Yuliya Tymoshenko has in essence acknowledged the fact that Ukraine’s fuel and energy complex continues to work without any well-defined system and that she will run it in the traditional (far from usual in market-economy countries) way of hands-on management.
This could explain the Deputy Prime Minister’s statement in an interview that from September 13 on she would personally “control the process of buying and accumulating fuel oil. Unfortunately we couldn’t solve the problem on the level of individual facility management.”
Although Mrs. Tymoshenko does not understand it, the fact that such public statements have been made could be taken as a signal. The country and its citizens do not need a heroine for a minister, they need a defined system and institutions that will work for the people irrespective of who heads them. Personal control disappeared together with the Soviet era.
Karl Popper expresses an interesting idea in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies. He wrote that the method of personal interference leads to the ever increasing unpredictability of social life, aggravates feelings of irrationality, and of being defenseless. Once introduced, discretionary power tends to expand as it requires certain corrections. And correcting discretionary short-term decisions is very difficult to do only by means of institutional measures. This tendency increases the irrationality of the system, creates an impression of shadow power and then prompts the acceptance of conspiracy theories concerning society with all that this implies — witch hunts, ethnic, social, and class hatred.
Could the situation with “fuel oil control” develop somewhat differently? Not likely. According to the Interfax-Ukrayina Information Agency, the government plans for state-run companies to use loans granted by Ukrainian banks, Oshchadbank (Ukrainian Savings Bank) in particular, to buy the oil. Simultaneously, the heads of state-run companies consider such oil purchases to be highly problematic due to high market prices. Hence, even if Madame Tymoshenko has the most selfless intentions, her control will exacerbate the situation described by Popper.
Of course, we would like to believe that the government will finally give up its vicious administrative practice and start keeping its promises to create rules of the game. Unfortunately, after ten months of this Cabinet’s work the number of “informed optimists” has increased.
