But that's what tends to happen when the chief motivating factor is cronyism. For the last 20 months, the government has been actively placing friends, campaign workers and cronies on the public sector payroll. Not all of these are temporary appointments. Many of them appear to be endlessly extendable contracts or full-time positions which will burden the state coffers permanently, or at least until they retire or leave to brave it out in the private sector. Some 4,500 people have been recruited this way in such a short span of time - more than half the number that outgoing Labour Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici recruited into the state sector in late 1986 and early 1987, in a panic before the general election that would unseat him.

That wage bill - to say nothing of the individuals on whom those monies were expended - went a long way towards crippling Malta financially for many years thereafter, and slowed down the rate at which the economy was able to recover from 16 continuous years of Labour mismanagement, abuse, corruption, neglect and plain clodhopping stupidity.

If they were, to use a favourite term 'wertit', then the situation would not be so frightening. But rather than being worthwhile, the prominent appointees - those whose names and faces we know - tend to be washed-up individuals who need the money but don't want the work, and who can't get either elsewhere. What their cronies in government have done is throw them a lifebuoy using money that isn't their own. If these are the prominent ones, we can only imagine just how useless the anonymous appointees are, how pointlessly burdensome they now are, not just financially but also at a practical level.

There are two separate issues here. One is the creation of pseudo-jobs for people to whom favours have been promised, which scores a double whammy of adding to the financial burden unnecessarily while at the same time bringing in people who cannot possibly contribute. The other does not add to the financial burden, because the jobs were there already, are necessary and have to be filled. The problem is that they are being filled routinely with individuals who are patently unfit for purpose and who have been selected only because they are Labour Party cronies. If they were Labour cronies and also fit for purpose, it wouldn't be much of an issue. But they are both cronies and unfit, exacerbating the wrongness of what is being done here.

The latest such appointee is one Mario Philip Azzopardi, a man well past retirement age who has spent the last 35 years working as a producer/director of low-budget films in Canada, and who returned to Malta a little while before the last general election to join the rising ranks of fossils from the 1970s, like Albert Marshall. He then proceeded to produce/direct the Labour Party's general election campaign videos and Joseph Muscat's theatrical public appearances - which in retrospect appear staged to a hilarious degree, but which in the heightened tension of a campaign were very effective with gullible people, who appear to be, distressingly, the vast majority of Maltese people (which is why the island is a magnet for every scammer under the sun).

Now Mario Philip Azzopardi has been given his payment in kind, not at the expense of the Labour Party for which he toiled, but at the expense of the Maltese taxpayer. He has been appointed 'artistic director' of events for the year 2018, when Valletta is European Capital of Culture. Is he fit for purpose? Definitely not: he is too old, too set in his ways, and too much a product of 1970s Malta - this being a curious situation in which he spent almost four decades in North America, but returned to his Mediterranean island country of origin only to pick up exactly where he left off. A 1970s pseudo-leftie rebel at 60 plus? I don't think so.

Except that he's not a leftie at all. Like many of the aging and outright elderly 'rebellious men' who see the Labour Party as their natural home, they are actually far right in their thinking and outlook. They are dismissive of women, contemptuous of homosexuals (though they know enough by now not to be rude about it in public), racist, with white supremacist tendencies that are clearly vocalised even if not innately acknowledged, and Islamophobic, equating Islam to ISIS and Sharia law, when real Islam is the equivalent of unreformed Roman Catholicism in terms of controlling individual behaviour and so on. So they are also ignorant.

Mario Philip Azzopardi hit the news in the last few days after he took the Joe Grima route on Facebook and began posting racist rants. Incidentally, Grima is another crony appointee, and that one is more blatant still, because he is close to 80 and what his friends in government have done is make up for the pension plan he probably didn't have.

Azzopardi's rants were pretty worrying in their outrageous insults to anybody who is Muslim. Imagine if he had said anything similar about people who are Roman Catholics. Fortunately, sufficient numbers of people took umbrage and he was forced to apologise, though I haven't worked out exactly whether he apologised for his views or for publishing them. Anybody who holds those views is unfit for the job he has been given, because those views are indicative of a very small mind, and the artistic director of Valletta, European Capital of Culture, can't be somebody with a very small mind. He can't be somebody rough and ill-mannered with no sense of humour to speak of, either, but apparently that's now par for the course. Manners, a sense of humour and the ability to hold a civilised conversation that is not a one-sided monotonous and self-serving rant are considered optional, even undesirable.

The Association of Performing Rights Practitioners must have been horrified at Azzopardi's appointment and been waiting to pounce, because the moment his rant was made public, it seized the day and released a statement asking the government "to reconsider his appointment". They can't demand his resignation because he takes up the post formally in January. They aren't having any of his apology, and instead noted "with satisfaction" the way the responsible minister of state, Owen Bonnici, dissociated himself from Azzopardi's views. Azzopardi, however, remains undisputedly his choice and his appointment.

As the association pointed out in its statement, the entire raison d'être of 'Valletta - European capital of culture' is to promote cultural diversity in the context of the Mediterranean, the chief aim being not pure entertainment, as Azzopardi and his immediate boss Jason Micallef see it, but change and understanding through creativity and an exchange of views. "Azzopardi's comments, made repeatedly and with much vigour on a public forum, make him a highly unlikely candidate for achieving this aim," the association said. "Malta risks losing a once in a lifetime opportunity to fast-track the development and professionalization of its cultural sector if bad choices are made at this crucial stage. Any choices should be made in continuous consultation with the sector itself."

They really do think he's most unsuitable, and because they are going to be major players in the whole thing, they should be listened to - also because they are right. Azzopardi most definitely is unsuitable, and not only because of his backward views on cultural diversity. He consummately lacks the gifts, talents, skills and experience for something like this, and worse still, he is not personable at all. And in that role, you have to be.