The Nicosia municipal swimming pool will be closed for the fifth consecutive summer season in 2024. This is because the public bodies are singularly unable to manage a project with a modicum of efficiency and competence. This is how the public sector has always operated – at a snail’s pace and with total disregard for the people it is supposed to serve because public sector bosses will still get their promotion and annual pay increases regardless of how poorly they perform their duties. They would certainly not be sacked for failing to deliver a project on time as could happen with a private company.
If a private company owned the public swimming pool, it would have had everyone working overtime to complete all the improvement work on time for the summer season, because failure to open would have meant no revenue. In fact, if a private company was the owner, the swimming pool would probably have been ready to open in June 2023, because the longer it stayed closed the more revenue would be lost.
Public Sector Inefficiency
Such concerns do not exist in the public sector, much less so when the mayor is not seeking re-election. Nobody at Nicosia Municipality cares that the residents of the capital will not have an affordable swimming pool to take their children to in the sweltering summer heat, for a fifth year in a row (excepting a few weeks in 2021). And there is no alternative apart from hotel pools, which charge entry prices that are unaffordable to most people. Needless to say, the mayor was re-elected seven-and-a-half years ago on a pledge to improve the quality of life for the people of Nicosia. Closing down the municipal swimming pool for five years is some kind of improvement.
There is no denying that the pool and its facilities, which were built in 1989, needed a major overhaul 30 years later but nobody would have imagined that this would have required so much time to complete. A new pool and facilities could have been built in half the time if a private company was in charge. The pool could have been opened now, but the municipality decided because the Olympic pool had not been completed to hand the public pool over to the Cyprus Sports Organisation for the training of swimmers.
Lack of Concern for Residents
This is another example of the inflexibility of the public sector. Why was the public pool not reserved for training purposes between 7am and 10am or 7pm and 10pm so the public could also use it? Probably this required a bit of organisational work and planning which municipal employees could not be bothered to undertake. After all, nobody is complaining, the mayor is not seeking re-election and municipal workers are not inclined to do anything that involves a little extra work. We should also bear in mind that the welfare of the people of Nicosia is not among the main priorities of the municipality.
