AN ILL-NATURED PEOPLE

by | 17 September, 2021

The concept of the government’s anti-corruption campaign is: our people are corrupt, they are aggressively offering bribes, and the honourable government can hardly defend themselves.

1 Seriously, shame on us. Those poor people in the government, the government and municipal officials, the directors and the clerks in the public administration appointed by the state; you wouldn’t want to be in their shoes… They’re constantly exposed to aggressive citizens who ruthlessly offer them money. There’s really nothing they can do about it. Some of them take the money out of pity, some are forced to do it, others take it to get rid of you, yet others because they don’t want to offend you, you insist after all.

According to the videos and billboards we’ve seen, the concept of the government’s anti-corruption campaign is: our people are corrupt, they are offering bribes, and the honourable government can hardly defend themselves. We are corrupt when we go to ask for state services. Whereas those who ask for money to get your things done, things which we have already paid for so they’d receive a legal salary – are not corrupt. Things get really ugly when there are tenders and public procurements. It is then when people’s aggressiveness to offer commissions is at its peak. And the honourable civil servants aren’t good at dealing with percentages.

The campaign also has an educational component and the moral is: Don’t do it, nowadays everything is in the public eye. One of these days they’ll organize special courses, so government officials could train how to protect themselves from this ill-natured people.

2 The director of the Tetovo Clinical Hospital Florin Besimi served as acting director for 11 years. By law, an acting director can serve that position only for six months. At least during these two years this Government has appointed him as acting director several times and has warned him that he must launch an open call for the vacancy. They just warned him.

We wouldn’t even find out that Besimi had been unlawfully serving as acting director if not for the fire which broke out in the Covid-centre in Tetovo, in which 14 people were killed.

Prime Minister Zaev, wasn’t referring only to him, but to all acting directors in state institutions when he explained that the Government sometimes keeps them in office longer than the legal deadline because “they give them the opportunity to apply for the director vacancy on a competitive basis.” That means that, if both Gruevski’s government and Zaev’s government have kept Besimi as acting director “for competitiveness” for 11 years and haven’t launched an open call for the vacancy of the director of the Tetovo Hospital, then he has no real competition. He’s so good at serving as acting director that not only they haven’t been able to replace him for 11 years, he himself can’t replace himself.

Besimi is a high-profile DUI staff. Zaev said that “most directors of healthcare institutions are appointed politically, because citizens transfer political responsibility to politicians and they take that responsibility through politically appointed people. Our intention is for the institution to be run by health care workers and that’s why most of the directors are healthcare workers.

The one dealing with politics is the Minister of Health. The majority of voters supported those policies. You’d think the director of the Health Insurance Fund is also a political figure because he implements the policies of the government which won people’s support in the elections. But then again, what’s so political about organizing the work and managing staff and material resources in a hospital, in a health centre, in an emergency ward, so directors have to be replaced after each election or even after a government reshuffle? What’s political about that? There is responsibility, but not a political one. What sort of political responsibility is required from a director of a public institution? What’s political about being a school or kindergarten principal?

We knew that what Zaev was saying has been true in practice. But, saying it out loud with such ease is the normalization of the abnormal. It’s like saying, we want them to be experts, but even if they aren’t, at least they’re party members.

3 Hospital directors and doctors are now in focus, because the tragedy in Tetovo raised a lot of issues about the health department. However, that’s the case in all state institutions, public and municipal enterprises, government agencies… So, not only is it normal, but it’s not even dishonourable for directors to be elected on the basis of political criteria, and not on the basis of expertise. And it’s normal for state institutions to break the law.

That’s why people suffer from chronic distrust in institutions. Because, your life in all areas is not decided by the expertise of the head of the institution, but by their political affiliation. And the government presents all of that as something normal by using our money to pay for a campaign which will convince us that we are the corrupt ones.

4 There was such fanfare about the joint session of the Macedonian and the Kosovo government, there were traffic jams all over Skopje for hours, people begged the police to let them go because they would miss the funeral of their parent… For what? So Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti could attend a press conference with Prime Minister Zaev which was a real smack in the face for the hosts because he said: I won’t deliver the people convicted of the murder at Smilkovo Lake in 2012 because I don’t trust your judicial system.

It’s one thing that Kurti doesn’t recognize Zaev’s Open Balkans. But now he doesn’t even recognize verdicts after two finished trials. He said that he believes that the truth wasn’t fully explained. So he talked to Zaev about international help as well. Neither Albanians nor Macedonians are good enough for Kurti. In this particular process an Albanian was the judge, and an Albanian was the prosecutor.
Zaev kept silent. He cares more about a foreigner getting mad at him, than us here. As if people from Kosovo will vote for him in the elections. He’s probably counting on the idea that here everything is quickly forgotten. And that really is the case.

5 How did things turn out like this; three of the most newsworthy prisoners and detainees have scheduled medical examinations at the same time? Dragi Rashkovski is getting his teeth repaired, Boki 13 is walking around the city on his way to the hospital, while Zoran Mileski-Kicevski has been having hearth check-ups for thirty days so he had to drive back and forth and had a car accident in which one person was killed. Do they schedule a check-up through “My appointment?” Or do they use an urgent referral to get treatment? Since, a lot of people who are neither in custody, nor in prison can’t even reach a doctor.

I’m not saying it’s illegal. But there you go, it’s just how things turned out. Just in time to set the seal on the idea that the people is really no good and too corrupt. While the judiciary and all other institutions are great. It’s all according to the law, boss.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski