Musketeers on the roof
A lady friend of mine has written in Facebook about the price of lemons in Lviv – 49 hryvnias is too much for a tea party, you know. Quite a few people have responded to this post, and I know now that the lemon price is 39 hryvnias in Kyiv, 50 in Chervonohrad and Odesa, and the equivalent of 20 hryvnias in Poland. The point is not in prices here, although their variation characterizes imbalance of the market. War, elections, political statements, and epochal events have relegated mundane issues to the background. It is sort of bad taste now to say that a bank that has gone bust is now out of cash and prices and currency exchange rates have broken loose like rabid dogs and are biting people at every street corner. Yet many are asking: is this normal in wartime or is this an outrage that thrives under the thunder of guns?
Rummaging in the historical memory that still conjures up the vision of ration cards and plants evacuated to the rear, we will not find the answer. It is not 1941 now. Nor is it the early 1980s, when we peacefully coexisted with the Afghan war that simmered somewhere very far away in an unknown land. So what laws should life be based on in a country that is repelling the aggression of a neighboring state, when there are different prices for imported goods and dissimilar images of existence, when a newspaper carries in the same issue an appealing advertisement of a five-star hotel and repugnant photos of soldiers killed in trenches? Maybe, it is the neighborhood of antipodes that forms the paradox of hard times? People go to work in the morning here and launch an attack there, hide from rain here and from artillery shells there. But it is the same source – the economy – that feeds both war and peace. Guns and bread can only be made available thanks to the people’s economic activity.
Unfortunately, the very fundamentals of life have slipped to the background of public awareness. Everybody only seems to be interested in the elections, the news from the eastern front, and paradoxes of the Russian and Ukrainian political life. The heated debates on lustration rules, corruption scale, and Western aid have lost the idea of transformation. Of course, to boost one’s moral spirits, it is useful to see members of the revamped Party of Regions in custody, learn about what else was banned in Russia, and read an extract from Petro Poroshenko’s speech in Washington. But we would like to see real changes which could keep us from the oncoming catastrophe of poverty.
We are fighting on political battlefields like musketeers on the roof of an old barn. The latter is about to tumble down, and roof timbers can no longer withstand the weight of the right, the left, youth, and former bigwigs. They are all bustling on top and unwilling to get down and reinforce the walls, instead of painting over the ceiling and dueling in the attic.
Why are lemon prices leapfrogging? Because there is no competitive medium, where Odesa residents could sell goods in Lviv. We have no national market at all if we are to proceed from concrete assumptions. A cubic meter of pine-tree boards costs 900 hryvnias in Lviv and 1,600 in Odesa because there is a monopoly seller of lemons in the Carpathians and that of timber boards on the Black Sea coast. He wants to benefit as much as he needs, not as much as he can, from a kilogram or a cubic meter. The national trade networks, through which a half of all commodities are being marketed, are represented by just five to seven owners. The same applies to all the spheres, to say nothing about the notorious regional energy, gas, and water-management authorities to which money flows only because the source is “in the right hands.”
In China, to which many Ukrainian entrepreneurs travel to acquire goods, reforms are talked about less than in our country. But they are being carried out there. Fifteen years ago the then backward country decided to help the agrarian producer by setting up online commodity exchanges. Computers were installed in the villages and connected to the Internet. Every owner of a hectare of land could sell his produce from the hinterland to Beijing. But in our country, cabbages perish in one place but cost an exorbitant price in another. Why has a computerized agrarian country been unable in 23 years to set up a farming produce exchange for small-scale and large farms? Why is there no land market or information for various sectors? Where are the many simple steps that can lead to the 21st century? For they can be taken without any special effort or public pomp with guaranteed assistance from Western partners who know better than we that the essence of the military clash with Russia lies in nothing but the economy. Should the latter remain oligarchic, raw-material-based, and with antediluvian manual management, it will be futile to expect freedom. There is no need to lustrate yesterday’s figures if their places are to be taken by today’s ones. What’s the use of pulling up the weeds of corruption if thistles are being sown in the fields again? There will be no civil society if crowds of poor people continue to stand by the landlord’s manor, waiting for alms.
Why is our political system not learning these copybook maxims? We know only too well how silly the parliament of a civilized country would look if every gallant marine were elected to it, don’t we? We would surely be ironic about good people elected as bosses in a medieval manner – by shouts from the crowd. Nor would we be in rapture over a government consisting of journalists. For, to be a civil servant or work in an elected body, one must have entirely different qualities. Yet we continue to form the government out of smart dilettantes who are known all over the country. But anyone of us, who can write superbly about medicine, will be unable to remove the appendix. And now the entire country needs surgery to remove thrombi in the arteries and veins of the economy. It is not enough here to have a good style of writing and know how to process the material for investigative journalism. Professionals are indispensable, and the whole problem is in them.
Whenever you build a house, do a major repair of your apartment or car, or carry out any major project, you always see a distance between the unlimitedly advertised possibilities and the modest abilities of the people you hired. The same applies to governmental practices. Promises and plans are taking your breath away, and rosy prospects are exciting your imagination. But there will be nobody to look into the market of imported fruit or the tax law. Politicians are saying that unless we set things right in the government and parliament, draw up good laws, and form a viable majority, we will not be able to move on. What are we to do then? To wince after eating the lemon we bought at a prohibitive price? To go on looking for another 23 years at the noble musketeers who fight for our happiness on the roof, or to drive them off the top in some way by refusing to vote?
