WE WERE given depressing displays of the selfishness and lack of public spirit that afflicts modern Cyprus society this week, as if we needed reminding of the fact that everyone is out for himself. While these exhibitions of extreme self-interest are understandable in prosperous times, they are very difficult to tolerate at a time of an unprecedented economic and social crisis when everyone should be working together towards a common goal – the soonest possible recovery of the country.
Adversity usually can unite society, encouraging solidarity among people as everyone pulls together in the pursuit of a common goal. This was how Cypriot society reacted to the Turkish invasion in 1974 – everyone made sacrifices, everyone helped their less fortunate countrymen that had lost their homes and livelihoods and everyone tried to ease the pain of those who had lost friends and family in the war. Admittedly, the effects of the invasion were much more devastating and traumatic to our society than those of the economy’s collapse but there are also similarities. The old certainties have been shattered and hundreds of thousands of people are now out of work, living in poverty and depending on charity handouts to survive.
In these social conditions it was truly infuriating to hear state hospital doctors moaning and attacking the health minister last week about the small reduction in their overtime rates, decided by the government. We are not talking about dock workers, but highly-paid, educated professionals, with secure jobs and a very comfortable living, trenchantly refusing to make a small concession for the benefit of the country. They should have been ashamed – considered it beneath them – to behave so shabbily at a time like this. Then again, these doctors were abusing the overtime system for decades, some doubling their annual pay.
In the same week we had the bank employees’ union ETYK, rejecting the pay cuts, which had been accepted by 2,700 employees of the co-ops, for its 300 members and threatening strike action. Again, these were highly-paid workers, with secure jobs and a comfortable living that had no grounds to demand preferential treatment. ETYK has also been fighting to preserve the privilege of bank employees to pay only half a per cent of interest on their housing loans, when everyone else pays 10 times that in interest.
There are countless more examples of the rampant ‘me’ culture that afflicts our society – the officials refusing to surrender their state limousines, Cyta employees’ demanding a King’s ransom as redundancy compensation, students not wanting to pay bus fares, contract teachers fighting for permanent state jobs (and getting them), big developers with NPLs demanding political protection. Everyone is out to maximise their personal benefits, plundering what they can from the cash-strapped state, at the expense those who genuinely need support from it, such as the long-term unemployed and old age pensioners.
We should not be surprised by this selfishness when the morally bankrupt leadership still engages in cheap demagoguery, pandering to the interest groups instead of censuring them and telling them that in these times the interests of the country come first. On one side is the president assuring public employees that their privileges (he calls them rights) would be protected and on the other the opposition parties encouraging the shows of self-interest as a way of getting at the government, the objective being votes.
Unfortunately, the patriotism of our politicians is exhausted on their cheap and hollow Cyprus problem rhetoric. They have no interest in any other form of patriotism – the one that involves making sacrifices for the sake of your less fortunate countrymen and of your country as a whole. They all utter platitudes about safeguarding the Cyprus Republic in the context of Cyprus problem, which is the easy bit, but nobody dares mention the need to protect it from those who bankrupted it and are still making demands of it. It is as if the only reason they want to preserve the Republic is so they can carry on plundering it.
Perhaps we are expecting too much from self-serving politicians who are unwilling to give up any of their own privileges. Such people cannot ask anyone to make any sacrifices for the good of the country. Together with the public sector unions, the politicians have killed any notion of public spirit and with it the hope of a quicker economic recovery. They cannot, or do not want to, understand that a country working towards a common goal is more likely to achieve this than a collection of self-interested individual all pulling in different directions.
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