The cycle of meetings designed to raise public awareness about the new co-governance bill continued with a gathering with local residents in the city of Lezhe today.
Already transformed into an important legal mechanism, the co-governance is designed to relieve citizens of bureaucracy and administration burden, and hold accountable any public administration officials or employees blamed for abusing their position and office by delaying delivery of public services.
Prime Minister Edi Rama informed that the new legislation, not only stipulates the obligations of the executive power to provide real-time public service to citizens, but it also offers another mechanism of administrative and financial sanctions due to be imposed on any official who refuses or fails to deliver services or solve the problems facing the citizens.
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Good evening everyone! Thank you very much!
We have come together today to go on with a series of planned gatherings due to be held all over the country to promote a process, which has been already launched for four years now, when the ruling Socialists won a second term in office alone and when we embarked on forming a coalition with the ordinary citizens as a co-governing process, which implies a close relation and a more direct communication between the citizens and the government.
One of the most important tools in this process, among others, one of the most concrete instruments, is the co-governance platform, which has been made available to all citizens of the country as an innovation overcoming a long-time system, which until recently was the renowned system of letters from the people sent to the public institutions and the public relations once available at every state institution.
This is a system that is operational in every state around the world, but in our country, during the transition period in particular, has been characterized by a phenomenon with the complaints forwarded by many people usually falling on deaf ears and with the letters sent to the institutions being read by nobody, in worst scenario, and with sporadic replies provided when someone read them, but the problems were still there and nobody addressed them.
By building this digital platform, we created the conditions for citizens’ complaints, for any problem with state offices, to be addressed, not only by the respective offices, but also directly to the government and thus every member of the government to be informed of any complaints regarding subordinate institutions, including the ministry.
This led to a very significant number of complaints being handled and resolved. In fact, it is about more than 50,000 such complaints in 4 years, which have received direct response, while another part have received a non-exhaustive response to the fact that there have been complaints, which should be forwarded to other institutions, primarily to the judiciary and the co-governance platform is not a court, it cannot address court cases and cannot solve judicial issues, as well as a good number of complaints regarding the local government, which in general has been very indifferent to this mechanism in general.
What we have now done at the start of our third term in office is that we have taken this platform and the whole concept of co-governance to a whole new level, signing it into a law, which has been already approved by the new government at its first meeting after securing the third term and already approved by parliament. It has been returned for all the unreasonable reasons, already, with which we are all used to, by the President’s office and will be included again on the parliament agenda and will be voted as it is, transforming the citizen’s relationship with the administration into a legal relationship in terms of the obligation of each relevant office and each relevant institution to handle any direct complaint by citizens and to tackle them.
Joining us today are the Director of the special Agency at the Prime Minister’s office that is tasked with this important part of our government for four years now, namely the co-governance platform and interaction between the citizens and the state institutions, as well as the Director of the agency specifically tasked with the entire digitalization process of our governance, or, as you all already know because of the pandemic, when every Albanian came to know the name and the added value created by this Agency, namely the e-Albania platform.
In the meantime, we have invited and I would like to express my appreciation to the two friends on my side, who are direct beneficiaries from using this platform and I believe that through their testimonies as ordinary citizens that have used no other tools, but this platform only and they will show that the platform really works.
Most importantly, the citizens will be informed today about the fact that under the new law, not only the government and the executive institutions and local government authorities are obliged to provide real-time replies within the deadlines set by the law, and to solve those problems where the right is on the side of the citizens and of those who apply or complain directly via this platform, but the law also includes another mechanism, stipulating financial sanctions to be imposed on those responsible for not responding or failing to resolve of the citizens’ problem.
I am very confident that just like it was the case with the permits and authorizations to leave home during the total lockdown, when all citizens used the e-Albania platform, made use of the digital authorizations and, thanks to this mechanism, we succeeded in protecting the citizens’ lives at that very crucial moment of the initial fight against the pandemic, because just imagine how the authorizations for people to walk out their homes were to be issued if this platform were not to exist. Would we tell people to stay in queues in order to obtain such a permit? That would have been catastrophic.
This should be the case and it should happen as soon as possible, but it will all depend on how much the citizens will get involved and make use of the online system to file their complaints and applications to obtain public services and official documents without having to seek for influential people or pay bribes to officials in exchange of a public service.
