The prime minister clings to office after having been pilloried by the media.
Ministers resign whilst party leaders act as if they are still in the school yard and their deputies do little but bleat.
The oligarchic media feeds society with a deluge of political fantasy, disinformation and lies whilst the public just get ever more frustrated and disillusioned and all the time Russian President Vladimir Putin sits on the border waiting for the collapse.
You couldn’t write this stuff down as a Hollywood plot as no self-respecting director would consider it plausible… but plausible it is… real it is… disastrous it is… the question is how has it happened?
First we need to accept that Ukraine does not have a political class that actually understands democracy or what democratic government and public service actually mean. Many live in the mindset of the dying years of the Soviet Union which was a time to steal as much as you could before it collapsed.
Few if any have ever had any education in political management and those that have were mostly trained in the Soviet era by communist ideologists. Many from the party lists have paid for their parliamentary seats and see politics as a way of either promoting their business interests or simply a way to enrichment at social expense.
The political system is designed to be self-perpetuating with the same old faces, the same worn out ideas and the same populist rhetoric that hasn’t changed for decades. There is no political philosophy or manifestos thus very little is new and very few in parliament really understand what they are discussing, what it means or what the impact will be especially if there is no personal benefit.
Many of the bills passed are a hotchpotch of vested interest bound up with red tape that serve only the interests of a few. The government has presented rafts of bills designed to reform and enable the EU Association agreement but barely 10% have even been discussed because in many cases their very concept will upset the vested interest or undo the grubby little schemes of the paymasters.
Many of the party leaders appear to be little more than robber barons who pontificate populist dogma with little concern for the social impact. They simply want power not because they have ideas of how to solve Ukraine’s very real problems or build a nation but because they want to continue the plunder that has already made some into millionaires and billionaires.
What is most sad is that they don’t even see it as theft… They consider it to be the right of power, just as it was in the past. When the USSR collapsed it had more dollar millionaires than the USA such was the level of endemic and institutionalised corruption and little has really changed. The system is rotten to the core. The political class are mostly corrupt as are many within the civil service, the prosecution service and the courts.
We are told that it is going to take time to change as new young minds with new ideas and new values break into the system… this too is a fallacy. Most of the new blood either gets seduced and swallowed up by the system or resigns as they realise that they are fighting an impossible reality. Sviatislav Vakarchuk and Ruslana being two highly public examples.
But why should the Ukrainian people and the international community expect Ukraine to be any different?
After all it took the British around 900 years to build their democracy, the Americans and the French almost 300 years and most of Europe has simply evolved into democracy as their aristocracies crumbled.
Perhaps it is therefore only natural to expect that Ukraine might become a functioning democracy, in say, the next 50 to 100 years?
It doesn’t have to be this way, it simply takes education. In Ukrainian universities, colleges and schools today, even after 25 years of independence, there are precious few courses in modern European democratic theory, practice and understanding, political party development or modern local government management or even consensus building.
Whilst there are political science classes these are taught using out of date course notes by teachers mostly trained in a basically Soviet system where the priority was in “how to remember” as opposed to “how to think.”
Modern democracy does not appear to be taught at any point in the entire education system and training in the civil service training appears focused on how to make the current dysfunctional system work effectively.
In all my years of working with the donor community in this part of the world I have never seen any money invested in the mass teaching of democratic standards, democratic management or the simple machinations of local government even in junior schools. The subject has simply been ignored. It is as if a country of 45 million people is supposed to learn by osmosis what took the west centuries… yet the west expects, nay demands, reform and democracy in return for financial support. It is duplicity of the highest order.
Some are even surprised by the very suggestion that democracy should be taught… because it is not taught in European schools. Perhaps that is because democracy is the system in west and therefore it is taught by tradition and social practice, traditions that simply have not yet developed in Ukraine. It is taught in the USA as a mandatory part of the curriculum but that expertise has never crossed the oceans.
Changing the system by traditional means will take generations… Yet we live in the age of communication where millions learn from the internet and where almost all major universities offer online tuition. The Open University in the UK has over 250,000 students whilst the Khan Academy website has over 250 million hits a year. All of the information already exists; it’s just never been put into a systematic internet format.
This country has some of the finest computer minds in the world therefore a solution is perfectly possible and in a very short time frame. All it will take is the political will and forward-thinking donors or philanthropists who are prepared to look at the fundamental reality and think outside of the box.
Martin Nunn, an international communications consultant and public relations strategist, is CEO of Whites Communication. He has advised the Cabinet of Ministers on communications strategy and serves as a voluntary adviser to Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
