Leonid Bershidsky
Ukraine's most successful reforming minister tendered
his resignation Wednesday, citing widespread corruption in Ukraine's government
and accusing a top ally of President Petro Poroshenko of blocking reform. If it
wasn't clear to everyone by now that the current Ukrainian leadership
is as thoroughly dysfunctional as the previous one, the case of Economy
Minister Aivaras Abromavicius should remove the last doubts.
A former asset manager, the 40-year-old Abromavicius
is Lithuanian by birth; he accepted Poroshenko's invitation to join the
government, and his offer of Ukrainian citizenship, a little more than a year
ago. I talked to him then, and
he was full of plans -- to cut his ministry's bloated staff, to change the
government procurement system, to privatize thousands of Ukraine's state
enterprises. "We shouldn't waste this crisis," he said. "It's a
unique chance for reforms."
He was doing reasonably well. The independent think
tank VoxUkraine, whose team includes some of the country's most respected
economists, recently placed the economy ministry at the top of its ranking of
government agencies. It had cut the number of unnecessary licenses, introduced
electronic, competitive procurement, inventoried state enterprises and started
replacing their managers with private sector professionals. It also shrank by
more than a quarter. Abromavicius is popular, untouched by corruption
accusations, and he's one of the few in the government whose reformist
credentials haven't been tarnished.
On Wednesday, however, he called a press
conference to say he was leaving:
My team and I have no desire to be a smokescreen for open corruption or
puppets for those who want to restore old-style control over government
finances. I don't want to go to Davos and recount our achievements while some
people are getting favors behind our backs.
He proceeded to name one of these people: Igor
Kononenko, an influential legislator who was Poroshenko's close business
partner before the confectionery billionaire became president.
According to
Abromavicius, Kononenko had long meddled in his ministry's affairs, trying to
install his people as top executives of potentially lucrative
government-controlled enterprises. Most recently, Abromavicius said, a certain
bureaucrat showed up saying his appointment as deputy minister in state
enterprises, including the oil and gas company Naftogaz, had been approved
"at the very top," and a phone call from the Poroshenko
administration confirmed it. That, the minister said, was the last straw
"I won't be part of this graft," he
declared.
Maxim Nefyodov, Abromavicius's deputy in charge of the
promising government procurement reform, announced he was
following his boss back into the private sector.
Abromavicius is not the only minister to be
subject to this kind of pressure. "Managing a business organization,
a ministry or a state company professionally requires independence in
goal-setting, decision-making and team formation, but the technocratic
ministers have had trouble with all three of these bullet points," Roman
Bondar, an executive search consultant who helped Poroshenko headhunt for
government jobs, wrote on Facebook.
The unofficial view has been of Ukraine's reformist
ministers as the public faces of a little-changed corrupt system, in which the
teams of Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk had divided up control
of government revenue streams. But without confirmation from trusted government
figures, Ukraine's foreign donors and creditors could ignore the mounting
evidence that the president and prime minister were involved in covering up
corruption. It was more convenient than crying foul while Ukraine was involved
in a hybrid war with Russia and struggling to implement a bailout program
devised by the International Monetary Fund.
Even after Abromavicius's coming out, it's hard for
Westerners to admit they have been aiding leaders who don't measure up to
Western standards of integrity. Ten ambassadors to
Ukraine, including those of the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, the U.K.
and Japan, published a statement on
Wednesday saying they were disappointed with the minister's resignation.
"It is important," it said, "that Ukraine's leaders set aside
their parochial differences, put the vested interests that have hindered the
country's progress for decades squarely in the past, and press forward on vital
reforms." The problem with that suggestion is that the Ukrainian leaders
represent those vested interests to a greater degree than they represent the
nation -- as has been the case throughout Ukraine's history as an independent
state.
Clearly worried that his domestic and international
legitimacy is going out the window, Poroshenko wrote on Facebook that he'd
met with the minister and asked him to stay and says Abromavicius promised to
think about it. As for Kononenko, the minister's claims about him would be
investigated by Ukraine's newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau,
and the legislator -- who denies the charges -- would cooperate with the
investigation.
That's not likely to change much, however. Ukraine has
slipped into the same mire that threatens to swallow up its neighbor, Moldova,
where a series of ostensibly pro-European governments has proved so corrupt and
beholden to oligarchs that anti-corruption activists have been holding joint
mass protests with pro-Russian parties.
In Ukraine, because of the Crimea annexation and the
war in the east, pro-Russian politicians now stand no chance. Yet if
technocrats such as Abromavicius fail and leave, and Poroshenko becomes a hated
figure like his ousted predecessor Viktor Yanukovych, the pendulum could swing
back to Moscow -- which would vindicate Russian President Vladimir Putin's
efforts to present Ukraine as a wayward sister nation.
For now, the technocrats are hoping for a bloodless
revanche. The next revolution, wrote Mustafa Nayyem, an
increasingly disaffected member of Poroshenko's parliamentary faction,
"will not happen in the streets but in the corridors of power and under
the parliamentary dome. And it will be staged by new politicians, tired and mad
at being pushed into action, called technocrats and told to implement reforms,
but then tied hand and foot by a lack of will to say goodbye to old
schemes."
Nayyem and a number of other young politicians are now
increasingly affiliated with Odessa governor Mikheil Saakashvili, the former
president of Georgia, who is assembling what he calls a Purification Movement
on an anti-corruption platform. So far, he has harshly criticized Yatsenyuk and
his friends, accusing them of corruption, but refrained from undermining
Poroshenko in similar fashion.
Saakashvili and his movement are pushing for
early parliamentary elections, evidently hoping they would win outright control
of the legislature and turn the president into a less powerful figure. At this
point, no one but Saakashvili's new force appears to have a shot at averting
further slippage down the Moldovan path and perhaps toward new violence.
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