1 This situation where SDSM wants to return state advertising in private media, which means over 4 million euros of our budget will go to five national TV channels, reminds me of an exchange in the wiretapped conversations that Zoran Zaev published. Martin Protogjer, Nikola Gruevski’s right-hand man and the head of ideological control, calls the boss of Kanal 5, Emil Stojmenov, about some show he doesn’t like and asks him to play it with interference, and the boss replies in an even more radical way: “I was planning to even turn off the power in the whole building, fuck it”. Then, Martin, being nice and all, suggests “No, no, just play it with it interference, distort the sound, people won’t be able to watch it and they’ll change the channel when they see it”.
Only five years have passed since we were stunned that Gruevski’s Government had spent 38 million euros from 2008 to 2015 on government campaigns. Most of that money went to Sitel and Kanal 5. SDSM used to whine that someone kept turning off the power and there was interference in the broadcast. Now, they feel like doing the same. As if the damage VMRO-DPMNE did by bribing media was insignificant, now SDSM needs to make it even bigger. In order to stay in power, they’ll go to bed even with their executioner. With the same people who jointly participated in the government’s crimes, took money from the Government to target the different-minded with smear campaigns, they used Chyrons to mobilise people in defence of Gruevski and his gang, they hid events the government didn’t want published, stuck nails to the faces of their political opponents, threatened with tombstones…
Now SDSM say they need TV stations. Why would they need them? It’s enough for them to just work well and not steal and there won’t be any need for them to buy media love and support with our money.
And what about the public broadcaster MRTV? Why not fix it? It’s been five years and it feels like they’ve forgotten it exists, they’ve ruined it. What about Macedonian Radio and Kanal 103[1]? They’ve completely neglected what should be our national cultural treasure, just so they could give more and more to private TV stations for shows like “Grand Stars”[2].
What a grand project they’ve come up with. They needed television as a place where’d they air public campaigns. Yeah, right… They need it to bribe owners so they’d tell journalists what they can and what they can’t publish. Illiterate and incompetent journalists will fear them, literate and professional journalists will keep quiet in order not to lose their job.
They don’t give a damn about the public interest. Those bosses served VMRO-DPMNE for eleven years. They’ll now serve SDSM. When the time comes, they’ll serve VMRO-DPMNE again. They don’t care about the responsibility they have towards the public. What they care about is keeping their yachts sailing.
SDSM’s plans to stay in power in the next elections are great. But they haven’t come up with anything new the past five or six years. They’re still copying from Nikola Gruevski’s notes.
So, it seems that the power will go out again, dear viewers.
2 Simultaneously with coming up with a plan how to spend 5 million euros from the state budget to buy love from TV channels, the Government also found a way how to decrease the number of students receiving subsidized meals. It’s one thing that they made the subsidized meals more expensive, since all the prices have gone up. But it’s another to tighten the criteria so much that scholarship students or students whose family members are earning the minimum salary are not able to get a subsidized meal. Who else is supposed to get subsidized food, if not those who have a minimum salary? The ones whose family members don’t have a salary at all?
I sometimes think someone is sabotaging people in SDSM. That VMRO-DPMNE is plotting against them and devises stupid solutions for them and sends them to their offices through some secret channels, and guys from SDSM are so lazy they release them without reading them. They have to show that at least some work is being done. They post it on Facebook. People in headquarters will provide the likes.
Or, perhaps, the government has completely lost touch with reality. How else could you explain that amid a world crisis, a social democratic government has decided to save money on students? On food, to make matters worse. On the food for the poorest students.
3 Fortunately, President Stevo Pendarovski is in touch with reality and says he wouldn’t let his son live in a dormitory. In an interview with TV 24, he said “the conditions in the “Stiv Naumov” dormitory were gross and disgusting even 25 years ago and I don’t think there have been any substantial changes”.
Can the dormitory conditions change by themselves? Will they improve just by someone taking a close look at them?
Stevo Pendarovski forgot he’s the president yet again. Yes, indeed, being the head of the state doesn’t mean he’s responsible for dormitories. But, Stevo Pendarovski now is not the same Stevo Pendarovski from 25 years ago. The small difference is that he is now the president of the country. After all, I’m not interested at all in what some ordinary citizen Stevo Pendarovski has to say about dormitory conditions. I’m also not interested in what President Stevo Pendarovski thinks about the same topic. What I’m interested in is what he’s doing to make it better.
4 Just as the Minister of Health, Bekim Sali, who stated that there is indeed no medicine for cancer patients, but he doesn’t know when it will be procured because it’s not him who procures it. Patients who’ve had a surgery and those who have undergone chemotherapy and radiation haven’t received immunotherapy for more than two months.
“Of course, patients are not expected to buy therapy for themselves, the state, i.e. the clinic has to take care of timely supply, but I am optimistic and expect these obstacles to be overcome”, said Minister Sali.
Patients will be able to pin their hopes on the statements of the Minister of Health! As if the disease they’re struggling with is not painful enough, as if the all the trouble they go through at the Department of Oncology and the uncertainty when they’d get their medicine, looking for connections asking whose palm they need to grease, now they have to endure even the minister’s optimism.
5 No, no, just play it with interference, distort the sound, people won’t be able to watch it and they’ll change the channel when they see it.
Why bother? Just turn off the power, fuck it.
Let life come.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
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[1] Music Radio – Kanal 103 is the only alternative (non-commercial) radio station in Macedonia that has achieved a cult status and a passionately devoted following among the audience. Transmitting since 1991, its mission is to promote avant-garde music and ideas, and it is responsible for some of the most important cultural transformations in the region. (Translator’s Note)
[2] Grand Stars (“Zvezde Granda”) is Serbia’s most popular reality television music competition organized by Grand Production. (Translator’s Note)
