For a week, we witnessed the drama at the English School that began with a parent on the Board of Directors trying to secure their child’s admission despite failing to achieve the required entrance exam score.
Corruption, leaks, conspiracies, hatred and passion – all against the backdrop of fantasies about belonging to an elite caste. And when half the board resigned on their own and the other half was dismissed by the president and cabinet, we supposedly returned to normalcy.
While we discuss privatising essential services, from the Electricity Authority to hospitals (perhaps someday even the Water Board), we continue to maintain a hybrid system for what is essentially a private school, subsidising it with public resources and playing games with appointed board members.
Having resolved that issue, we appointed 209 community leaders – relics of bygone eras, conquerors and colonialists, just like the English School. These community leaders are expected to certify whether applicants for statutory pensions are indeed still living with the person they married, among other largely unnecessary tasks that would be difficult for anyone to verify in the urban environments where we live. Rightfully, this caused an uproar, but the president is whistling indifferently, waiting for this dust to settle too.
Just as the dust will settle and we’ll forget about the Health Insurance Organisation’s attempt to extend Christina Yiannaki‘s services because they failed to organise mechanisms for sending patients abroad for treatment. An entire state relies on one person for a critical service – if something happens to them or they retire (as is happening now), there’s no alternative.
And because the Health Insurance Organisation claims to be understaffed, as supposedly all government services are, no agency noticed that a fertility centre advertising services with an address in Limassol doesn’t actually exist there. It’s not nonexistent, though – it operates in the occupied territories, and anyone unaware of the political situation might end up with stateless children, trapped like their parents in an unrecognised state.
Dazed by the shock of all this, but mainly by the fact that children are traveling to the occupied territories to participate in contact and cooperation programmes with children of Turkish Cypriot or Turkish citizenship, we learn that the Republic’s customs office accepts documents from casinos in the occupied territories without considering it an act of treason. Someone with a suitcase full of money can claim they won it at a casino in the occupied territories, and customs will tell them “congratulations, good for you.”
All this in just one week, among many other issues.