A lack of adequate regulation and public control provides fertile ground for corruption, which inevitably results in higher costs and lower quality, to the detriment of Serbia’s citizens
Imagine you’re baking a cake. You don’t follow a recipe, don’t use proven ingredients and entrust the making of the cake to someone who’s never previously baked anything. Moreover, the cake costs as much as the most expensive speciality from Vienna, Paris, New York or Tokyo. And voila, that’s the state of public projects in Serbia.
The absence of adequate regulations and public oversight of works creates fertile ground for corruption, and corruption inevitably leads to higher costs and/or lower quality, and all to the detriment of Serbia’s citizens.
Public projects in Serbia don’t respect technical, financial or management practices to a great extent. The current government has been deregulating constantly for more than a decade, reducing requirements for expertise in all areas – construction, transport, education etc. The interests of investors are prioritised, often at the expense of safety. The works at the railway station in Novi Sad were entrusted to companies that lacked adequate previous experience of working on similar projects, which directly increased project risks in terms of deadlines, costs and the quality of results delivered, and thus also safety.
For projects like EXPO, where a public justification study is lacking, we receive information exclusively from the president, which is unacceptable and unconstitutional
The new raft of laws proposed in the National Assembly by the departing government extends to the extent of being absurd in envisaging the commissioning of facilities within the scope of the EXPO project without a usage permit, and enabling the launch of construction works without a project first being subjected to environmental and immovable cultural assets impact assessments. This all testifies to us every day moving further away from a system that we could say has been astructured in accordance with the needs of citizens.
A lack of transparency and the absence of the public in works also represent major problems of the public sector in Serbia. Under a veil of contract secrecy, citizens don’t have adequate insight into what’s being done, why it’s being done, how much it will cost, how long it will take and what benefits it will bring to society. We don’t know whether public projects have formal managers and who they are if they do, what their competencies are, how they were selected. Such information should be available to the public.
The government defends some public projects with police cordons because the public doesn’t want them, as is the case, for example, with the project to remove the Sava bridge. For some projects that will require the spending of billions of euros of public money, such as EXPO, we don’t have a justification study that’s publicly available. This is unacceptable. We can only hear about and see these projects at the press conferences of the President of the Republic of Serbia, and his jurisdiction in this area is in no way in accordance with the Constitution of Serbia.
Uncompromising application of the law, followed by the urgent improvement of regulations and strengthening the role of the profession, represent the only way to heal all spheres of society, including future infrastructure projects.
