Like most Ukrainians, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has had bad experiences with the state machine.
Any time a state-issued document was required, it meant waiting in line for hours, shuffling from office to office — an ordeal she said left her feeling scared and helpless.
“I simply didn’t know how to approach this state machine from a consumer’s position,” she said in an interview with the Kyiv Post on April 29.
Klympush-Tsintsadze, 43, is now a leading component of that state machine, having on April 14 become Ukraine’s first-ever vice prime minister on European and Euroatlantic integration. Among other duties, she will be responsible for overhauling the very civil service that has been a bureaucratic bane for herself and her fellow citizens for decades.
But don’t expect immediate results, Klympush-Tsintsadze warned.
While the long-awaited new civil service law came into force on May 1, it might take from two to five years for the civil service to show broad improvement, she said.
First, new rules for hiring and firing civil servants have to be implemented, including an open, competitive recruitment system for government jobs.
Then salaries will have to be raised above the officially low ones of a couple hundred dollars a month today, meaning money will have to be found in Ukraine’s slim state budget of $30 billion or so. Without wages that a public servant can live on, corruption in the state sector is likely to remain high.
Also, the functions of the ministries will have to be revised, with some of them being delegated to local government bodies.
“And we need to develop a vision for administrative procedures,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said. “As a state we have to provide better quality services, and make it easier for our citizens to get them.”
The creaky state bureaucracy Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union duplicates functions and authorities in various state bodies, has unclear lines of responsibility, and pits state officials and ministers into competition with each other for power and control of state assets.
According to Klympush-Tsintsadze, it will be her main function as vice prime minister on European and Euroatlantic integration to disentangle these crossed lines of authority. She said she wants to foster coordination, cooperation and communication among Ukraine’s various ministries and state bodies, so that “Ukraine has a unified voice with which to talk to its European partners.”
Knocking on EU’s door
One area in which Ukrainians are looking for quick results is the issue of visa-free travel to the European Union.
But while the EU has already promised this to Ukraine, there is still a lot to do, according to Klympush-Tsintsadze.
The European Commission on April 20 officially proposed lifting visa requirements on Ukrainians, and Klympush-Tsintsadze hopes Ukrainians will be able to travel to the EU more freely as soon as this fall.
“We don’t have to perform any additional actions to meet any EU requirements anymore, but we need to continue the processes that we’ve started,” she said, explaining that Ukraine has to appoint the last member of the ruling board of the National Agency for Corruption Prevention, as well as a new prosecutor general.
The Ukrainian parliament also has to approve changes to the constitution regarding the judiciary, and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau has to proceed with all the cases it has opened.
“Our partners from the European countries will follow all these things, but they are not in any way officially tied to the decision (about visa-free travel),” she said.
As for applying for EU membership, Ukraine is still too far from that goal to even raise the issue.
“Knocking on a door that is, well, not closed, but one that we are not ready to enter – it’s just not right,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said. “But I’m sure Ukraine will get such an opportunity, if the country prepares for this entrance.”
Working with the Rada
Klympush-Tsintsadze came to the Cabinet from the Verkhovna Rada. She won her seat at the last parliamentary elections in October 2014, being elected on the party ticket of the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko.
Before entering politics, she worked as a journalist, and then held management positions first in Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s charity, the Open Ukraine Foundation, and then in the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, where she organized the annual Yalta European Strategy conferences.
She decided to join politics after the EuroMaidan Revolution. “At that moment it was clear that if you didn’t try, if you didn’t make use of everything you know, you would always feel guilty.”
While in parliament, she was a member of a pro-democratic and pro-European inter-factional grouping called the EuroOptimists.
Mustafa Nayyem, a lawmaker from the group, supported the appointment of Klympush-Tsintsadze as minister. In a post on his Facebook page on April 26, he described her as “our person in the government.”
Klympush-Tsintsadze said she would keep working together with the EuroOptimists group.
“Without cooperation between parliament, and the president and Cabinet, neither system will move forward,” she said, adding that it is still too early to draw any conclusions about the new government.
“We have to work. We need 100 days to see in which direction this government is going, and how competent it is.”
