Disagreements in BH neither are blockades new to the political scene. New conditions followed the imposition of the Election Law. In the run-up to the local elections, as a hint of a heated political summer, the rhetoric is sharpening, and the existential problems of the majority of citizens remain in the shadows. And, the question: how to survive. Because even two average salaries can no longer fill the consumer basket in BiH, which amounts to almost three thousand BAM.
From the first to the first, they don’t live but survive, we are told by citizens who are having a hard time coping with daily price increases.
The poor social status is also evidenced by the ever-fuller number of folk kitchens. For many, it is the only meal they eat.
AMIR RADELJAŠ, manager of the Stari Grad National Kitchen
“Our kitchen has 630 regular users, who come every day to get their hot meal. We don’t turn anyone away, because people are in a state of need, mostly pensioners, people with lower incomes, or people who have lost their jobs”.
Political inaction and disorder reflect disastrously on the everyday life of citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Officials with high salaries cannot even feel the crisis, citizens say.
The standard of living is thus among the lowest in Europe. Without concrete measures and moves with constant price increases and low incomes, the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are getting poorer and poorer, and the standard of living is getting worse.
The trade union consumer basket calculated by the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the month of March 2024 was 2,917.50 BAM.
According to the latest data published by the Federal Bureau of Statistics, the average salary paid in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the month of January was 1,338 BAM, and the minimum salary according to the Decision of the Government of FBiH is 619 BAM, so the coverage of the Union consumer basket by the average salary is 45.86 percent and the minimum wage by 21.22 percent.
When creating the Trade Union Consumer Basket, the average salary paid in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was taken into account, as well as the minimum living expenses of a four-member family consisting of two adults and two children, one of whom is in high school and the other in elementary school.
The percentages of individual category participation in the union consumer basket are: food 43.72 percent, housing and communal services 13.42 percent, hygiene and health maintenance 8.32 percent, education and culture 10.62 percent, clothing and footwear 12.34 percent, transportation 4.73 percent and household maintenance 6.85 percent.
In the food category, prices from three shopping centers were used for 86 items. When it comes to hygiene and health maintenance, expenses for ten items were counted, and for housing and communal services, expenses for six items, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced.
While the Social Justice Day was marked around the world on Tuesday, when numerous countries came forward with official data on how many of their citizens live in poverty and what they are doing to create a society of equal opportunities, until then the number of poor citizens in BiH was a complete unknown.
Moreover, the statistical system has been avoiding this topic for years, and the last, and completely wrong, data on this was done almost a decade ago, writes “Avaz”.
More precisely, as academician Žarko Papić told “Avaz”, the BiH Statistics Agency measured poverty in 2015, using a completely wrong methodology, which, he stated, gives a wrong picture and actually hides poverty.
It was, he explained, about the so-called relative poverty. According to these data, 16.9 percent of the population was relatively poor in BiH.
“The average of the European Union at that time was 24 percent of the relatively poor population, and how wrong that methodology is, you can see just by comparing these two data, because that methodology measures income differences, not poverty,” said academician Papić.
He assessed that, literally, political reasons are the reason why official data on poverty do not appear, and if we had consolidated data on the poor, we would see that the situation is much worse than the officials tell us.
“Eight years ago, as part of a large World Bank project, my organization calculated poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina according to the relevant methodologies. According to these data, since we do not have more recent ones, we calculated that 23 percent of the population in Bosnia and Herzegovina is poor. So, more than one fifth. These are people who can barely feed themselves, and all their other needs are beyond the criteria,” underlined our interlocutor.
He explained that BiH is a complete paradox, because the social situation is in some way amortized by people going to work in, for example, Germany, where there is a whole line of gray social protection that has nothing to do with the state and official policies.
” And it is about the fact that, for example, a son who went to work in Germany sends money to his parents who would not be able to survive on their pension. The remittances of our diaspora in GDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina are the second largest in Europe and that is the which maintains in a strange, indirect way the so-called social peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where no one takes care of it,” Papić pointed out.
He stated that social topics were completely pushed aside, given the absolute dominance of the so-called national tensions and the production of threatening conflicts.
At one time, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights warned that, according to international standards, almost half of the children in Bosnia and Herzegovina live in poverty, as do 80 percent of pensioners in the country.
Redžo Mehić, president of the Board of Directors of the Federation of Pensioners of the Federation of FBiH, told “Avaz” that the solution is to start creating a social map of citizens immediately so that the help reaches the right hands.
“If someone really wanted, and I’m talking about political parties that are in power, with the exception of the three that show these signs, to ensure the unity of the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina regardless of religion and nation, then the emphasis would have to be on social issues,” says Papić.
