Centre for Civic Education (CCE) has, in recent months, analysed the work of certain members of the Government – primarily the Minister without Portfolio and the Deputy Prime Ministers of Montenegro – in the context of the inflation of functions within the Government’s structure, often with overlapping or unclear competences, as well as pronounced non-transparency.
The CCE recalls that Montenegro has the most numerous government in Europe, with as many as 32 members, including seven Deputy Prime Ministers and one Minister without Portfolio. This is just one example of the irrational approach to public finances, as the quality and efficiency of work are nowhere near proportional to the budget allocations for the administration.
So far, the CCE has reviewed and compared the activities, salaries, and benefits of the Minister without Portfolio from PES, Milutin Butorović; Deputy Prime Ministers Milun Zogović from DNP and Budimir Aleksić from NSD; Deputy Prime Ministers from Democrats, Aleksa Bečić and Momo Koprivica; and Deputy Prime Minister from PES, Filip Ivanović.
This brief review shows vast differences in the volume of activities – ranging from minimal engagement to somewhat greater workloads. The common denominator of these activities is that they are predominantly of a protocol and promotional nature, without track record. In addition, patterns of political bargaining and party-based employment have been observed, accompanied by a lack of transparency and an almost complete absence of cooperation with civil society.
To provide a complete picture of the rationality of such spending, the CCE requested, through Free Access to Information Law, the General Secretariat of the Government, data on the total individual costs of the offices of Minister Butorović and Deputy Prime Ministers Aleksić, Zogović, Bečić, Koprivica, and Ivanović. The requested information included gross and net salaries of their staff, travel costs, per diems for official trips, office rental and furnishing expenses, office supplies, telephone bills, representation costs, fuel, vehicle depreciation, and any repairs of official vehicles, among others.
Although these requests were sent between mid-May and the end of July, along with multiple urgencies, the CCE did not receive a single response from the General Secretariat, thereby breaching the provisions of the Free Access to Information Law. Consequently, the CCE has lodged complaints with the Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information (AZLP) for part of these cases.
In recent days, the public also learned of alarming data that may partly explain why such information is being withheld – Montenegro has almost 30 times more official vehicles for public officials and other public administration employees than it has fire engines, despite firefighters being those who, as we are witnessing, with vehicles decades old, risk their lives to save citizens and their property. And this is only one part of the enormous cost of a bloated administration increasingly focused solely on itself and its privileges, instead of the public interest.
This approach further confirms the worrying level of non-transparency in the work of the 44th Government, which exceeds the limits of political decency and the basic standards of democratic practice and responsible institutional governance. The gap between declared priorities and actual investment in key public services shows that public spending policy is guided by particular, rather than public, interests. Unfortunately, we also see that for many, the ambition during the fight for change of government was merely to seize privileges, rather than to improve different segments of society.