The authoritarian government of Ilham Aliyev doesn’t know how to respond, adopting and then abruptly cancelling various laws in an attempt to show its doing something.
Azerbaijani economic expert Gadir Ibrahimli called these steps inadequate.
“First of all, food prices surged by 50 percent, (while) the private and public sectors started to dismiss employees,” he told Meydan.TV, the only one independent online news channel, on Jan.21. “Sure, this process began earlier, but after Dec. 21, the second (manat) devaluation accelerated this process. The low income populations’ conditions got worse and they became very poor.”
The government is not up to the situation.
“When there is a monopoly, the government under the name of ‘artificial price hikes’ decided to arrest the small part of the real sector of the market. It is scarier than devaluation,” Ibrahimli said. “Because confirming the existence of artificial price hikes approve the existence of monopolies. At the same time, the arrests (of food market directors) in this case, show us that the government is not going to overcome monopolies.”
Aliyev, however, attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and still takes up the prospects for the Caspian Sea nation of nearly 10 million people.
The Azerbaijani president said that inflation was only 4 percent in 2015, according to the presidential website, cited by the Azertag News Agency.
“Azerbaijan’s economy is already diversified, with the non-oil sector accounting for about 70 percent of gross domestic product. Our aim is to rapidly develop the non-oil sector in the coming years,” Aliyev said.
That news would come as a shock to most in Azerbaijan, who know that the country depends on oil for more than 90 percent of its revenues.
Moreover, Alieyev’s plans for the future, which he told to Russia’s RIA Novosti, shocked Azerbaijani society – he has never given an interview to local media.
In his interview, Aliyev said that the manat won’t suffer if oil prices keep falling.
“If the price of oil continues to fall, the manat will not suffer. As for the current exchange rate of the manat, I think we did what we had to. We are not going to do anything in order to support the exchange rate of the national currency further. Now the manat is at a fair rate and I think that it has found its place,” Aliyev said.
But the nation is actually going through an unprecedented period.
Central Bank Governor Elman Rustamov suggests charging a 20 percent mandatory fee for money transfers abroad or another 20 percent fee on currency transferred as a direct investment to purchase securities, real estate and land.
These steps and others show that the government is just trying to get more money out of the people, which will spark only more chaos in the formerly oil-rich country.
Gulnar Salimova is an Azerbaijani journalist who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of the Russian Academy of Education in Nizhny-Novgorod. She also completed three media courses at the Baku School of Journalism and took the second place Silver Argus award as the “2014 Photographer of the Year” in Azerbaijan.
