Pickpockets in the state treasury

Do you know how pickpockets stole in Skopje buses? Several of them would get on a crowded bus and start looking for the victim by tapping the back pocket, where men were usually carrying their wallets. Or they will locate the lady who holds her purse tightly with both hands. Usually the operation is performed when people return from work, and on days when they get their salary. After those crooks determine who is going to be their victim they will make a fuss in the bus and voila – the job is done. The victim is has been robbed. The criminals get off at the next stop and wait for  the next bus.
If the pickpocket is accidentally detected on the spot, the driver takes the bus straight to a police station. Then the wallet together with the money would be found on the floor. They throw it away, as if they haven’t  stolen anything and as if nothing happened.

This is how I see those sticky fingers shoved in the state treasury taking innovation grants, so after the pickpockets are revealed, follows the throwing of the wallet on the floor. Very innovative pickpocketing. It needs to be patented, so it can never be repeated.

Older tenders with new customers are even more innovative. Everything is transparent. Register a company. Apply for the tender and you get a nice job to sell stuff to patients in public hospitals, but also to healthy people, for about 35 million euros. Ten percent pure profit, “miserable” 3.5 million euros. It’s a profit with clean hands, if you’re humble. If you push a little higher, you can get double. Well, let’s not exaggerate, the half of the profit will go for expenses for people who have come up with a genius idea to provide you with such a wonderful business, after which you immediately feel like a very smart man and, as our people say, a capable man who just started working and made millions. Good for him. One minute he ties up his turban, the next he becomes an imam. Aferim.
Look at that capable mayor. He took his family, loaded his van with cigarettes and straight to Bulgaria. Police officers caught him on time, they were supposed to let him do the job properly, not to be a banal attempt for smuggling, but a clean smuggling deal that will take him to period of five to six years of temporary work on the property of Idriz beg, near Skopje, and not for just  18 months, which will allow him to do whatever he wants until the invitation comes.
What do you think – did the person know the road for a very long time, or this is the first time that his competitors have told on him. And so on, and so forth, until the milk is spilled with little and everything that has been achieved in the past year and a half, and which rightfully marks a historic chance of abandoning the criminal system and liberating the state from tyranny and criminals. Of course, the rule of Nikola Gruevski’s criminal association can not be compared to this, whose successors today are not only hampering justice and the rule of law, but the future of the state, only to save the robbers of Macedonia from prison.

That is why it is a great revolt among the citizens and the media and the authors who have the qualification of objectivity, because they have made serious criticisms of the previous criminal authorities and have great contribution to the demolition of the Gruevism in a peaceful and democratic way. These are not journalists and media servants and propagators of VMRO’s crimes as great successes, but professionals who know their jobs, whose basic duty is to disclose any abuse of power and authority, to reveal every attempt to put their hands in someone else’s pocket, which is the same as putting their hands in the state treasury.

The role of Prime Minister Zoran Zaev in revealing crime and violation of human rights and freedoms, abuse of the judiciary and the media is probably the greatest with the activation of the so-called ‘bombs’, whose “explosions” proved that everything that critics of the Gruevski regime wrote was the truth, even much more than that. It is not comparable to what is happening today with what the VMRO-DPMNE tops did, but the consequences can be the same, that is, much worse. The loss of confidence in the public because of pickpockets eager to get their hands in the state treasury and a mayor’s smuggling of cigarettes, and because of a tender, which, although it is worth millions, is like a stolen chocolate in a grocery store compared to billions of euros robbed from the state treasury and directly from the property of the citizens of Macedonia, this still cannot be an excuse. Let alone be an attempt to minimize and swept under the rug. Like they did not take the money, they gave them back, threw the wallet on the bus, everything was legal, there are no resignations for this, where will we find people to join the government and become officials. These are infantile and dangerous public excuses of Prime Minister Zaev at a time when everything should be impeccably clean, when the biggest decisions in the recent history of Macedonia are ahead.

It is a terrible thought to miss out the chance of a century for fulfilling strategic state interests, such as the alliance with NATO and the EU, over some sort of grants and tenders and someone’s greed.

Gentlemen of the Government – think a little harder so that you don’t gamble country away for a handful of euros. It’s not that your government will be overthrown and you will be set on fire and burn like hay along the road, but because of that strong wind we too will burn with you.

These days, I have very mixed up feelings of anger and embarrassment that this is happening to Macedonia now, and then I get the urge to scream with joy that there is a strong pressure from the public for any abuse, and this represents a real innovation not a technological one, but natural as a tsunami, before which the government pulls back and acknowledges its mistake, not arrogantly blaming the critics of being traitors and foreign mercenaries as their predecessors did. In Macedonia there is a serious wave of a critical mass that will convince politicians and authorities that any attempt to take a denar from the state treasury is a farewell to politics. And, unlawful avoidance of taxes to the budget means facing court. The bigger the capitalist that is caught that did not pay the state taxes and did the crime, the better for preventing and a better news that law and justice are starting to work. Grant acceptance, tips from national money, from the position of an official, and even with only one percent ownership in any company is a strong conflict of interests. Gentlemen, there are banks in the country, take out loans like thousands of other companies. Do not suck out money from the country, you were not elected to do that.

Innovative grants for professional media are also a great and completely unnecessary dud, damaging for both the media and the government. Media and journalists in Macedonia who were left without livelihoods, or barely survived the blows of the regime of Gruevski, who corrupted bosses and editors in eligible media spreading fake journalism, need not only big financial support, but above all ambience for unobstructed work. A public advertisement for subsidies to all relevant media is common in almost all countries of the European Union, without pressuring editorial policies and journalists. The strongest pressure is the professional attitude to work, journalistic codes and citizens who determine the ratings of the media. It should be done and cherished, not funded with grants.

I’ve never wanted to create a policy, but it’s close to mind when you’re making a spaceship that needs to evacuate the population from the territory under attack from an epidemic of corruption, so you can not leave just because the ship is overweight. So, get rid of the ballast and finally move towards the goal that everyone in the country accepts as a way out. There is no other way.

Erol Rizaov