1 Let this weekend pass, and with any luck, the razzle-dazzle of “100 days of government” will finally come to a close. Fingers crossed, starting Monday, VMRO-DPMNE and VLEN will stop speaking about what SDSM and DUI hadn’t done and what they “will” do, but rather – actually start doing it.
VMRO-DPMNE’s electoral campaign was quite extensive. They have made so many promises, from Monday on they might need to start checking things off the list, we wrote this, we made it happen. Yet, they haven’t written anywhere in their program that they shall complain about what their predecessors have left them.
100 days of boasts, 100 days of complaints.
The only concrete things that they have promised and knew that they were going to deliver were the 500 million euro loan from Hungary and the linear raise of the pensions by 2500 denars, а raise that was going to happen anyway, due to the regular adjustment with the current costs of living. With the exception that, now, all pensioners got the same amount. The conservatives, which by definition need to encourage higher earnings, have sent the cheapest populist message to the companies and the entrepreneurs – you don’t have to pay high pension contributions while you work, you’ll all get the same amount anyway. Oh, yes. I almost forgot about yet another measure that they’ve delivered, although they hadn’t promised it. They’ve also reinstalled the metal fence around the Government.
Enough already with the claims that they’ve inherited a broken state. At the end of the day, if we’re already talking about a broken state, there hasn’t been a more broken state than the state that VMRO-DPMNE left in 2017, after an 11-year rule. SDSM with their incompetence and greediness has merely upgraded that well-trodden path of stealing and lying.
2 Still immersed in boasting about the 100 days, Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski was 90 minutes late to the German embassy’s reception on the occasion of the German Unity Day, October 3. All guests had already arrived, including the President, Gordana SIljanovska-Davkova. The Ambassador, along with all the staff members was waiting for him by the door until 20:10. His arrival was announced, because the Ambassador was planning to greet him in her speech. We even saw that written on the video-wall. He came at 20:30, missed the national anthems and the Ambassador’s speech, and the guests were already leaving.
Where are the people from the Prime Minister’s Office? Surely someone is in charge of his schedule. The Prime Minister doesn’t necessarily have to know what his daily schedule is, he has a country to run. Where is the protocol? Did they forget that the Prime Minister had an invitation and that he accepted it? I’m sure the Germans didn’t call him out of nowhere – hey, listen, why don’t you drop by tonight, we have a thing to celebrate.
They said that he had a TV interview at the same time. You would think that a war has started, so the Prime Minister had to cancel all obligations and had to address the nation immediately. And what statement did he make? That SDMS sucked and the European Union wasn’t fair. As if this was something we didn’t already know.
If the 90-minute tardiness isn’t some cabinet member’s fault, something that should get them fired by the way, if this is really the Prime Minister’s choice, then either Mickoski wants to be Nikola Gruevski, who was notorious for being late, or he wants to send a diplomatic message to the Germans. He wants to put the point that he’s been repeating all the time into practice: “We don’t submit to bootlicking”.
3 We don’t submit to bootlicking, yet we obtain Bulgarian passports. Out of economic reasons. As Minister of Energy Sanja Bozhinovska confirmed in the podcast of my colleague Mishko Ivanov. Last year she started the process of stripping away her Bulgarian citizenship, responding to Ivanov: “At a certain period of my life, out of economic reasons, much in the same way as many Macedonians, yes, I got a Bulgarian passport.”
Someone gets a Bulgarian passport out of economic reasons to be a wall painter in Germany, another not to pay a tuition fee in the Netherlands, while someone does it to buy apartments in Spain and Portugal, as reported by Minister Bozhinovska in her declaration of interest.
Bozhinovska is now a minister and no longer has economic reasons to have a Bulgarian passport.
Why are the economic reasons to get a Bulgarian passport more valid than the patriotic reasons? Why shouldn’t someone who feels like a Bulgarian get a Bulgarian passport? Minister Bozhinovska certainly felt that way. When you request a Bulgarian citizenship, they don’t ask you about your economic situation. They ask you if you are Bulgarian. At the time, she felt a little bit Bulgarian, however now that she has strengthened economically, she no longer feels that way.
If it’s not a problem that we have a minister in the Government who declared herself Bulgarian for economic reasons, then we shouldn’t have a problem changing the Constitution to start the EU accession talks. To include Bulgarians in our Constitution. For economic reasons.
4 The Health Minister, Arben Taravari, says that he has the impression that 60 to 70 percent of the citizens are happy with the doctors who work in the public health sector, “yet, unfortunately, journalists do not follow that news”.
The real question isn’t whether people are happy with the doctors, but rather are they happy with the public health system which is run by Taravari. It’s not the minister’s job to deal with the competence of the doctors, but to create conditions for them to do their job.
The journalists aren’t to blame for writing critical texts about the public health sector. We don’t publish bad articles based simply on stories of unhappy patients or through his open line contact number. We are patients too. And we know very well how we go through the public health system.
We don’t have a problem with the doctors. On the contrary. It’s precisely because of those doctors and medical personnel that we are ready to withstand the stinking toilets, the corridors left unswept for decades, the broken-down elevators and the food that we bring from our own homes.
We have a problem with the system and the organization. And with the accountability of how the money that we pay every month for public health fund is spent. We have a problem with not being able to get an exam or operation appointment, with dysfunctional diagnostics equipment, with a system that is crashing, with the lack of hygiene, with the Ambulance working like a taxi company, driving all over the place from one hospital to another because they have no coordination where the equipment works and where it doesn’t, if there’s an available bed or not, we have a problem with the administration that is full of illiterate cousins, employed there based on either their political or ethnic affiliation, yet there is no person available at the Emergency Center to fill out your questionnaire and bring you to an x-ray, we have a problem with foreign citizens being treated with personal identification documents from Macedonian citizens before our very own eyes…
Taravari, who is a doctor himself, forgets the fact that he is a minister. The doctors’ responsibility is to treat. And the minister is responsible for the system. He personally, along with the directors he appoints from the lists submitted to him by the headquarters of the ruling parties.
5 Firefighters did arrive in time to put out the fire in the residential building in Chair, but weren’t able to access the place for half an hour, because they were waiting for the towing service to arrive and move the parked vehicles.
Luckily, there were no casualties this time. There are 43 injured or hospitalised residents. The building in Chair is one of the twenty buildings in the municipality that didn’t have a construction permit, but were later legalised. Everything’s according to the law, boss, it’s just that sometimes it isn’t.
We don’t need to conduct a special analysis. I don’t want to jinx it, but take a look out of the window where you live or work and just think to yourself: what will happen if the Fire Brigade or the Ambulance has to come to rescue you? May God forbid it. Be it legal or illegal buildings, Skopje is a totally unsafe place. And with all the loony construction and raping of the city, where greediness is the only criterion, it will surely pose an even greater risk to life.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
