During his entire mandate as Prime Minister, Edi Rama has tried constantly, in different ways, to legitimize “solving” problem outside the framework of laws, procedures, regulations, and institutions.
Usually these “solutions” are based on incidental and uninformed opinion, based on “popular” conceptions about where the “problems” are expressed in popular complaints. Of course such complaints signal the existence of certain problems, but they cannot offer any solutions and even less be treated as public politics.
But cloaked in the concern and responsive to people’s problems, Edi Rama is cementing is extra-institutional and extra-legal power. Now he is turning the perceptions, opinions, annoyances, grievances, or personal or superficial judgments into an institution to empower himself and only himself in order to use them against anyone. Within or outside the party, these are the symptoms of unlimited power
- There are no pertinent departments within the administration the evaluate the progress of and take disciplinary measures against civil servants; Rama fires them live on television and employs whomever sends him their CV.
- There are no official or professional studies, analyses, or evaluations of strategies, programs, and policies; there is a working group that classifies the Facebook comments on Edi Rama’s page, based on which Edi Rama gives specific directives.
- There are no offices, official channels, or formal mechanism to handle complaints; there are popular hearings directly transmitted on TV or Facebook.
- There us no administrative or criminal responsibility based on violations or damages caused to the public interest; there are “slaps” of Edi Rama.
- Local and international reports on drug are not important, the fields of drugs that people see with their own eyes are not important; they exist only when Edi Rama accepts they exist.
- There are no responsible institutions that as part of their daily work draft strategies or actions to combat the drugs that have covered the country, there are no responsible institutions that are charged with duties and concrete responsibilities; there is Edi Rama that announces when and how the war will start.
This method has two important consequences. First, it completely personalizes the relation of the government/official with the citizen. So it stimulates the worst practices of administrative development, based upon tribalist or patriarchal access. You can solve your problem by personally turning toward the leader with complaints about others, but he himself cannot be criticized.
As a result, this model will be reproduced on the lower management levels and will favor the “friends” of the government. Others will have to profit from personal relations or to “buy” a solution.
Second, the Prime Minister’s method avoids any responsibility that he and his policies carry regarding the state of the institutions and policies – registries, healthcare, education, investments, tourism, drugs, corruption, etc. The responsibility is individual. In other words, the policies that were implemented were the right ones, but they were compromised by certain individuals.
So there is no place for change or reflection. The leader takes the right decisions, but the greed and incompetence of the managers of the institutions constantly undermine him – and it matters little that these individuals on all management levels in every ministry and central institution are party nominations.
