On September 1, 2020, Head of State Kassym-Jomart Tokayev spoke at a joint session of the Houses of Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan with the Address to the people of Kazakhstan “Kazakhstan in a New Reality: Time for Action”. The principal components of the Address have been phrased in the election platform, in the Address to the people of Kazakhstan 2019 and in other speeches of the Head of State.
There is no doubt that the practical implementation of the Address, on the one hand, is based on certain resources, that is, on the consolidated social support of the President. On the other hand, it is aimed at further development of the tasks and objectives set by First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Elbasy Nursultan Abishevich Nazarbayev. This indicates the continuity of the government policy embedded in the building of the new Kazakhstan.
Attention should be paid to a series of new conceptual approaches to the delivery of the Address. According to international experience, the Address of Heads of State is a speech activity aimed at expectations of the nation, emotional impact on citizens, awakening their economic and political activity. Efficient use of new methods to deliver the Address allows getting new information about the state of the society and sociopolitical challenges.
We can see that, as part of this Address, the President has virtually fully covered the most critical aspects of the country’s life, ranging from the economy to the social sphere and human rights. Therefore, the Address is a key genre of political communication in this context.
The Address is a combination of informative and imperative components. However, the proportion of these components is different. For instance, the imperative component of the Address is expressed through the verbal genre of instruction. The President gives a number of strict instructions to the Government, the Accounting Committee and other government agencies.
It is important to stress that the modality of necessity, and not obligation, is used by the Head of State in his Address. This leads to the understanding of the assigned tasks as the tasks, the solution of which is necessary objectively for all people in the country. The Address is also written in the official manner. The President applies rather short and clear sentences, which are easily accepted by ear.
As a whole, in his speech, the President answered in detail as to how the state fought and is combating the epidemic, for macroeconomic stability, and put out all efforts for social support of the population during the pandemic. All these were necessary to create conditions under which the external challenge, namely the spread of COVID-19, would not impede the most important thing, i.e. the domestic development of the country, to preserve social and economic stability, employment and income of the population, which, as Kassym-Jomart Tokayev noted, are the highest priority of the state.
The Head of State set a range of interrelated tasks in his Address, which fundamentally change the conventional system of state administration in key areas of the socio-political and socio-economic development of Kazakhstan. No doubt, it will bring serious changes in public consciousness and the system of public relations in all spheres of the Kazakh society’s life. As well as the fact that such a transformational reform will demand strong support at the legislative level.
The scale of the events might confuse someone or cause rejection, but it is necessary to demolish the obsolete building in order to build a new, multifunctional one.
So, following the logic of the Address, first of all, the reform of the state administration system is now the top priority.
The Address emphasizes that the new model of state administration will necessarily require a reloading of the current civil service system, meaning the solution of the triune task in the formation of supplementary incentives to raise the quality of service and liability for its ultimate outcomes, i.e. reduction of the state apparatus and employees of the quasi-government sector, rising wages on this basis, and introduction of a factor-score scale to assess civil servants’ performance.
Therefore, the Head of State announced the adoption of a series of steps aimed at radical enhancement and improvement of the state administration system. This is the decision to set up the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms with the immediate subordination to the President, the Supreme Presidential Council on Reforms, the decisions of which will be final. The Committee on Statistics is also being transferred to the Agency and subsequently transformed into the Bureau of Statistics. That is, these steps will ensure the efficiency of the state apparatus and transparency in the activities of government agencies, excluding any conflict of interest among themselves.
Concurrently, there is a task to achieve a balance between the levels of legal regulation of the executive power activities to eliminate excessive bureaucratization of vital decision-making processes. This is particularly true in terms of interdepartmental relations.
The President’s theses regarding the reform of the National Planning System deserve special attention. The current problems of the national planning, the state of government and industry programs with multiple indicators that were virtually unattainable and scientifically unjustified due to the lack of a fundamental research and methodological basis, with funds that were actually misspent, have been regularly raised by deputies in the Senate of the Parliament, but their optimal solution has not yet been found.
It is not a secret that currently the activity of the Government is mostly assessed by results of implementation of government and industry programs. Herewith, these documents do not allow to fully covering the efficiency factor of the Government itself. Moreover, the present system of national planning excludes the existence of an Action Program that would serve as a working paper of the Government.
It is evident that, relying on the efficient management system, one can set significant tasks as regards the improvement of mechanisms and instruments ensuring effective economic development of the country.
The Address, taking into account in-depth understanding of economic development in the new realities, sets a task to elaborate a new industrial policy aimed at putting all necessary accents in the production diversification policy on the industrial-innovative basis and giving a new accelerating impetus to the development of industry towards the growth of its competitive advantages in the global and regional economy.
With a view to improving the investment climate, there is a task to implement a new instrument, i. e. a strategic investment agreement, as well as to unclog bottlenecks in the government procurement system, which will enable to boost the trust to the state on the part of all entities at all economic levels.
The large package of proposals on improvement of conditions for small and medium business development is also quite logical, among which we can mention changes in the basic principles of regulatory policy, and the maximum liberalization of tax administration.
Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich correctly accentuated his focus on the creation of a genuinely diversified, technological economy. In doing so, the economy should work to enhance the people’s welfare. We should note that now there is an increasing public demand for a fair distribution of benefits from the growth of the national income. Meanwhile, at the end of 2019, the country was moving in another direction. Thus, loans to the economy in 2019 amounted to 13,863.8 billion KZT, which is 5.9% more than in 2018. However, the fact of decrease for loans to small businesses is alarming.
