Mustafa Nayyem, a former well-known journalist and author of a famous post on social networks calling for participation in Euromaidan in 2013, announced that he was leaving his position as head of the State Agency of Ukraine for Reconstruction. He explained his departure by saying that he and the agency were prevented from working and effectively restoring the country. He directly accused the government led by Denis Shmygal of creating these obstacles.
On June 11, a large international conference on the restoration of Ukraine will begin in Berlin, where Nayem was supposed to go as head of the reconstruction agency. However, Prime Minister Denis Shmyhal did not approve his business trip. Nayem compared it to being stabbed in the back.
The Ukrainian government rejects Nayem’s accusations and calls his statement an attempt to avoid reporting on important issues.
The ousting of Nayem’s team can be seen as a continuation of the story of the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Kubrakov in May, which was negatively reacted to by Ukraine’s Western partners, but which was sought in the Office of the President.
“They didn’t let me work, they made me afraid of bureaucracy”
Mustafa Nayyem was a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, with whose team he later quarreled. He then worked in government structures under President Vladimir Zelensky.
On June 10, he announced his resignation from the agency dealing with the aftermath of the Russian invasion.
The former journalist and former deputy worked as the head of this department for more than a year. He was appointed to this position on the recommendation of the Minister of Infrastructure Alexander Kubrakov, who was also recently fired.
Judging by Nayem's Facebook post, he is leaving his position with a loud slam of the door. The official said that the government did not allow the agency to work normally and was “a nightmare with bureaucracy.”
Documents for payment for protective structures, fortifications or restoration took months to be agreed upon by the government, were returned six to eight times with meaningless comments, were delayed for several months, and some have not yet been agreed upon,” Nayem wrote.
He accused the government of failing to agree on payments for critical projects within three months: restoring water pipelines and protecting energy. Employees of the agency, which its head says oversees 353 rebuilding construction sites, have had their pay cut. Because of this, valuable personnel began to leave the department.
Nayem predicts that after this they may begin to persecute him: “We did not always fit into today’s style and team of public administration. And I do not rule out that in the future there will be attempts to persecute and discredit our work.”
Last week, Nayem was not approved for a business trip to Berlin, where an international conference on the restoration of Ukraine is scheduled to begin on June 11.
A letter stating that Prime Minister Shmygal would not let Nayem go to the conference was published by Daria Kalenyuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Center. She condemns the government's actions against Nayem's agency.
Kalenyuk has a good relationship with the US Embassy, and she was invited to a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a visit to Kyiv in May.
The document she published was cropped.
Sources of the Ukrainian BBC service in the Cabinet of Ministers provided a copy of the entire document, where a note from Denis Shmygal is visible.
He wrote that Nayem is being asked to prepare reports and analyzes on the completion of protection sites and restoration projects. This part was not in the document from Kalenyuk.
Criticizing Shmygal’s decision to deny Nayem a trip to Berlin, Daria Kalenyuk noted that the relevant Minister for Reconstruction is not going to this conference, because after Kubrakov’s dismissal, no replacement was found for him. Nayem, whose agency and its partners have been preparing the conference for the past year, is also not going. And this may be perceived negatively by international partners, she believes.
Investigative journalist Yuri Nikolov drew attention to the fact that the day before the start of such an important conference, the name of the head of the delegation from Ukraine was still unknown.
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