How they got the job is more important than their resignations

Goran Adamovski

Economy Minister Kreshnik Bekteshi is the first to publicly announce he will not tell his sister and the sister-in-law to resign from the jobs they recently got in well-off state-owned companies. According to his logic, is all the same if close relatives of government officials get excellent jobs just when their close relative is an important member of the government, and journalists working for a minimum wage in unfair competition between the media outlets. Bekteshi claims that he did not help them get these jobs, so he has nothing to say.

The minister, whose name the public uses only by chance, and not because of the visible activity and vision for resolving the country’s economic problems, it is quite normal that his sister and his sister-in-law at the same time managed to get jobs in state-owned firms, and for a salary that is much higher than the average. Well, it’s at least fair that Bekteshi did not say that he didn’teven know that they were applying for the jobs.

Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who has the power over his lawmakers and party members and persuade them to vote for the change of the country’s name, for amnesties of their former enemies, for a bunch of controversial laws – does not quite seem to manage and force them to tell their closest relatives to resign. His public appeal was accepted only by the party spokesman, Kostadin Kostadinov, the son of the vice-president of the Assembly, Goran Misovski, and SDSM’s General Secretary, Aleksandar Kiracovski. Kostadinov says that everything was in order with the employment of his mother in the Strumica Central Registry, but that she resigned due to moral reasons. It remained unclear where her morale was four months ago when she got the job, although, probably, she and her son were well aware that there would be negative reactions coming very soon. The same goes for Kiracovski’s father-in-law. His mother-in-law remained at work. Kristijan Misovski, however, admitted that he is stepping down due to pressure from the public, but explained that he was the only one that applied for the job position in the Insurance Supervision Agency. It is rather strange that in such a number of unemployed citizens, no one else, except for him, was interested in a well-paid state job. Maybe they didn’t see the job ad.

What can one say about the other fifteen, for which the newly formed Anti-Corruption Commission opened an investigation, and now they are hiding, hoping that things will go quiet, and their relatives will keep their jobs? Actually, no one expected anything different from them, because if they were different, they certainly would not have moved their entire families in state-owned enterprises and institutions.

What additionally irritates is the fact that the epidemic does not stop, and more and more employment scandals are emerging on a daily basis. DUI’s staff is at the top, this party leaves the impression is that the only ones that it has not hired yet are the official’s pets.

Ali Ahmeti’s party colleagues have long since acted as if they were part of the government when they needed to take responsibility. Conversely, the first to praise or “fly eagles” when they get something at the Government building on Ilinden Street, such as the Law on Languages. In Mala Recica they calculate that without their votes, SDSM has no chance in any election, even if it is presidential. And they greatly abuse this fact.

SDSM is still not aware that the ruling party will lose tens of thousands of votes over twenty jobs. Nor that the party’s tolerance towards DUI will fire back.

Therefore, they need to urgently stop the new employments, which, according to the law, are not supposed to even happen due to the forthcoming elections, and the relatives of the officials need to resign.
And what’s more important: to determine how they got to that position. When was the job ad published and where, what were the requirements, what kind of education was necessary, who applied, who did the selection, what were the competences of the elected ones, why were they better than the rest of the candidates and whether their son, father, son-in-law, brother, sister, mother or anyone else helped them to get that job. Everything else is just a demagogy due to “moral reasons”.