The Devil Brought Them

At first - naively - I really thought that by introducing those last excise duties on fuel, Bosnia and Herzegovina would wake up one morning to find itself crisscrossed with quality expressways and motorways, because they announced it loudly, and then, when the entities and the district almost went to war over how to divide the collected money, I thought: Let the devil take them and the excise duties... as long as there's no shooting! And then I read that the devil took the previously collected 8.5 billion marks, and left us (pfft!) with them.

Then I - again, naively - thought that after the adoption of the transport strategy, accession to the transport community, and the opening of BiH's doors for projects and foreign investments, and after we received four out of six regional projects in Trieste (hey!) or two billion marks... the summer of 2018 would further warm the diligent hands of our civil engineers. However, almost a year has passed since then, and some devil took those two billion and another small amount, five hundred million... and left us with them again.

Then I heard on television - I couldn't watch it - that the Indirect Taxation Authority achieved a record performance and collected again some millions of marks from indirect taxpayers (621 in January alone), of which a small amount was returned to those who should have received it, and the rest, it seems (again), was taken by some devil because - after the division to the state, entity, and district level - no one knows how, where, and on what these funds disappear in the end...

Then I saw on television how the king of SbA gifted the president of DT with gifts worth more than 1.3 billion dollars... and I hoped - in vain - that at least from the change, let alone the alms, something would fall into Bosnia and Herzegovina... my hopes grew even more when I heard that Trump received the largest yacht in the world, with all the equipment inside, including toilets in all 80 rooms and 20 gold-plated suites, hoping that we would get at least one of the uninstalled - those that turned out badly - toilets, because we are in need... However, it seems that the devil took the gifts and the unpaid alms again, but the sinner forgot to take with him our people who claim to have friends all over the Islamic world who are eager to help us...

I lost all hope that anyone would ever help us and that the devil would finally come for our people when I read that Prince and Crown Prince MbS, son of the aforementioned SbA, offered 4.3 billion euros for Manchester United from the family fortune of 967 billion euros, from some Americans who gave 900 million euros for the Red Devils (?) back in 2003...

And then it dawned on me - stupid, no longer naive - the lamp lit up... it's not the devil but a fiend! And not just one... there are more of them... And he's not cunning in all colors, but only red! And he doesn't care about religion... he's more interested in football!

That's why the poor Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of BiH, VB, today, on our behalf, borrowed a lot of money from the Kuwait Fund for Development of Kuwait to build 17 kilometers of highway on Corridor 5C from Nemila to Nedrag.

Since the devil took 8.5 billion from the first excise duties, and even a billion from the last ones... since the same devil has been taking billions from indirect and hundreds of millions from direct taxes for years... since the same devil has been taking hundreds and thousands of something, maybe millions, collected through various parafiscal levies for decades... in short, since Bosnia and Herzegovina is full of devils because of whom we haven't been able to build a decent road from Sarajevo to Tuzla (and back) or from Sarajevo to Mostar (and back) for decades, it must be God's gift - it cannot be mere luck - that Kuwait has the Kuwait Fund for Development, from which it supports projects in the field of infrastructure and other sectors, and that this will continue for at least another 20 years, or more precisely, 15 years with a 5-year grace period at an interest rate of only two percent per year.

Do Bosnians or Herzegovinians even know, without counting on their fingers, how many zeros are in a billion? Or at least a million, or 34 million? And how much is 34 million euros in marks? And do they know if the interest is on the principal or the other, and how much is 2% of 34 million? I don't know how to calculate either, and I don't like it... especially since I calculated that even my unborn grandchildren already owe various international funds and development funds of other countries. Then, maybe something easier: do the residents of, for example, Sarajevo know who the residents of Poljine are... and do they pay for electricity, water, garbage collection, RTV subscription... do they know the prices at the market, has anyone ever seen them buy a 'fasunga'... do they know what can be bought for a minimum pension or at least for a minimum, or even for an average salary... Are the streets leading to all Poljine areas of the first, second, or third priority, and when is snow cleared from them... or does snow not fall there at all, but is it always sunny?

Actually, I wanted to ask, does anyone from Bosnia or Herzegovina or others know, if the devil is taking the money, and not taking those who are after the money like us... could it be that the devil actually brought them to us?