In the “Flasim” podcast, Prime Minister Edi Rama shared the message of a citizen who has been waiting for six years for a solution regarding the apartment damaged by the 2019 earthquake.
While publicly reading the letter from Amos Mezuraj, Rama said this was an entirely legitimate reaction and stressed that it is precisely the real concerns of citizens that affect and motivate him the most.
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He acknowledged that after so many years of waiting, the citizen has every reason to feel disappointed, while criticizing the administration for its inability to deal with everyday problems. The prime minister added that he had forwarded the case to the responsible institutions and asked citizens, in his words, not to allow their troubles to be politically exploited by groups that do not seek solutions, but rather to keep anger alive.
The citizen’s message
Rama: In the end, I want to stop at a message I have on my cellphone and that I have pulled out to read, perhaps not for everyone. It is a long message, in which the person who sent it to me writes:
“Good afternoon, Mr. Prime Minister. I read, as every day, your post today as well, coming from a citizen of my generation.” So the person who sent it to me is from the same generation as me.
“It is very clear that a prime minister is judged and voted on for the vision, ideas, ambitions and challenges that unite us as a nation, which directly or indirectly affect our lives. The problem begins when the subordinate institutions forget that, while a prime minister has the duty to deal with these major issues, they themselves should deal with the daily troubles that affect our lives and not benefit from this vision, but work to make it tangible for us too.
We are 12 families who have joined this protest, not all physically on the boulevard, because we are disappointed that even today we still do not have a solution for half of the building that collapsed on us from the 2019 earthquake, near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We have pursued every possible avenue, legal and otherwise, to seek help from every institution, mini-municipality, municipality, the Ombudsman, ministries and the prime minister’s office, but even today we have no answer.
We also sent you a letter last year and immediately afterward we were contacted by the Tirana Municipality, which promised us a solution even in the presence of the MP. But as soon as the elections passed, the responses we received in writing had nothing to do with what had been promised to us in the office; they would no longer receive us. The problem was delegated from one institution to another due to a lack of legal competence and everything returned to square one. There is no one willing to take responsibility not only for solving it, but at least for raising the issue where it should be raised, following the case and keeping us in constant contact.
For this reason we have chosen you, I believe, as citizens too, directly or indirectly; after six years of being sent from one door to another, we put your name on this problem. Perhaps wrongly,” he says himself in parentheses, “but six years without an answer are not few, and meanwhile we see construction permits being issued for resorts, complexes, apartment blocks. Let them be issued, almost every month, but we ask ourselves: for one staircase of an apartment block, is the permit really so difficult? Do we have to be developers, businessmen, in order to find a communication channel and then begin to speculate, burdening ourselves and our minds, that this or that has been promised to someone? We do not know what explanation to give to this clash between realities.
And when the mind is poisoned, your steps lead you to the boulevard. Why should we have to write letters and SMS messages to a prime minister when there are dozens of directors, ministries and municipalities that should have solved our problem in six years? Why should I have to interrupt my work to send this SMS? Why should I have to go out and protest in the afternoon when I could be spending time with my children? Why should I have to wait? Were six years not enough for this state?
These daily but vital problems that we have been living through for years push us to look to you for the guilty party. Your own administration has the tendency to transfer its inability onto you, placing us citizens before you as prime minister. Informal responses such as: ‘Why didn’t you send it to court?’, ‘Since the prime minister promised you a solution, let him give it to you,’ ‘You have no reason to come here, it is not my competence but the government’s,’ ‘I am not signing something to go to prison because the prime minister wants to build your apartment block there where you had it,’ do nothing but fill the glass of water day by day.
Sorry for the direct way of communicating, but I think this is more honest. Plans and visions are all very well, but we want to live well every day and we want it today. We do not need charity, because we manage on our own in life, but we want the state not to become an obstacle for us. We have the bad feeling that we have been wronged and that we will no longer find a solution. Forgive me for the disturbance, but I feel powerless to solve these problems and, believe me, that feeling hurts me.
Thank you. Have a good day. Respectfully, Amos Mezuraj.”
Afterward, Rama said that this is the protest that interests him, angers him and pushes him to continue his battle. He said he is not outraged by the protest of “what-ifs” or pretense, but precisely by the protest that arises from a real hardship.
The prime minister added that if he were in Amos’s place, after six years of waiting, doors opening and closing, promises fading away and responsibilities being passed from one person to another, he would very likely feel the same way and perhaps would himself become part of that protest.
He stressed that he does not doubt this anger at all and that, on the contrary, he feels it as his own, even if that may not be believed. According to him, the citizen’s message was read precisely to bring this reality to light.
Rama also said he has received many similar messages and described them as the clearest example of what he has repeatedly said in recent days: not everyone who joins a protest is there for the same reason. According to him, there are people who are not brought onto the boulevard by ideology, party affiliation or abstract resentment; nor by likes, followers, influencer interests, environmental convictions, nationalist impulses, manipulation or missions to manipulate others, but by a concrete hardship that over time turns into anger and then into an outburst.
He called this reaction legitimate and said the citizen is absolutely right. According to Rama, no one should be forced to write to the prime minister about issues that institutions, which are paid to handle them, have failed to resolve. On the other hand, he stressed that he personally follows every message he receives and recalled that he had sent this case as well, a year earlier, to the competent authority.
Rama added that he does not want to justify himself, but shared this message to show his own truth: that he has the same concern and that a year ago he had forwarded the issue to the Tirana Municipality.
He went on to say that there is currently no mayor and that the Tirana Municipality, in his words, “functions with a defibrillator, with oxygen,” with “700 pushes and 700 cramps.” Nevertheless, he stressed that beyond the municipality, there are problems with the administration as a whole and that when it does not carry the weight it should, the burden falls on the citizen, the family and those waiting for answers.
He further said that he wants to make an appeal without asking for understanding, but simply for everyone’s attention. According to him, although he understands that when hardship affects you personally patience runs out, one should not allow a just problem to be used as fuel by those who, in his words, feed on protest and chaos, more spiritual than physical, producing harm instead of solutions.
Rama declared that there are people, entities, organizations and even other actors outside the country who feed on the problems of others. According to him, the problem of those citizens who are in this situation should not become “fuel” for politics or their aims, because they do not seek solutions, but need one never to come, in order to keep anger, division and the illusion alive that every wound of a citizen is proof that everything here must be brought down and Albania must start from scratch.
He stressed that he has a duty to listen to the citizen, but not to become hostage to those who speak in the citizen’s name. Rama described the protest of honest people, who do not want to become “fuel” for the industry of hardship, as highly respectable, understandable and infuriating for him.
At the same time, he asked all those who are in this condition not to give their hardship away anywhere. According to him, that hardship should not be handed over to the administration and, if they need him, he is there to fight together with them, but it should not be left in the hands of those who want to take things backward by using this hardship.
Rama said that solutions never come from those who ignite the fire of anger, but from those who, despite shortcomings and mistakes, have the duty to extinguish every source of problems by standing over it.
In the end, the prime minister declared that he is doing the best he can. He said he is proud of many achievements of the public administration and of its transformation compared with the past, but at the same time stressed that he is just as bitter and disgusted by what happens in certain cases and places. According to him, the solution is not “to blow it up,” but to correct it together. The major operations, he said, have been carried out; now what remains is to continue treating the wounds and the points that have infection.
