KZBlog

This is one of those fascinating articles I held onto to see if there would be a follow-up. So far I haven’t seen one so I’ll post on the original now. Senator and presidential candidate Gani Kasymov is concerned about young people leaving Kazakhstan.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Kasymov claims that tens of thousands of citizens go to live in the UK and Arab states. He wishes that the government would acknowledge this problem and develop a policy to counteract it. To his credit, he says it is not a simple problem with a simple answer. However he gives his own theory:

[Young people] do not believe that they can have normal career development itself, they do not believe in our medicine or education system; The biggest problem is ire over the fact that they cannot protect themselves against corruption – that’s what prompts the migration

I think this is a very important point that he is raising and platitudes that there is no place like your homeland are not enough. While the standard of living in Kazakhstan has risen, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is still disturbingly wide. Corruption is a real problem, not only in terms of bribery, but also in terms of nepotism and cronyism. And perception of corruption is also quite high; in some cases people don’t try to do certain things because they believe it will be impossible without a bribe or connections even though they have no reason for their pessimism. So the nation has a lot of work to do to level the playing field AND make sure people know the playing field is level.