Nezavisne novine: The reform of the public and local administration in BiH does not give the results because people are still being employed by their party line, and the expenditures and number of employed have been increased, non governmental organizations claim.
Ljubiša Marković, former mayor of the Municipality Centar in Sarajevo, claims that the situation in local administration is very bad, because the reforms which assume the reduction of administration, are being blocked by the interests of parties.
During his mandate, Municipality Centar was the first one in BiH to get the ISO standard as an award for a quality of services to citizens.
"The mayors are protecting themselves from moves of rationalization and the parties are blocking them in that because they are scared that they would remain without votes in case of dismissing the employees. Rationalization and reduction of administration are not popular methods and the parties do not want it because that way they would remain without a significant number of votes. However the reform of local administration would have to be a part of the total public administration reform, if the results are wanted", says Marković.
He adds that in 2000, when he became a mayor of the Municipality Centar, he was also facing the problems on the occasion of reduction of administration in this municipality.
"I have come with a vision. I have reduced the number of employed from 307 to 208. We have accepted 50 new and young volunteers. I was aware of the problems, but I went to the creation of a functional municipality. There were obstacles and hard moments and political enemies wanted to politicize that move and show how I worked against one nation", Marković says by adding that municipalities do not have enough authorizations and that they need to have a bigger budget.
"It is not being understood by us that if money is being spent on a local level, that it is then the most functional. It is that way in all countries. The mayor himself can do enough if he has vision and knowledge. However, the leadership of municipalities does not want those competences because they would have more responsibilities. It is a very small number of local self-governances which have and know how to implement the good projects. So in Sarajevo, the City administration in lack of the qualitative projects, colors the buildings and renovates the faucets", says Ljubiša Marković .
There are no expected changes
Non-professionalism, inefficiency, corruption and politization are the most often problems which BiH citizens are facing while asking for services or achieving their rights in institutions of public administration in BiH. This has also been stated in the report of the Center for Human Politics from Doboj, after the survey done in the region of whole BiH.
The president of non-governmental organization the Center for Human Politics, Momir Dejanović says that from this report on the public administration reform, nothing really changed by today.