President Petro Poroshenko recently admitted that the pace of reform in Ukraine was too slow in the first months of his presidency.
He vowed to speed them up as he announced his strategy till 2020.
Ukraine will apply for membership in the European Union. It will get into top 20 countries in World Bank’s Doing Business ranking; double its per-capita gross domestic product; refurbish civil service by 70 percent, and increase average life expectancy by three years. Oh, and 90 percent of the country’s residents will be proud of their country.
If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.
“This is rather a set of dreams,” says Oleksandr Paskhaver, president of the Center for Economic Development and one of the country’s leading economists.
To achieve these goals, the country needs to conduct some 60 types of reforms simultaneously. Of them 10 are the most urgent, and they include an anti-corruption reform, justice system refurbishment, cleanup of law enforcement and deregulation.
It would be overwhelming for any executive team – if it had a plan to do it. The president’s team only have a two-page set of key performance indicators. The rest is too vague, and fails to answer some of the fundamental questions, such as how these goals will be reached and who will drive the process.
Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of the president’s administration whom Poroshenko has tagged as the guy in charge of reform, said the president’s administration just prepares the goals, or what they refer to as strategy. The actual step-by-step plan is yet to be designed.
He said it’s like reconstructing a house. “Initially we have to describe what we need in the end and then outline the set of works,” he said at a press briefing on Sept. 30. But he said the president’s administration was not going to design the reforms. It will just “coordinate.”
Shymkiv said the parliament will soon get a set of bills needed to speed forward, including drafts on anti-corruption bureau, tax reform, state service, decentralization and deregulation. He could not specify when it will happen, and where the bills will come from. Some of them, like the bill on anti-corruption bureau, which is supposed to investigate top level corruption and is already dubbed “Ukraine’s FBI,” have been proposed by the civil society.
Top figures at the Cabinet of Ministers, it seems, have their own idea of what needs to be done – and it’s not necessarily in line with the presidential view. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk on Sept. 3 presented his own plan, the Revival Plan for Ukraine.
It included a number of more immediate ideas, such as reducing the number of taxes from 22 to nine and cutting the number of government agencies that can control and inspect business. Most of his suggestions are yet to be implemented, and it’s not expected to happen during the campaign before the Oct. 26 snap parliamentary election where the president’s and prime minister’s parties compete.
Shymkiv said the Cabinet offered tactical reforms for a year, while the president outlined a broader strategy that even stretches beyond the first presidential term, which ends in 2019. Shymkiv claimed the president and the Cabinet work well together, and yet he criticized Yatseniuk’s tax reform plan, saying the business was not consulted.
But criticisms towards the presidential plan are many and significant.
For example, economists are struggling to explain how the nation, whose economy is crippled by ongoing war, will reach $16,000 in 2020, up from the current $8,500. According to the IMF forecast, this year’s GDP is set to contract by 8 percent, while next year – by 1 percent.
It means, that to achieve the presidential target the economy will have to have robust double-digit growth for the rest of the years, which is unprecedented in Ukraine. But Shymkiv said the plan is doable.
Experts are even more critical about humanitarian targets set out in the presidential plan. They are assembled there under the generic name Pride. It says by 2020 the country aims to increase the number of Olympic medalists by 35 from the current 20 it received at the L:ondon Olympics;, produce five Ukrainian quality films that will reach mass audience, and make 90 percent of Ukrainians proud of their nation.
“How is it possible to create pride?” asks Vira Nanivska, honorary president of the International Center for Policy Studies, a non-government organization. She said the plan was “too Soviet.” Nanivska said the the presidential plan fails to take the war into account as well.
Ukrainian philosopher and strategist Sergiy Datsiuk says at the times of war the country can make plans for no longer than two years, and then it needs to be revised. “It’s very ambitious to plan up to 2020 in a war situation,” he wrote on his blog. “But it’s not very fair considering the situation.”
President Poroshenko said he hoped that a new parliament elected at the end of this month will give a new impetus to reform.Pashaver said that war was the right time for reforming as “people are ready for difficulties.”
But it was still a big challenge to find people who were really motivated to carry it out. This is something the presidential team agrees with. “Why are the reforms are stalled? Because it is necessary that people wantto conduct them,” Shymkiv says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
