Almaty Akim remains true to his habitual modus vivendi – keeps being engulfed in controversies.

ALEM RESEARCH shares another round of ratings of Akims of regions and cities, based on the monitoring of Mass Media and social networks in July 2023.

This time, the monitoring exercise showed that after the Dead Calm in June, Akim Dosayev resumed the habitual mode of behavior. He did so loudly – as, loud, as to score 14 thousand mentions in one month. That is an absolute record, that o public servant has ever scored in the last three years.

Almaty Akim’s press-service, by the way, performed well in July. Its regular press-releases kept cyberspace mostly neutral. In July, we saw 15% of negative feedbacks about Akim’s performance. That is a lot, because the regular volume of negative comments addressed to Akims in this country never exceeds 6% to 10%.  Short coverages of Dosayev’s work, as well as his own statements, that things will be good in Almaty, both of which were widely-spread in the Kazakh segment of the Internet, kept negativism within certain level of containment. 

The month of July was rather hot in the Kazakh Internet. We have impression that the city simply grew tired of numerous problems that had been accumulating in Almaty for decades. 

Tariff Is No Guarantee

We saw aggravating problems – overcrowded buses, late arrivals of those buses, buses being dirty and with air-condition broken. In the backgrounds, we kept hearing proposals to increase transport fees.  Mass Media published tens of supporting opinions of various “experts”.  As a rule, those “experts” were people associated with the transportation companies, or bloggers-for-hire, who suddenly began suffering from grief caused by under-financing of transportation companies.  Their collective message was that the city needed to increase transportation tariffs ASAP. Kazet users were struggling to have them all answer one simple question – will more finance improve the quality.  “Experts” would ignore that important question. 

Almaty folks said – “OK, got it, they will increase the fee, but it won’t get better”.  House management companies, when they demand increase in their fees, at least, promise something.  Transportation companies did not even think about doing the same.

Vegetation, Water, Asphalt

The July draught exposed another problem – not enough irrigation of vegetation in the city.  At the same time, our urban sanitation authorities would actively chop dehydrated trees. 

Kaznet users’ reaction was that the city authorities purposefully did not irrigate vegetation, so to clean the surface for another urban development project.  The “sanitation chopping” was performed in parks that were still breathing.

Social networks called chaotic and uncontrolled welling construction the main reason for unexpected water deficit in the upper part of the city. Users think, that with Akim’s silent blessing, construction companies erect tens of thousands of square meters of dwelling, while the City Hall disregards the fact, that urban infrastructure will fail to support the growing headcount.  Akim’s attempt to explain, why the water deficit happened put users into irritation.  The Almaty Water Management Facility simply said that they needed money for modernization of everything in their auspices. 

Kaznet concluded that City Hall used water deficit to justify its claims of necessity to increase municipal services tariffs.

Road repairs was another factor of irritation.  Road repairs is a positive phenomenon of reality.  The problem is, they were only repairing mains, thus causing massive traffic jams.  Kaznet users, at the same time, tried to make it clear to Akim, that there were secondary roads in Almaty that had not seen repairs for 10 and more years. 

In social networks, we saw numerous videos, authors of which – people, who obviously knew the specifics of the road repairs, commented that authorities were repairing where repairs were not necessary.

I Was Assigned by President

The following events triggered the most acute reaction.  Somewhere in social networks, users drafted a petition demanding Dosayev to step down.  Later, Akim shared his attitude to that.

It was particularly when his press-service overreacted.  The matter is that nowadays, any petition is not a legal document.  Why?  Because the Government once promised they would create an official Internet web-site for posting petitions, but never did that ever since.  At the same time, the Government introduced a procedure for the posting of petitions.  So, without the said web-site, the petition was not recognized, as legal, but even if there was such a web-site, the anti-Dosayev petition would not be recognized, because it was not compliant to rules.  City Hall, however, reacted to that petition – unprofessionally. 

At a meeting with Almaty folks, Dosayev, while commenting on the petition, said that the petition was made by bots.  The Kaznet experts performed a count concluding that there were bots behind that petition, but those were bots from Russia and their purpose was to vote against Dosayev’s resignation.

At that very meeting Dosayev said something, that finally killed all remains of trust the city had.  He said, that it was the President, who assigned him, which meant it was up to the President to decide whether Dosayev should step down.

There was another story associated with Akim’s attempt to improve the city outlooks.  Locals made an observation – city authorities replaced the good-quality granite plates, installed in the Soviet times, and substituted them with cheap Chinese decoration materials.  Those materials began flaking off soon enough.

So, people started asking questions – “Why at all waste money for that?”.  The Prime-Minister addressed city Akims with a reprimand for ineffective investment of funds and threated to call the funds back, if Akims fail to spend the money properly. 

Kaznet resumed that Dosayev  did not care for the city, his main goal was to spend money, regardless the fact that those moneys made the city look bad.

In July, Kaznet developed the opinion that Akims should be elected.  Only then, will they work for the best of interests of urban communities they are in charge of.