If you want to develop corruption and bureaucratic arbitrariness, propone unrealistic requirements to the entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens, and any contact with government officials will comprise huge resources of corruption risks. Do you remember the fairy tale “Cinderella” when the step-mother is saying, “Of course, you can go to the ball but first we must grind the coffee, clean 5 sacks of beans and 5 sacks of peas, dig all the meadows, and then, there is no problem, you can go to the ball.” If the stepmother were a government official, she would have looked thru the keyhole at what Cinderella is doing and if the girl were unable to solve all the problems in few hours, she would have fined her. Or, would not fine for certain “gratitude.”
Suppose, you want to demolish a wall in your house and build in another place and you are so naïve that you want to do everything within the law by going through all the instances. No problem. But you know how strict our laws are, everything is done to avoid the corruption risks, to ensure your seismic security and to preserve the architectural look of the city. If you nurse hope on this “white” mechanisms, then you will never move your wall. It is a complex task, it is not the “barn” of Arami 30 Street to demolish in one night. But people who have lived in the Soviet and independent Armenia are not so much naïve, either they will call their friend-acquaintance official or “Let’s see how we can be useful to our brother.”
This is how the citizen-state relations are built. Purely theoretically, it is possible for the individual citizen not to have any dealing with state institutions. But when it comes to the economic entity, here, the contacts are mandatory. In our country, “strict” laws are written specially, the requirements of which are not possible to implement, irrespective of who the entrepreneur is: a small kiosk or a huge factory. And if it is impossible to implement, then, it is necessary to enter into certain relationships with “inspecting” officials or to have a respective sponsor. Otherwise, even a small kiosk will not be able to operate.
Now, it is decided to toughen the trade of medication, to exclude corruption risks, shadows, illegal circulation, make the medication more accessible and so on. The true implication is as follows: “so many medications are in circulation, so what is our benefit?” And the drugstores are imposed things which are known in advance that they will not be able to do it, for example, to place insert sheets in Armenian in every pack. They experts have calculated that currently there are 120 million packs in Armenia. Can you imagine what will be going on in the pharmacies in case the fulfilment of the law? But I wonder if I need 3 pills from one pack, will they give the sheet to me or leave it in the pack. Or, maybe they are making a copy on the spot to have two copies. In short, it is an absurd and unrealistic requirement, specifically written to encourage the corruption of the “inspectors”.
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Lao Tzu used to say still 26 centuries ago, the more rules and regulations, the more thieves and robbers.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