On the other hand, through this platform, this new mechanism and this series of meetings we are seeking to promote yet another novelty of our third term in office, on which we have been intensely working over all these years, namely transferring all the public services and official documents straight to the citizens’ smartphones and computers.
Thanks to the digital revolution we have embarked on and which has yet to complete, as many other aspects of the process have yet to complete, we know deliver as many as 1200 public services online only, without the citizens having to walk out their homes and report at the state institutions tasked with the public service delivery in person. Instead all these 1200 services, official documents, licenses, authorizations, certificates and permits are now issued via the online platform.
In addition to that, if until lately one was told to report at various offices to secure a stack of official documents in order to obtain a certificate, an authorization, a license, a permit or a single document, under the new mechanism you will no longer be forced to report at any office in person, because all the supporting documentation will be provided by the digital system itself.
However, there are a number of services that cannot be provided digitally, including obtaining a passport or the ID card, as you have to report in person to leave your fingerprints.
Likewise, marriage acts cannot be issued digitally as the groom and the bride, as well as the wedding witnesses, should be there in person. The digital witnesses have yet to be invented. The time could probably come when marriages are certified digitally, but no country around the world, including Albania, has developed such a system yet and this means that physical presence is needed. However, they account just for five percent of the public services, whereas no physical presence is required for 95% of the public services as they are delivered online and it would be regrettable if the citizens wouldn’t take advantage and use this mechanism, in which we have invested hard work and a long time and instead still keep staying on long queues and choose to seek out relations that unfortunately add up to the stress usually caused by workers behind the service windows.
But it is pretty simple today. The system is capable of tracing your request, which means it doesn’t depend on a person. If you were to depend on a person, unfortunately, that person could happen to be polite, but he or she could also be impolite and a rude one and therefore you would be forced to stay and wait longer. Not only that, but if you were to depend on a person, it could happen that he or she loses your file and your documents and citizens have been often told to obtain other documents.
This is no longer necessary. Concluding my opening remarks, I would also say that we have embarked on this public awareness raising campaign, because we can’t afford waiting for every citizen to learn about this opportunity, since every public service is now available online via the smart phones and computers.
Even today, a part of the public services – for example obtaining a criminal records clearance certificate has been a terrible endeavor, because this is a document one should present whenever applying for an authorization – but now such a document is forwarded to your phones.
Yet, this is not the case with the State Cadastre and the legalization of the informal buildings. One can now file an application while in his or her own home. This means, they no longer need to report at the State Cadastre office in person, wait in long queues or make efforts to find a middleman for your file or application to be sent to the relevant office. You can do it now via the phone. However, we have yet to build a closed system for the property ownership certificate to be forwarded digitally via the phone. Therefore, such a process will take some more years during this term in office, yet it will become a reality within this governing mandate and imagine that a day will come, seemingly unimaginable today, but we are nearing to it, because extraordinary job has been done, all the paperwork, maps, overlaps and all the histories about the properties ownership are all included in a digital system so that all the disputes over the property borders are ultimately resolved, as this will be done via a super advanced technology that will tolerate no mistakes.
If you need a property ownership certificate, it will be sent instantly to your phone, just like a text message. I am not talking about some science-fiction stuff, but about something we are working on hard today and it will become a reality within this government mandate. However, the service windows at state institutions, including the State Cadastre, are no longer needed, and this is why we have decided to shut down all the service counters throughout Albania starting in January 2022.
As was the case at the beginning of the pandemic, when people learned to use the e-Albania platform to obtain permits, citizens will again adapt, because it would be disastrous for us to wait longer and incur huge shared costs and not resort to this mechanism instead. The system will put an end to the complaints, ridicules and allegations against us just because of certain irresponsible individuals in the state offices. And this is not about replacing these “irresponsible individuals”, because it would be irrelevant and useless to do so if you don’t change the system. So, with the new system in place, we will make it possible for the public services to be delivered online and anytime a citizen encounters difficulties in obtaining a required service, he or she can resort to the Albania we want platform to file a complaint instantly. Hundreds of people work behind the screen and they are hired to work and tackle your request and the new service system –the Director will better explain how it works – has been built to alert about any case when the application deadlines have been violated. Once alerted, the relevant director, the minister and entire cabinet are instantly informed that a citizen has been denied an official response within the legal deadline and an investigation process begins immediately and the support element, either for the services and the platform, is the new anticorruption unit that has been recently set up, but this unit is tasked with taking measures against those who have hampered the process of providing a reply and delivering a required public service to the citizen.
