Friday, January 7, 2011

Mongolia in 2020

UB Post
January 7, 2011
How do you in these early days of 2011 imagine your homeland of Mongolia, your organization and your private life will be at the end of coming decade? Everyone has own imagination.

If you don’t have a certain imagination and if you cannot properly express your imagination if there is, then it means you have bad vision or you don’t have none. It also indicates that you do not have a definite goal. A person saddles up only with a definite goal on hand. Future imagination or vision is the starting point.

It is not clear how much difficulties and troubles we have to get through and how much risks we have to take in order to adapt to real changes, if we fail to analyze already existing tendencies and trends in today’s society and economy and to take actions to stop some particular trends and tendencies. Some people say let it be. These people prefer living like a whittling on water, or it means these people are ready to run away if the things go wrong.

For instance, if general education system of Mongolia, particularly vocational and higher education system cannot meet modern business requirements and further cannot comply with increasing short-term demand of labor force, how we are going to substitute or compensate it? If we import the most labor force from China after a decade, what problems will be arising step by step in terms of demography, society, economy, politics and foreign relationships?

It is sad that today we have only two visions including a big wallet with big money and a desire to spend it to the last cent. Political parties in power are solely responsible for this. They have built such a situation since the 2000 parliamentary elections. Instead of building a vision and leading the country to progress, the political parties have built a political system under which they excuse each other and “dandle” one by one under the name of consensus. It is likely that the two political parties in power will win elections one by one and form their coalition governments in the coming decade.

Since there is no leading political force, Mongolian people remains without an opposition force in politics. The only way the two parties can function is the status-quo principle mutually trading with offices and power. Their governing council even discuss and decide together any principal requirements deriving out of any of two parties. Mongolia regains single-party domination. A new party called “Mongolian Democratic People’s Party” is formed.

However, under increasing pressure from citizens, who already felt human rights and freedom, to make the governance more transparent, it is certain that function of Mongolian government will be improving gradually. But the power will shift from the government to private companies the government takes care of. Political and economic domination of such government-caring private companies will get stronger and stronger, further their proxies in politics will increase and finally a machine to make a decision favoring only such companies will start. There will be practically no competition.

Moreover, local governments are taking financial control beginning from this year and a “representation” so called informal “council of province or soum” not existing in law will gradually get stronger than provincial and soum parliaments and their donor private companies will take control over local natural resources little by little. We can see that such informal councils which exist for all provinces have become the most powerful, most wealthy and most influential institution. In order to be a member of such council, you don’t have to be party member, you just need to be a native resident of that locality or a kid of such natives. In Afghanistan, exactly the same local leader is the one stronger than the government.

Ordinary people want that their homeland - Mongolia – developed, worshipped human rights and freedom, had real opportunities for employment and good life, had good infrastructure system and that Ulaanbaatar City was clean from air pollution and that all residents lived in comfortable dwelling apartments. They want that the country became economically capable of building such a life. It should be done by a transparent, smart and compact state mechanism in efficient combination with market mechanism. The only thing we want from the government is to create conditions supporting this creative activity. We also want the government not interfere at least if cannot support. This is the only way to succeed development.

Translated by P.Shinebayar

1 comment:

  1. Great post! I believe there are tens of hundreds of Mongolian young people abroad who are willing to start their own business in Mongolia for their livelihood and for Mongolia's economic development. One of the bad experiences they will be facing is the situation and the possible destination stated here. At this point it is not clear who will be forming the healthy atmosphere for new and young entrepreneurs to be able to compete fairly.

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