In other words, this means that the small business situation in the country is worsening. For this reason, apart from the scheduled activities, we also need to take systematic measures. It appears that the National tasks to support small business are inconsistent with the continuing trend to reduce lending to small businesses.
Serious questions with respect to the regulator arise when it comes to improving the quality of economic policy. Thus, according to data from the World Economic Forum and the Davos criteria in 2019, the indicators of Kazakhstan’s financial system have significantly deteriorated. Low volumes of private sector lending and limited access to financial resources for small and medium businesses contributed to this. The reliability of banks still raises concerns.
Notwithstanding the growth in the nominal value of the banking sector indicators, a decrease of its role in the national economy over the last 5 years has been observed. Therefore, improvement in the quality of the economic policy on the part of the National Bank is a topical issue, to which the Head of State draws attention.
The message can be found in the President’s Address, about which he repeatedly spoke, that a great potential for stability lies in internal factors of development regulation. In particular, in the triangle “quasi-government sector – monetary and credit system – the National Welfare Fund”. Indeed, huge conglomerates with overblown financial appetites and privileges granted by the state, on the one hand, insufficient efficiency of monetary and credit policy carried out by the second-tier banks that are far from the needs of the real sector becomes one of the obstacles to the national economic development, on the other hand. And, thirdly, the practice, inevitable under these conditions, of irrational spending of the National Fund’s resources to solve current problems.
In the short term, we should, based on a comprehensive development of market institutions and mechanisms with a special steadying role of the state:
Achieve an increase in the return from the quasi-government sector;
Evaluate the actual contribution of the National Welfare Fund to the growth in people’s prosperity since its establishment;
Ensure business lending by second-tier banks on favorable terms and for an extended period.
Full-scale implementation of these key and other related tasks will allow ensuring stability of the national socio-economic development based on balanced and efficient government management.
Within the system of economic policies, the President gives an important place to the task of ensuring balanced territorial development. The current system of division into donor regions and recipient ones reinforces the dependency attitudes and discourages revitalization of economic life in subsidized regions. It is obvious that the incentives for the regions subsidizing the state budget are reduced.
To be fair, it should be emphasized that such differentiation formed in the previous years of the planned economy, under various patterns of development and distribution of productive forces of the Union and the Republic. However, nowadays there are program mechanisms and instruments for industrial-innovative development, in particular, the republican and regional industrialization maps that should be applied today in an accentuated way to solve this task set in the Address.
Along with this, an opportunity arises as part of the steps for the implementation of this task to bring to a logical end the long-running issues of local self-government formation, bearing in mind, first, the strengthening of the financial potential due to the formation of a solid and stable base for replenishment of rural district budgets. To this end, it is intended to consistently and steadily delineate the powers of bodies of local state administration and local self-government.
Finally, the primary goal of all reforms, namely the formation of a socially oriented state, has never been taken off the agenda. Throughout the entire period of independent development, regardless of the state of the economy and production, it is the President’s Addresses to the people of Kazakhstan which have been setting social objectives for this or that period.
Hence, social well-being of citizens has been declared the main priority in the present Address of the Head of State. With this view, they have been charged to begin developing the Social Code of the country, which will regulate and update the legal framework for the formation and implementation of social programs, sustainable and efficient development of the social sphere sectors, consistent with the needs of the country’s population.
It is worth noting such an important feature of this Address as the issues of building a fully functional civil society, which is the critical prerequisite for the comprehensive development of the country on its way to the community of civilized nations with developed democratic values. The President proposes to create a single legitimate institution of online petitions so that citizens could initiate reforms and proposals. This is a paramount and essential step to implement the “hearing government” concept.
In general, legislative support of all reformative tasks and activities requires a thorough systemic law-making work, bearing in mind that the underlying constructivism of the Address has a long-term and irreversible nature. In this respect, special responsibility is attributed to the well-organized work of all branches of government, which is a guarantee of successful fulfillment of the tasks set by the Head of State. Specifically, the Parliament of Kazakhstan should review and adopt nearly thirty bills by the first half of 2021, including the analysis and modification of the budget, tax, environmental and other codes as regards their optimization and updating.
There is a landmark section in the Address entitled “NEW QUALITY OF THE NATION”, where Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich emphasized that currently we have a task to form a new paradigm of our people’s development and a new quality of the nation. He also made the point that recent events has shown the necessity to adapt to the dictates of the time, both for an individual and society as a whole.
We need to change our routine life attitudes to ensure a qualitatively new development of our nation. Moreover, new principles and new benchmarks should be adopted in society. I personally got a strong emotional impression from the words of the great educator, Ahmet Baitursynov: “To gain knowledge, one should study. To become rich, one should have business. To become strong, it is necessary to be united. And for all this, one should work hard.”
Certainly, we confront large and complicated tasks. Their successful resolution takes out-of-the-box approaches, new ways of thinking, global solidarity and mutual support. The President has determined the strategic course, and outlined an action plan for the state in a crisis for the whole society.
These days, all government agencies and the society itself must change and cultivate their abilities. The challenges of time force us to constantly develop, upgrade skills and get stronger. I am confident that our country is able and ready to solve the biggest challenges, and the whole society bears an enormous responsibility for the future of the state. Only by uniting our efforts, we will overcome all the challenges and achieve the established goals as outlined in the Address.
Yedil Mamytbekov
Senator of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan
