I use a motor-bike as a preferred mode of transport, because it’s easier to park, it gets through traffic like a knife through the proverbial and because, truth be told, it’s excellent fun. Except when some officious twerp decides that traditional biker attitudes towards parking (“if it ain’t obstructing, leave it there”) and slaps a ticket on it, or when some fool cocooned in a metal cage on four wheels decides it’s time to try to end my miserable existence, that is.

I’m premising my remarks with the foregoing because I don’t want anyone to think I’m grinding a personal axe when I point out that it’s time for Minister the Honourable Joseph “There’s Oil in Them Thar Seas” Mizzi to be packed off ignominiously. The only traffic tribulations that really affect me personally are parking issues where I live, and the Councils in the area are Nationalist-led (if “led” is the appropriate word)

So it’s against them that I rant when I spend longer driving around to find parking than it took me to drive from Malta to Krakow and back (I exaggerate for effect) And it’s the respective Mayors’ ancestors who are invoked when I get a ticket.

But forget them and consider the waste-of-skin Mizzi.

If there’s anyone who embodies the general uselessness of Premier Muscat’s Government, it’s this over-promoted individual. He started out by handling the re-invention of the bus service with an ineptitude, and largesse with our money, that almost beggars belief.

He followed it up with that breathtaking statement, made on his behalf, effectively, by some functionary of Transport Malta, soon to be re-named Disaster Malta, that traffic problems in Malta are only a matter of perception. This was followed by a series of major irritations, such as the on-going, and murderous, works on the Coast Road, now approaching their end (we keep being told)

The abyss was reached over the last few days, however, with the direction being shown by the manner in which Mizzi’s people, with an arrogance they must have inherited from someone (guess who?) told drivers that in the light of the upcoming opening of schools, they should plan their journeys better.

“Yes, right, I’ll take the M10 and swing by the M6 to join the M25” I thought, before coming back to Earth and remembering that there are only two, basically minor, roads on which to get to Valletta and both are at saturation point.

The predictable mayhem of the end-September/beginning-October period was followed, as we all know, by absolute carnage when it rained. Fine, we suffer from the “leaves on the track” syndrome that afflicts other countries, so there’s a small level of justification for traffic to be snarled up, but this was not a snarl up, I’m told (I was in Gozo, so I missed the fun) this was a total SNAFU.

The cherry was put on the cake of misery by the government’s plaintive whine that “Malta’s traffic problems should not be politicised”.

Excuse me, you arrogant and incompetent twerps, but who spent something in the region of five years in the run-up to the last election making political capital out of traffic and transport problems?

Who said they had a road-map to solve things, costed and ready to go, according to the other Mizzi, Sai Lang’s husband? Where is he, incidentally, lost in China or something?

Who used their mercenaries to accost Minister Austin Gatt and screech at him for being an adherent to the principles of Onan, pray tell?

Malta, in case anyone has forgotten, has been mismanaged and ruled over, not to say plundered, by Premier Muscat’s band of incompetent fortune-hunters for more than two years now. It is their fault, and no-one else’s, that they’ve taken the less good that was in place when they took over and made it abysmal.

All that we need now is that they do the same with the good stuff they inherited, like the economy, foreign policy and the service industries. The indications are that the road-map is showing the direction, and if Peanuts Scicluna is anything to go by, it’s not a nice one.

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