Grand Designs in Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan’s president Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov’s announcement that the state is to spend seven billion US dollars on construction projects this year raises questions about how transparently the money will be used, and whether it will be squandered on white-elephant projects.

Addressing government ministers in February, Berdymuhammedov set out a policy for boosting the local construction, but said that a new building agency would invite foreign as well as local firms to bid for work.

The spending plan for 2011 represents a significant increase on last year, when 4.8 billion dollars were invested in 120 major building projects.

Since coming to power in 2007, Berdymuhammedov has followed his predecessor, the late Saparmurat Niazov, in using state funds to erect grand buildings of little relevance to ordinary people.

One local observer singled out the Oguzkent, a luxury hotel in the capital Ashgabat, asking, "When have you ever seen a hotel that cost the budget half a billion dollars to build?"

Another commentator said construction costs in Turkmenistan often cost far more than they would anywhere else, saying estimates were artificially inflated.

A staff member at the construction ministry said, "We’ve never had this kind of money allocated to our sector before, so it will create a real building boom."

But he said that while prestige-projects looked great on the outside, they were often shoddily built and needed expensive repairs.

Expensive building projects are not limited to the capital. Work began last year on a large stadium in the northern Dashoguz region.

"Some senior official must have decided that unemployed young people should engage in sports rather than hang around," a resident of a village near the stadium site said. “No one cares that this region has high unemployment or that over 300 people a year are leaving to find work in large towns or in Turkey and Russia.”

The stadium is one of several construction projects in Dashoguz, which also include local government offices, a museum, an agricultural institute and a racetrack. A new textiles factory was one of the few that will bring practical benefits.

In eastern Turkmenistan, a villager complained about similar grand designs there. "They’d have been better building new plants to process wool, sheepskin, cowhide, cotton, vegetable and fruit instead," he said.

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.