It's ok, we have passports, water and pension: How the state blackmails its citizens

By: Sead OMERAGIC

There are too many reasons why BH citizens should feel vulnerable because of dysfunctional state. The state is also the entity, canton and the municipality. Recent passports related drama are replayed games without frontiers with our nerves. Eventually, we found ourselves desperately waiting to get our passports and expressing some sort of public gratitude to the state for not forgetting us completely. At one point, it seemed as if FBH citizens were sanctioned for the state officials not doing their jobs.

In common European circumstances, a state is just a service of the citizens. It looks like we are divided: First them, the state officials with privileges of having a job in the state service. Each of them can say: The state, it is me. Their salaries are higher than anywhere else, the privilege and protection of state officials. At the other end the vassals without privileges - that's us. We don't matter even though we are total majority. We know that the state institutions and public companies are filled to overflowing with cousins and people with the 'right' national affiliation. That's how our public administration ended up with the burden of incompetent yet well paid public servants.  

The fact that the state is doing its job is causing all kinds of problems. Or better say, the illness does not choose its patients. Lack of knowledge and incompetence on all state positions, poor organization, all of that will be individually billed to us.  

One of such problems is drinking water in Sarajevo. We have been experiencing this problem for decades and now they tell us to be grateful as they will finally stop with reductions. The state capital has become a hostage to laziness and incompetence to develop a long term strategy for this problem.

The incompetent people think ad hoc and short-term. It is because of them that Sarajevo stepped into the 21st century without water, even though it had had water, public water system and baths back in medieval times.  

The government that we have chosen, regularly provides us dozens of problems and blackmails. They blackmail pensioners so timely pensions are an issue every single month. After all, the pensioners should be grateful that they will receive any pension! As if they did not work hard their entire life for this pocket money they hope to receive. Does the state feel responsible?

Cheap national stories are still an alibi for incompetence and lack of knowledge, even for poverty and general failure. If the state is not held accountable for its failures, than this is a tyranny of the citizens.

Lately, there have been talks about three different (national) views of the Reform Agenda. The European Act of people's right, inter alia, protects citizens from violent and self-willed state. If the state discriminates us, if police protections is based on double standards, if the judiciary keeps failing to give us equal treatment, if the government does not function as a system, everyone is at risk.

If there are no sanctions against negligence and wrong and dangerous decisions, if incompetence is presupposed, then instead of a state providing us with a decent life, we only get to live in nerve-racking survival mode characterized by chaos.

We keep getting blackmails and partial solutions, they throw before us bread crumbs and bones to chew on. And when at last, crazy and confused, we get only small part of what is considered 'the essentials' in normal states, we become almost ready to thank the state for being so merciful. Whether we want to admit it or not, the state at all of its levels has turned into semiprivate corrupted communities. Political parties rule, carefully selected groups which imposed themselves within national corps. Privileged families rule as well as various lobbies so the state purpose as service to the citizens has been lost long time ago. We wonder if anywhere else the corruption functions as the state.