Fear of unemployment and economic crisis,
economic growth and social security will top the list. And in the Oct. 28 vote,
Ukrainians try to elect a political
elite that could bring them that. But this is where the problems start.
Ukraine’s political elites are desperately lacking the two essential qualities
that are required to meet those expectations: competence and maturity.
Here are some illustrations of what I
mean. With great fanfare, the Ukrainian government announced on Nov. 26 that it
signed a $1 billion agreement with a Spanish company to build an onshore
liquefied natural gas terminal in a bid to decrease Ukraine’s dependence on
Russian gas imports.
Just a few hours later, it emerged that
the Spanish company in question had no idea about the agreement, signed
nothing, and authorized nobody to either negotiate, or sign on their behalf. The
mysterious man who concluded the deal is nowhere to be found.
The deal was a glaring example of the
incompetence of the following agencies that were (or were supposed to have
been) involved in a deal like this one: the Agency for National Projects, which
pushed the whole affair, the president’s administration, which oversees the
agency, the Cabinet of Ministers, and energy ministry in particular, and the
counter-intelligence and economic departments of the Security Service of
Ukraine or SBU.
Those departments of the SBU account for
5,000 people of the total 33,500 officers the service has, according to a
source in the outgoing government. All those thousands of people showed their
total incompetence, among other things.
But does the opposition have higher
quality to offer? If their actions immediately after the election are anything
to go by it does not look like it. Faced with fraud in several majority
constituencies but which represented less than 2 percent of parliament’s seats,
the whole opposition spent more than a week rallying, calling people for
endless strikes and hunger strikes in the streets, and trying to make up their
minds about what to do next. Some of the
more feckless grandstanding concerned whether to refuse to accept their
mandates – which of course would have given the Party of Regions the
constitutional majority the opposition claimed was its overriding electoral
goal.
In the meantime, the pro-presidential
forces in parliament approved a new law on referendums that many fear will
become a step towards changing the constitution in a manipulative,
non-transparent manner, and possibly a means toward joining the Customs Union
with Russia. The opposition once again failed to see the forest for the trees,
focusing on the wrong thing, and once again proving its own incompetence.
It has to be said that the level of
competence really varies in all of the groups of political elites that analysts
tend to clump together for the sake of convenience. There are competent people
in the government, able to control many agendas and run their jobs smoothly –
even along with a few businesses on the side. In other words, they are
competent but corrupt.
And there competent people in the
opposition – sociologists, economists and politicians — but they are still in the minority and are
able to make little headway either within the opposition or in effecting change
in society. In other words, they are
competent but ineffective.
That said, most people in both groups are
still old-style bureaucrats, fearing to express opinions, or take actions and
responsibility. The good news is that it seems the political elite, and in
particular those with an old Soviet mentality, are falling behind the society
in many ways, including the degree of competence and maturity, which has
increased dramatically in the population as a whole in the past several years.
In particular, civil society is getting
more robust than ever, affecting policy making, a whole range of political
processes and bringing forward new leaders who sometimes end up in politics.
A good case in point is UDAR’s numbers
four and 10 on the party list, Oksana Prodan and Pavlo Rozenko. Both of them
come from the non-government sector, and are well-respected by their community.
Prodan was one of the leaders of the Tax Maidan, the mass protests of business
owners at the end of 2010 against the new government’s tax code. She is also
head of Fortetsya, a small and medium business association. Rozenko is a
well-known social policy expert who has worked for the reputable Razumkov
Center.
At a recent conference in Warsaw, Prodan,
in particular, talked about what she is coming to the parliament with. She said
she was coming with hope for change and the belief that change for the better
is possible. But most importantly, she said she will concentrate on a few, but
significant changes to improve the business climate – particularly,
deregulation. She will push to cancel all those silly Soviet health standards
and spravkas, for example, that have new era regulations piled on that are
impossible to observe, no matter how hard one tries. This pushes many
businesses out of the legal norms and makes them vulnerable to any inspection
and therefore likely to engage in corruption to stay afloat.
These are just tiny signs of the processes
that are bubbling in the society under the thick greasy layer of corruption and
incompetence that we see every day around us. But they give hope for a better
quality of politics sometime in the future, when a critical mass of these
people come to power.
In the meantime, these processes also are
like a tactic of a 1,000 small cuts: they don’t kill the giant of incompetence,
but they weaken it, hopefully paving the way for its fall one day.
Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].
