Wannabe prime minister Boiko Borissov said the other day that should he form a Cabinet after this summer's elections for Parliament he would appoint a number of Roma to top government positions such as cabinet ministers and deputy ministers. "I met with Roma organisations and I saw that there area number of Roma, not that many but still a few, who have university education".

His point was that as prime minister he would be more open to the idea of appointing Roma to the state administration "responsible for entire social groups", unlike the current Government which, obviously, has not done enough in this respect.

Much has been said about how politicians try to appeal to the several hundred thousand (according to official statistics) Roma in Bulgaria. And Borissov can easily be accused of trying to win their vote by promising public posts.

It is true that of all the ethnic groups the Roma have always been treated with suspicion and have been often underestimated as professionals simply because most Bulgarians perceive them as low-skilled labour who work on refuse trucks and clean parks and gardens.

Experts often cite the high dropout rates of Roma children at an early age from school. Or the fact they they were never sent to school in the first place by their parents because they'd rather have them working and earning money than being educated.

On this point Borissov did not say much. He only said that he would appoint Roma with university diplomas to his administration. One might think that this would be the Roma's prize for having survived the difficult path of obtaining a diploma in the first place. Because it is almost a mission impossible for a Roma to go through the entire system of education in Bulgaria fighting all the stereotypes, awkward questions and strange looks without running away.

Let's not forget that Bulgaria is almost halfway through the Decade of Roma inclusion 2005-2015. It was designed especially with the aim of making Roma feel part of society. Many programmes, educational and housing among others, were envisaged for that purpose and many documents signed. Unfortunately, as NGO officials said last year, the process of inclusion has not moved on much further.

As NOG experts said, 10 years is not enough to make Roma part of Bulgaria society and this can only happen when Bulgarians change their perceptions of Roma.

A good example has been the way the Government treated the Decade of Roma inclusion itself. When the Bulgarian Socialist Party won elections in 2005 it did so in coalition with a number of small parties, including the Roma party.

Soon after that Yavor Dimitrov became the only Roma cabinet appointee when he was made deputy minister of labour and social policy responsible for the Decade. He became famous for being "the Roma" working in state administration. They must have thought that a Roma would do the best job in supervising all the work on the Decade.

A few months later he was dismissed with the explanation that he had neglected his work, i.e. he had failed. He was replaced by another Roma, a village mayor, which led to the conclusion "that as long as he is a Roma he can do the job".

The sad thing is that Dimitrov's dismissal would not have been newsworthy if he was a Bulgarian because unqualified Bulgarians lose their job all the time. But because Dimitrov was a Roma, and therefore an exception, he made the news. If there were hundreds of Roma working for the state it would not have been such a big issue.

But one has to ask whether a Roma should get a job simply because he or she has a diploma. The experience of the past 20 years has shown that having a Bulgarian diploma is not a guarantee that one has the skills required to do a certain job.

Bulgarian universities have been issuing thousands of diplomas in every major imaginable every day. And yet employers keep complaining that Bulgaria lacks a qualified labour force and even ponders importing workers from Vietnam.