I’m sure many of you will agree that we remember few milestones from the golden age of our late teens and early 20s like getting our driving licence. I must have been 20 when I finally got mine on my second try after months and months of driving lessons.

My first try wasn’t successful, thanks to a wooden performance that would have made Madonna look like an Oscar winner and my examiner telling me to drive through a stop sign.

I remember going to my first exam with my friends and family telling me that no one ever passed on their first try. It seemed to be widely understood and expected that I would fail my first time as almost everyone else did; it was presented to me as a fact.

These thoughts and memories flashed through my mind as I read of the latest scandal to hit our newsstands. As I pored over the news that a Transport Malta director allegedly pressured driving examiners to pass a number of applicants, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes in disbelief. Any idiot can drive; indeed, most idiots do; what does it say about us as a country if it’s come to a point when we are even meddling in driving licence tests?

Apart from the fact that all the unsavoury details sound absolutely ridiculous, what of all the allegedly inept drivers we are putting on the road? With so many tragic accidents happening almost daily, does no one feel the weight of the irresponsibility that concessions such as this carry?

Has it really come to the point where people are phoning ministers just to guarantee a pass in a driving test?- Anna Marie Galea

When I sat for my first test, I certainly didn’t have the confidence to be able to drive with the less charitable souls that swarm our streets: if I had been passed as a favour, who knows what accidents might have resulted both for other frazzled drivers and me.

Even the words allegedly uttered by the Transport Malta director to one of the driving examiners are shocking. After being instructed to give third-country nationals brought to Malta to work as bus drivers who already had licences from their respective countries a literally easy ride, the director allegedly told the examiner to “pass the drivers unless the coaches return splattered with blood”. It honestly beggars belief how blasé people have become even in the way they choose to speak to each other.

The clincher to all this was that all the favours being requested from driving instructors to pass random people from their tests were allegedly being called in to keep an unnamed minister happy. I mean, I know that many of us weren’t built to be rocket scientists but has it really come to the point where people are phoning ministers just to guarantee a pass in a driving test?

I’m even wondering how such a conversation would take place: do you just roll up at their office with a Christmas list of inane requests? No wonder flunkies always sound surprised when they illegally phone me around election time and baulk when I tell them that I need absolutely nothing from them. The last time I checked, I wasn’t a sugar baby.

What a sad, sad state we are in.