Should we hire “legionnaires”?

Today the parliament is going to vote in the new Cabinet of Ministers. The show is expected to be impressive. First, according to Yurii Lutsenko, there will be a separate voting for every candidate for the post of a minister, after a comprehensive presentation of his personality to the deputies. Secondly, it has been promised that foreigners would be included in the government. And this is the greatest intrigue.

According to the information of Deputy Head of Presidential Administration of Ukraine Dmytro Shymkiv (it is predicted that he will be appointed the minister of economy or even vice prime minister on reforms), international recruiting companies (Pederson and WE Korn Ferry) have selected 24 foreign candidates for the posts of ministers. They include both citizens of other countries, and Ukrainians who have worked abroad or represent the Ukrainian diaspora. According to Shymkiv, the main requirements to the candidates include professional qualities, successful work experience, lack of conflict of interests between his private needs and the needs of the state, and presence of values oriented at serving Ukraine. “Ukraine more than ever needs Western experience of state governance, combating corruption, financial planning, anti-crisis management,” he resumed.

How many people out of 24 will reach the final? “It is expected there will be no fewer than five, although I don’t have the final list of candidates,” an interlocutor close to the negotiation process stated to Den yesterday. He said the patience of the Cabinet of Ministers will be played till the last card. There are several people of Ukrainian origin whose candidatures have become a topic for discussion: Roman Rubchenko (McKinsey consultant), Volodymyr Demchyshyn for the post of Minister of Fuel and Energy (current head of NKRE, formerly – head of the department of investment-banking services of ICU), Natalia Yaresko – for the post of the minister of finance (cofounder of the Horizon Capital Company), Danylo Pasko (president of the Harvard Club of Ukraine), Alex Lissitsa – for the post of the minister of agrarian policy (president of Ukrainian Club of Agrarian Business). Do they all have Ukrainian national passports? Two of them (Demchyshyn and Lissitsa) do, and Yaresko doesn’t. It’s hard to tell for the rest, because this information is not always mentioned on the websites of the private companies where they work. At the same time, in his speech in Rada last week Petro Poroshenko gave a clear signal that legislative changes are needed to be implemented to speed up the procedure of granting Ukrainian citizenship to foreigners by the head of the state. The doubtless foreigners, according to the information previously aired by the Ukrainian mass media, include Eka Zguladze – for the post of first deputy of the minister of internal affairs (former Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia in the parliament of Mikhail Saakashvili) and Zurab Adeishvili (former Minister of Justice of Georgia). Poroshenko said that a foreigner who hasn’t been involved in Ukrainian corruption should be on the post of the head of the Anti-Corruption Bureau.

Why does the power invite foreign specialists to the country? Will the Ukrainian economy be rescued by the “team of legionnaires” in the Cabinet of Ministers?

COMMENTARY

Hennadii DRUZENKO, government commissioner for ethnic policy:

“The Cabinet of Ministers’ secretariat has no information on possible appointment of foreigners, because horse-trading linked to Cabinet portfolios is now involving only MPs, and I suspect that very few even of them are taking part in it. Newly elected parliamentarians are now having some kind of discussion among themselves, but unfortunately, they have been at it for far too long. Meanwhile, unlike more successful countries, we do not have time to keep this discussion going for longer, for we should immediately form a government and find a balance between political ambitions and the country’s need for leadership in a time of crisis.

“I hope that the appointment of foreigners to government positions is just a populist slogan, and nobody is seriously going to do this. It looks like a move in the political horse-trading rather than a serious intent. Not to mention that these people do not live in Ukraine and they would feel free to use our country as an experimental subject, I have a simple technical question: hopefully, we are not going to immediately introduce two more official languages? Documentation here is done in Ukrainian, which even the Georgians do not know. So, how will they work with mail, citizens’ petitions, and documents? Will we hire a couple thousand translators for them? It is also a question of access to state secrets. Surely, we will not have a minister without access to state secrets?

“We have our own personnel with biographies and diplomas which are as good as theirs, even yours humble servant has a collection of different regalia, starting with a British diploma and ending with certificates of Fulbright scholarship and Max Planck fellowship, so I can outdo many Europeans.

“I do not know a place where it worked in practice. Some countries invited foreign advisers and it worked sometimes, like in Chile and Georgia (although there was a lot of debate on it there). However, advisers are not ministers, not political decision makers.

“Within 5 months of my work in the Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers, I     have not seen political will to replace directors of departments of bureaus. Replacing ministers but leaving 90 percent of their staff intact will not bring any real change. No driver will make a Lada go faster than 200 km/h. So, why are they not replacing civil servants?

“In general, a good leader with ministerial portfolio cannot change their department on their own and in isolation, because they are all interrelated. Secondly, we need radical changes in the law on civil service, as the minister has no right to fire civil servants. Therefore, either we will change everything at once, or our effort will end in failure as we try to change one particular body at a time. However, speaking from my personal experience, I hired two people without experience in the civil service to my staff, and our performance is second to no other executive agency. The three of us find time to do everything perfectly, even under the current system.

“Tools of changing the system are as follows. Firstly, readiness for radical reforms, not in words but in deeds. Secondly, we need a rise in wages, for a person who gets 100 euros a month is either uncompetitive in the labor market, or they just have some other motives to stay on the job. In better cases, these motives are ambition and socialization, and they live off their parents or spouse. If the Georgians, known in the Soviet time as a symbol of corruption, were able to change the system, then sufficient political will allow the Ukrainians do the same without necessarily involving holders of foreign passports.

“In general, it would be better to attract people from the First Professional Reform Government Initiative, because they have all the advantages of Western experts, beautiful diplomas and also understand what is happening in Ukraine. They do not have to learn the language or get acquainted with the problems and realities of our country. The fact that they are not allowed into the new government is evidence of the desire to have political figures, which can then be blamed for failures and lack of political will to reform.

“Moreover, all this may become a plot to be used by Russian media propaganda, which would present it as a real occupation of our country. I even joked: Let us appoint Russian ministers, and we will end the war. But it is very sad joke.”