NOT long ago it all looked so much better: oil prices were high, the middle classes were growing and the autocrat-father of the state, Nursultan Nazarbayev, presided over 17m grateful subjects. Yet today the situation in Kazakhstan looks more troubling than at any time since the country broke free of the Soviet Union to become, against the odds, Central Asia’s most prosperous state. To many, Mr Nazarbayev’s promise of a “Kazakh dream” now seems like a sick joke.
An overreliance on oil is what makes the Kazakh economy so fragile. Since the price crashed, export revenues have tumbled. The currency, the tenge, has fallen by half since August. That has squeezed wages and savaged household consumption. An economy that grew by over 5% in 2013 may contract this year, for the first time since 1998. It has not helped that growth is stalling in China, Kazakhstan’s second largest trading partner, while Russia, its largest, is now deep in recession.
All this is hurting ordinary folk. In a rare protest in a closely controlled state, two dozen homeowners gathered outside a bank in Almaty, the commercial capital, last week. They...Continue reading
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