TIRANA, July 13 – The European Union is committed to assist Albania create a more efficient modern public administration to meet the challenges the country faces in its bid to the join the bloc, Romana Vlahutin, the head of EU’s Delegation to Albania said Monday at a public event.
Albania’s government is looking to implement a deep reform of the country’s public administration, which is often seen as inept in providing quality services to citizens and in meeting the challenges of the reforms Albania must conduct to join the European Union.
The European Union will help in transforming of Albania’s public administration as it sees such reform as an absolute priority for the opening of EU accession talks, Ambassador Vlahutin said, adding the public administration must be ready to act when talks with the EU start.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has repeatedly said that administration reform would be a priority of the Albanian government in its second mandate. The Socialist Party won a clear governing majority in the June 25 elections. Rama had accused smaller coalition allies of having pressured the Socialist Party not to reform the public administration, used for years as a reward tool to give jobs for party activists.
There are fears the Socialist government will use the reforms to purge the administration of qualified candidates that are not affiliated with the party in power, a common practice in Albania; however, Rama has said he is trying to improve quality not hire party loyalists like others have done in the past.
One of the challenges Albania’s government faces in hiring quality candidates is that public sector salaries on average are lower than private sector ones and the country cannot compete internationally, losing hundreds of its most highly-qualified people to other countries and to private companies. Ambassador Vlahutin also acknowledged such challenges.
“There is never enough investment in people, because salaries are often lower than in the competitive private sector, and the workplace environment that does not care for talent,” Vlahutin said.
The reform in the public administration is one of the five key priorities that Albania has to meet in order to open accession talks.
Albania’s public administration needs help in capacity building of human resources and improvement of the service to the citizens as well as the fight against corruption and nepotism. Vlahutin said EU had already given 32 million euros for capacity building in Albanian administration.
Ahead of the formation of a new government in September, Rama told Socialist MPs to take a listening tour to hear what people want and expect of the reformed public administration.
A team of government workers have also looked at feedback that citizens shared with Rama on Facebook, over the many problems they face when dealing with the public administration.
Rama then issued a name-and-shame list of about 100 people prepared by a working group that monitored more than 2,000 comments on Facebook. The issuing of the list itself was controversial and was both criticized and praised on social media.
Niko Peleshi, Rama’s former deputy, said the government had created a working group on restructuring the public administration to make it more transparent for citizens.
“We want to build a culture of joint roundtables, where representatives of the community sit with their MPs and members of the central government, sharing problems,” he said.
