DOMESTIC SURVIVOR White bread for politicians, and we will eat grass

By Ernad Metaj

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I grew up watching survival shows and admired how heroes could go without water, food, or fire. Then, more than 15 years ago, while recounting the adventures of heroes from the series Man vs. Wild, a joke circulated that there was a task even he couldn't master.

- Bring him to Bosnia and Herzegovina, give him a wife and children and a minimum wage. Let him survive a month with that, a friend of mine joked, and we laughed.

I have matured, and it is no longer funny to me. The minimum wage back then was a serious income compared to what the minimum wage is today. No film producer or director with ideas can compete with our politicians who have been successfully directing "survival" for years, but live. They don't need actors; a whole army of those who officially live on the edge, or below the poverty line, is fine, but they just can't give up bad directors and screenwriters.

According to official statistics, citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are the poorest in Europe. Due to media reporting, only the authorities in the Federation of BiH have commented so far. They did not tell us that BiH is not the poorest, but they "comforted" us by claiming that the interpretations of some media that "workers in the Federation are the poorest in Europe" are incorrect, which is based on data about the lowest wage of 406 KM. Only those from Republika Srpska are poorer, because when the "lucky ones" from the Federation are given a warm meal and transport in full, they have a guaranteed salary that is 81 marks higher than that in RS.

What the authorities will not say is that neither of them can cover even a quarter of the consumer basket. The average salary, which is around 920 KM, is also far from the costs of the consumer basket. The average is significantly influenced by salaries in the public sector, which are on average "a minimum wage" higher than the real ones. However, the authorities will not boast that we are among the leaders in Europe in terms of the difference between salaries in the real and public sectors.

But what do politicians know about the life of an ordinary person? These days, they are entertaining him with the battle over severance pay for the deputy mayors of Sarajevo. Pensioners Ivica Šarić and Milan Trivić will, thanks to the persistence of SDA and SBB, leave their positions richer by 20,000 marks, or almost fifty minimum wages received by at least 30,000 workers, while during the coronavirus pandemic, that number grew to 200,000 people. While pensioners are "profiting," BiH is pushing to the top of European statistics for the number of people leaving the country in search of a decent income.

While they are lagging behind with the reforms needed to approach the EU, the authorities have made sure to get us used to European costs. An increasing number of food items are cheaper and of better quality in Europe. While the minimum wage in the Federation of BiH has not risen for more than a year because it awaits a set of new legal solutions, prices in stores change from month to month. The latest announcements say that chicken will increase in price by about 20 percent. But what do we care, we are a country where the least meat is eaten per capita anyway. Thanks to government measures, there are more and more vegetarians here, I'm just afraid that the authorities won't think they can "eat grass." We've long since run out of options.