Incompetent Officials Hinder Turkmen Reforms

Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov is engaged in a major reshuffle of his top officials, although NBCentralAsia analysts question whether simply bringing in new faces will be enough to make government more efficient.



At a January 15 cabinet meeting, President Berdymuhammedov, who also holds the post of prime minister, slammed the cabinet for being unprofessional and incompetent and failing to get to grips with his reform plan.



In remarks published by the official government website, Berdymuhammedov said that neither ministers nor provincial governors were adequately aware of how a market economy should work, nor did they have the skills to manage modern industrial processes. As a result, the outcomes they achieved fell far short of the tasks they had been set.



The meeting ended with one-third of the cabinet being dismissed, including the communication and welfare ministers and the heads of the state oil company Turkmenneft, the cotton and carpet-weaving industries, the Caspian shipping line, and a commercial bank. In addition, the governor of Lebap region was sacked.



This was followed on January 21 by a second cull of officials, this time targeting the security agencies. The main victims were Defence Minister Agageldi Mammetgeldiev and border guards service chief Bayram Alovov.



NBCentral Asia experts say that many of the officials sacked in the January 15 purge were paying the price for the disappointing outcome to date of a programme introduced in 2007 to improve urban and rural infrastructure in Turkmenistan.



Although the authorities earmarked two billion US dollars for the programme, the first phase is regarded as having been a complete failure.



“Most of the money allocated in 2008 to build roads, regenerate urban areas and put other infrastructure in place was not drawn down, and 75 per cent of the construction projects that were planned were not actually implemented,” said a local media-watcher.



One of the main reasons seems to have been that the organisations and agencies that should have carried out the work under contract lack qualified managers capable of strategic planning.



After his election as president in February 2007, Berdymuhammedov announced he was going to institute reforms. He did reverse some of the worst policies of his predecessor Saparmurat Niazov, who died in late 2006, but he continued to apply the same kind of top-down leadership style and appointment policies.



Local analysts say that like Niazov, Berdymuhammedov, prefers to appoint people from his own entourage. He has also perpetuated the practice of giving officials a six-month short probationary period, and then dismissing them summarily if they are deemed to have failed.



Commentators in Turkmenistan say the ministers criticised by Berdymuhammedov do not meet deadlines and have poor management skills, a result of low professional standards.



“Almost all current Turkmen officials obtained their posts through either patronage or bribery,” said the media analyst.



An analyst in the Dashoguz region says that the current generation of officials were educated at Turkmen universities where the curriculum has remain unchanged for the past 20 years, corruption levels are high and the only reason for studying at all is to get the right diploma.



“They were taught by lecturers who did not care what the students learned and who took bribes in exchange for giving good exam results,” he said.



Analysts says that only by radically changing the system for training future public servants will reforms bear fruit. Among the changes they recommend are introducing entry tests for university admissions, encouraging study abroad, and reviving professional development systems.



An observer in Ashgabat says a recent survey conducted in one of the city’s local government offices, where nearly eight out of ten managers lacked the right qualifications for the job.



“The authorities need to remember that there was nowhere for the current [generation of] executives to get a good education,” added the observer. “They grew up on the Ruhnama [mandatory text written by Niazov] and so they know nothing and are capable of nothing.”



(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. The service has resumed, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.)