hoping for the big changes promised to us, the “earthquake” which would transform Malta into the “best place in Europe”.

But we will not wait forever and if these changes seem too elusive and too long in coming, there are those who are already thinking of setting up a new workers’ party.

I for one, being an expat from Canada, can think of only one solution – leave this island for a fairer ground and never return.