1 The director of the State Inspectorate for Agriculture, Vase Anakiev, who is also the vice president of the Socialist Party, part of the ruling coalition, has been arrested on suspicion of accepting a bribe of 50,000 euros. He asked for so little because he’s a socialist. Had he been a capitalist, who knows how much he would have needed to be happy.

Charges have also been brought against former State Attorney Fehmi Stafa for accepting a bribe of 50,000 euros to pull strings with a judge at the Court of Appeals handling a case for his client as a lawyer.

In November last year, the director of the Agency for Financial Support in Agriculture and Rural Development, Ilija Stoilev, was arrested on suspicion of accepting a bribe of 50,000 euros to favour a private company in the allocation of funds from the European Union’s IPARD programme.

So, for under 50,000 euros, you can’t even start a conversation. 50k is the starting rate for doing business with people appointed by the ruling coalition parties. Who knows how much those who appoint them are asking for? The meter is running. As one of our supermodels would say, “For under 50,000 euros, I don’t even get out of bed.”

Minister of Agriculture Cvetan Tripunovski recently announced that the Law on Agriculture and Rural Development will come into force next year, and that the Government expects a large number of young people to return to the countryside.

The next time Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski meets our people on a plane, returning home en masse, let him ask them whether they’ve set aside 50,000 euros. So that their business can take off.

2 After an extensive public debate in which the Ministry of Health included experts from science and healthcare, bar owners, chambers of commerce and the Facebook community, the Government decided to implement the ban on indoor smoking through a Law on Creating Drafts in Illegal Buildings. The Minister of Health, Azir Aliu, was very enthusiastic, believing that the Law on Protection Against Smoking would come into force as early as 1 March, but he hadn’t faced the power of bar owners, backed by cigarette manufacturers and distributors. So now he tells us that they’ve reached the conclusion “from both the scientific community and health experts that if a space has two open sides, meaning the terraces, smoking can be allowed, because the air flows”.

Had we known what formidable negotiators bar owners are, we wouldn’t have changed the country’s name. But never mind, that’s already a done deal. We might at least make use of them now and send them to Brussels to renegotiate a change in the negotiating framework with the EU.

I can’t understand why the minister is clinging to the idea that a new law will change anything, when everything will remain exactly as it is anyway. Air circulation will depend on whether the owner opens the roof for two or three minutes to air the premises. He says that in Skopje alone there are over 7,000 terraces that are not, in fact, terraces. That owners will be required to provide a separate door to the non-smoking area, and another to the terraces. Because when you’re outside on the terrace, you’re actually inside. And when you’re inside, you’re actually outside, on the terrace. Because the terrace is air-conditioned. It’s absurd, but it works.

That’s precisely the part Minister Aliu didn’t take into account. Cafés don’t have terraces. They have solid structures. He overlooked the fact that those 7,000 terraces are in fact usurped public spaces, 7,000 pedestrian zones, streets, pavements and parks, first enclosed with plastic, then with glass, and eventually turned into permanent buildings. Who knows whether the Municipalities even charge for them, given that we still hear their sob stories from the Covid period, when they were allowed to place tables wherever they pleased.

So the Law on Protection Against Smoking can’t be properly implemented because these illegal buildings would first need to be demolished. And these are not some kind of towering illegal constructions for which mayors might justify their inaction by claiming they don’t have money, or that no companies submitted bids for the demolition tenders. They are terraces, aren’t they? With a roof. And with a door for smokers, to create a draft. It doesn’t get more environmentally friendly than that.

3 It’s a completely different matter how hazardous to life the illegal terraces are. Many of these solid buildings use gas heaters. And gas, combined with cigarette embers, could easily become the subject of yet another international expert conference, like the one the Government organised on the anniversary of the fire in the illegal nightclub in Kocani, where 63 people died and over 200 were injured.

Cigarette packets read: “Smoking is harmful to health.”

At the entrance to cafés, it should read: “Draft kills.”

The right to choose is inviolable. One has to die of something, after all.

4 The Centre for Civic Communications in Skopje analysed possible abuses in the provision of food for communal kitchens. The tender for meals, conducted by the Ministry of Social Policy, Demography and Youth, is worth almost 1.5 million euros. Colleagues requested data from the Ministry under the Law on Free Access to Public Information, but they didn’t answer any of their questions. That’s why they filed a complaint with the Agency for the Protection of the Right to Free Access to Information. But the Agency doesn’t rule on complaints, because the Government hasn’t appointed a director or deputy director.

So much for transparency. The Ministry doesn’t answer questions that raise suspicions of corruption. The state complaints institution replied that it can’t answer and – that is that. The Government boasts of transparency, yet there’s no one to take care of transparency when there’s no director or deputy.

There’s no director to sign responses to complaints. So who signs off on the employees’ salaries? They’ve been working for more than a year and a half since the change of government. Do they even get paid?

There’s no director to grant access to public information. And who grants access to the salary that we pay them?

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski