Kazakhstan ministers instructed not to complicate citizens' lives and stop working Soviet style

Kazakhstan Ministers were instructed not to complicate the life of the citizens and stop working “the Soviet way”. President raised the issue of division of powers between the center and the regions at the government meeting, Tengrinews.kz reports. “I have instructed to make a clear division of functions between the center and the regions, to strengthen the local authorities with personnel before the election of all village Akims, however, as far as I know, this work is being slowed down by our central authorities. Ministries and authorities are happy to transfer up part of their responsibilities to the regions, but they don’t want to pass on their functions and money. Over the last 6 years the personnel of regional administrations has been decreased by 30 percent: from 47 to 37 thousand. At the same time the number of personnel in central ministries, authorities and their regional branches has hardly been decreased at all. Instead of passing the functions to the regions, the ministries and agencies are concentrating these functions,” the President said. Speaking of the reasons behind these developments the President said that the ministers new not how to work in another way. They are working “Soviet way, they have to rule”, Nursultan Nazarbayev said. “They come to the oblast, their people meet them, eat with them and that’s it,” Nazarbayev said speaking of the ministers’ behavior. “What do we need a ministry for except for it being the center that works out all the policies in the area of its responsibility? All other issues can be resolved in the regions and oblasts. There are several departments, administrations and local central organs that are doing the same job.” “Serik Akhmetov, this is a test for you on how to win over the officials’ desires. Otherwise, we will not succeed in de-centralizing the power. We cannot manage all the problems from here. But to have them manage, they have to have the authorities and money for that. Why create a crowd of officials in the regions, duplucated their authorities, messing things up and complicate the lives of the end users: our people?” the President told the Prime-Minister. He instructed Minister of Regional Development Bakytzhan Sagintayev to analyze the local self-management system within a month. “This can be solved in one day. One signature is enough to pass the authorities to the inferior bodies that will then be dealing with the problems as part of their everyday work,” Nazarbayev said. He pointed out that there were 2,522 village administrations in Kazakhstan. 193 of them were located in regional centers or in villages close to regional centers. “In such cases all their issues can be successfully deal with by regional administrations. We need to avoid such doubling,” Nazarbayev said. He also mentioned a suggestion to create a Strategic Planning Agency. By Renat Tashkinbayev