KS Health Center and Citizens Collateral Damage of SDA's "Reward" Policy

By Rasim Belko

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BOSS should prepare. For the 18th hand, they will get a little health. More precisely, the Public Institution Health Center of Sarajevo Canton. 

And so, according to the established practice, the 18th, or rather the key hand of some minor party or individual, as the deciding factor in the SDA + satellites government, gets the director of the Sarajevo Canton Health Center. An institution that carries the health system of Sarajevo Canton on its "shoulders". 

The party, or what's left of it, whose 40 candidates in the previous elections collectively won 7,995 votes, and the only one who entered the KS Assembly, Haris Pleho, with 2,670 votes, received the management of our health as a reward for his role in the political play. 

But it's not just health, it's procurement, tenders on the principle of you give us here, we give you there. 

From election to election, the principle is the same, everything else is nuances. In fact, only one nuance differs, whether Pleho is Bosniak or Serb. 

Manipulators of petty political manners, with even pettier ambitions, enter politics for no reason other than positions from which they will fill their own pockets and those of those around them. 

What does it mean in political life for a party that wins about eight thousand votes in a Canton with about 400,000 inhabitants. 

And then you, whom the people clearly do not trust, manage the most important link in the health system - primary healthcare. But they never drew power from their election results. It is enough for one from that list of political opportunists to enter the cantonal or some other parliament. 

And they wait. And when they wait for a recomposition, they bargain. They know the value of the 18th hand in the KS Assembly or some other decisive hand in another parliament. And SDA has never been stingy with our money. 

They have always lavishly rewarded those decisive hands. 

Because of SDA and its political satellites, in this composition SBB and DF, we have a situation where we are changing the director of the Public Institution Health Center of Sarajevo Canton in the midst of a pandemic. Pleho got tired of waiting, so both SDA and, God knows, SBB pushed for Mehmed to be replaced and Muhamed to be appointed. For Kulić to leave and Ahmić to come. 

And this is not the first time. 

Besides SDA, the electoral system also allows this kind of game, which has a fairly low electoral threshold. Thanks to that low threshold, hunters for the 18th hand get the opportunity to be the decisive factor on the political scale. 

And we all pay the price. 

Muhamed Ahmić was the director of the Psychiatric Hospital of Sarajevo Canton. 

He resigned from that position in September 2019 because, as he said at the time, "he did not want to be dismissed by the then new majority. It was a time when the dismissal of the "six-party" government and the takeover of power by SDA were already widely discussed. 

Ahmić knew that BOSS would take care of him, and he revealed this in a statement to Radio Sarajevo. 

“I don't regret this position, I would like the new director to be someone from the hospital, and thanks to the populist measures of Elmedin Konaković (then President of the KS Assembly, note.a.) as the previous prime minister, the director's salary in the hospital is lower than a doctor's salary, so I am going to a higher salary”, Ahmić told Radiosarajevo.ba.

Ahmić's basic salary as director of Jagomir was around 2,180 KM, while Kulić's basic salary as director of the JU Health Center KS was around 2,600 KM. 

Considering that BOSS cadres are not particularly thrifty, it is not excluded that Ahmić's basic salary will be even higher. And so it goes in circles.

Political moles are digging around us from election to election. 

The principle is the same, sometimes you are Bosniak, sometimes Serb. 

The important thing is that the Health Center is liquid.