Editor’s Word: Termokosi

Have you read somewhere that the socially owned firm wrote off 14 million euro of the 16 million euro owed to it without any proper procedure to identify which customers should or should not be let off their bill?

Did you realise that it was fined 20,000 euro this week for breaking the law on public procurement when awarding a contract for the supply of fuel, and that as a result of delays to the tender, it ran out of fuel?

Were you aware that Termokos’s serious failures meant that babies and elderly people in Pristina hospital were kept warm with hot water bottles when it dropped below freezing outside?

The bigger picture is sometimes difficult to see for a journalist eking out a corruption story, like coaxing a maggot from a rotten apple. I could have written about the first three issues above without most readers batting an eyelid. The fourth, however, is different.

A reporter spends so much time working out how the maggot got into the apple and how to tempt it out, that you forget that some poor soul is might have already sunk his teeth into the rancid fruit.

Even when millions of euros are being misused it’s sometimes difficult to explain to you, the reader, what is so special about this particular apple and why you should be interested in what that maggot is doing.

The best stories are the ones which demonstrate the real effect of corruption in Kosovo, which show how that little maggot and that rotten apple have impacted on everyday life.

Termokos’s failure to secure fuel to heat Pristina, directly resulting in babies and the elderly being kept alive by water bottles in the city’s hospital, is just that.

This institutional failure – perhaps corruption – could have led to the death of some of society’s most vulnerable people.

The appalling way in which Termokos is managed would be funny if the consequences were not so serious.

Mostly the impact of graft is subtle. That’s not to say that it is any less damaging, its effects are just more nebulous.

In a country which so struggles with corrupt behaviour, it is easy to shrug off the odd bribe because any consequence seems minor and far removed from your everyday worries.

A child will not freeze to death each time someone takes a bribe, but perhaps it’s useful for people to imagine it that way, and maybe they would care more about the less heart-wrenching, but equally damaging instances which occur every day.