Political fortunetellers’ community

By Alisher SAGADIEV special for better.kz

“Any phenomenon gets a clot form in Kazakhstan and then transforms into crisis”

Piotr Svoik

Common people and authorities would be glad to take advice from wise experts and analysts. First ones need to know whether they shall to stick to low-paying job of switch on planting potatoes in the farmland as more effective resource investment. Second ones need to be keeping informed about common situation in the country for not to make a rapid transit from dreams to the firing wall as it was in Romania with Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife Elena in 1989 year. But where do you get good analysts and political scientists in Kazakhstan?

The loss of reality leads to disharmony, conflicts and tragedies. That’s why any time we need mechanisms able to make precise measures of the current situation and give a forecast for the future with a high degree of probability. Western countries have various analytical and expert services full of political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and other specialists. There no analytics some where in Mali, Somalia or Nigeria yet (or already). The place of Kazakhstan is quite problematically defined in the coordinates system.

Technically, there are political scientists and political strategists, sociologists, analysts and other specialists of close to them range of occupations in the country. Can we use their estimates and recommendations as guidance? It’s better to not to. There’s no difference if you ask Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies (KazISS) under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan or Alliance analytic organizations, or fortunetellers near Green Bazaar (free market for agricultural products) in Almaty.

When experts are giving an estimate of present affairs and future forecast relying solely on their empirical evidence and mental constructions – is the one thing; but when people who have access to a different state documentation give virtual pictures of life – it’s about crisis of analytics in common.

Analytics is a thing of appliance by its nature. By the idea, the analysts are being requested for the reason to sort out situation and to get options of following movements to obtain one or another result. However, Kazakhstani realities are amazing by, that from one side, many structures and persons, calling itself an analytical, can propose real-world step-by-step designs, and from the other, bodies of governmental management are not asking for the advice from competent entities, before “bringing the country an irrevocable “

When Akimates’, ministries’ and agencies’ official reports containing as much truth as raindrops in a desert, then working with such information wouldn’t bring real results. Allegedly the whole state started to establish a powerful research structure. However, to believe in its success is only possible only in the case if it will be as a full-blooded tree – with roots, head, mighty system of internal unity and photosynthesis. Whereas if everything would be limited by a hundred of egg-headed cadres in a single-standing office, along with obvious features of academic (laboratory) idiocy, then the situation would never get off the ground.

To get precise picture political elite in the West is utilizing various sociological services and surveys conducted by them, having recommendations from analytical research centers. However, if to go by this way in Kazakhstan, then it would appear that affiliated sociological structures are giving the information not really different from governmental reports. Analytical centers would too producing products which can be utilized solely for fantasy-style computer game. The opposition (contra-elite, to be precise) have too st

In period of economical crisis, following by unemployment growth and impoverishment of large layers of people, the essentialness of information about real social attitude in corridors of power must grow high. Yet when there is no functional back link system with people, instruments from manual control sphere can be utilized. One Akim should try to get to work by a bus or a trolley in rush-hour, other should go to appointment to local hospital, third – dress simpler, get drunk and test police patrol activity, fifth – to try opening a shop or a canteen… An adequacy of political decision could not be born apart from the reality. And let ruler and common people have different pictures of the world, the president can hardly feel himself safe by ignoring problems and wishes of the million, having no opportunity to find out what’s what.

Transferring Western templates on local ground is a dead-end way of researching. Which Harvard or Oxford can describe Agashka model and its grade of influence on political processes in the country? Meanwhile Agashka is accomplished phenomenon, which has much more influences in many ways, then the invisible hand of market by Adam Smith. Agashka is a mix of high social position, disrespect for the labour and parasitical way of life. His invisible hand covered everything from regular assignments to “application” of budget funds of any sorts. It is a heavy brake on the way of country’s development, and recipes needed to effectively overtake it. As the entire amount of things personifying him – nepotism, bribery, incompetence, corruption, ignorance, tribalism, peculation, corporate raids, and uselessness.

Cratophiles (fans of power in its utmost forms) is another headache of Kazakhstan. Those people who are turning into crap without being in power. They can’t think themselves outside power. To keep themselves within it they are ready to take any area of work, promising incredible results and to lie until last possibility. Because falling out of power machine for them is similar to civil death – they absolutely can’t fit to life in common environment. And cratophiles should be handled somehow on system level.

There is no “statehood” in modern Kazakhstan, if to imply nomenclature of Russian satirist Saltykov-Shedrin. Under “statehold” it is understood something that can support an order and simply bearable functioning of complicated system. To cleanup things to order something urgently needed, such as separation of complicated organic mixes by its calorific capacities (to sort the flies from the steaks and the wheat from the chaff), but on this point professional help couldn’t be avoided.

The situation can substantially change by opportunity to transform population into subject of political process. During all previous years the political life of Kazakhstan had inter-elite type (groups of activists weren’t qualitatively changed the situation). Nowadays, huge categories of people can be pushed on political field. Those are townsmen with one or two local economic mainstays (it is firstly meaning mining sector). Youth (either the ones who are paying for education and unemployed), cheated construction shareholders (whatever propaganda stated, their problems weren’t solved and not being solved), ethnically disturbed and finally poverty. The history is witnessing that during economical crisis’s there are less strikes, but they are of a more violent type.

here is no any kind of consolidated position of Kazakhstani experts’ society by strategic issues. Beginning from elementary moments, such as which assets should be given priority – long term ones (oil refineries) or short-term (crops – to seed on spring and to harvest on autumn). And at that the interethnic situation is tensioning, and what will be the geopolitical tomorrow in the vast region – yet is certainly unclear.

How to control assets available in Kazakhstan, like huge territory and concomitant resources – the specialists should be helpful too. But they are either speaking banal things or loading with phantasmagorias. No fully-fledged market of analytical services emerged in the country, and thus there are no possibilities to find out who is among those experts worth in the reality. By formal signs there were much piglets being fed during the last period, but when their impartial slaughter is starting (qualitative recommendations), it is suddenly clarified that all of them are of dwarfy breed. In such a way all of breed characteristics must be urgently improved.

One of the ways of withdrawal from the crisis, (on this subject, for instance, it is precisely written in this article: http://www.dialog.kz/?lan=ru&id=81&pub=1136&hil=%C0%E9%E4%EE%F1) in which is Kazakh sense-producing corporation is evidently appeared, could be that situation, when persons who have the experience of work in authorities corridors, or even in the Power (this means not on ordinary posts) would be engaged in this. What it would give? A person, given with special training and theoretical instruments for this baggage, can attach its worthless experience, gained by him in times of being in governmental structures. And s\when such people will organize their own analytical-researching structure, at that opened, with engagement of all, so saying, healthy forces, it is quite possible that it will start working much more productively than all of existed before. Does such structure existing? The answer is yet opened. But the fact that time has come for it, is indisputable.