Another Resounding Flop

This time, it was mechanical engineering industry.

Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have passed through the hands of the budget controllers (politicians and bureaucrats). At the exit – bankruptcy, commercial shamanism, losses, non-liquids and a dangerous process of squeezing Belarusian goods out of the traditional markets, not to mention the gaining of new ones, liberty-belarus.info writes.

Aliaksandr Lukashenka: "...Significant state support was provided to leading industry organizations. Machine builders were helped to refinance the loan debt, to replenish working capital and thereby to create the conditions for effective work. However, significant positive results were not observed. And someone has to be responsible for that."There is no doubt that these are the attempts to cast the blame on blamethrowers. The list is large enough.

Directors are to blame. They carry out the management of the enterprises and take decisions at the micro level. Yes, indeed, but they wouldn’t utter a word without the consent and decisions agreement with the Ministry.

The leaders of the ministry are to blame. They lobbied for investment projects, tackled the budget funding, promised profits, foreign exchange earnings and development. Yes, indeed, but those proposals would have never become laws without the Council of Ministers and the Presidential Administration.

The government is to blame. The Prime Minister and his deputies are in charge of the industry, they keep a check on directors and the ministries, for them not to lie and correct their mistakes in time. Yes, indeed, but not a single document can be adopted, or an appointment be made, including the level of the state plants’ management, without the consent and signature of Lukashenka.

It means that Lukashenka bears the lion's share of responsibility for the deep crisis in the mechanical engineering industry and deindustrialization of Belarus. It is the failure of his personnel policy, his industrial policy, his attempt to preserve the lion's share of the economy in the hands of the nomenklatura. It is his failure, that having dozens of monitoring bodies, he has not been able to identify problems in time, and has not developed a system of risk neutralization. Even official statistical agencies provided enough information in the public domain to see the impending problems of the engineering and the industry in general.

Lukashenka collected people in his team, who match his worldview, his model of CJSC "Belarus". He surrounded himself with officials and managers, who have buried their professional "ego" under many layers of "What would you like, Mr. President?"

So now we are reaping the fruits of total nomenclature fawning, overall deprofessionalization of the system of governance of state and the commercial sector.