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President Tokayev has made it clear that he does not like flattery. There are signs, however, that a certain idealised image is being cultivated around him.
We can remember that Tokayev has publicly scolded officials for excessive shows of honour such as putting up billboards with his picture ahead of his visit.
Perhaps, by publicly showing his intolerance of such a primitive thing as flattery, President Tokayev wants to maintain an image of an intelligent and progressive ruler?
It should be admitted that open flattery addressed to the president mostly comes from local authorities and provincial media, which could be just a habit, lingering from the Soviet past and former president Nursultan Nazarbayev’s 30-year rule.
Notably, Tokayev has never openly denounced the personality cult around Nazarbayev, maintaining that his predecessor is “a major historical figure”.
Nonetheless, a personality cult around Tokayev does seem to be emerging. It is being created carefully, sometimes in roundabout ways, but quite speedily.
One such indirect route is the growing attention to the president’s late father, Kemel Tokayev.
Through new documentaries, books and events about him, we are finding out that the journalist and writer Kemel Tokayev was an outstanding figure.
Kemel Tokayev started his career as a correspondent for the regional newspaper in Zhambyl, rising in 1966-1977 to the position of the editor of Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta (News of the Supreme Soviet) – the mouthpiece of the then Socialist Kazakh republic’s parliament. He has also authored about a dozen novels and collections of short stories.
Kemel Tokayev’s family fled the 1930s famine in Kazakhstan to what is now the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. There, one day, he and his elder brother Kasym were picked up on the street by police and placed in an orphanage. The same day their young sister died in an accident, their mother had a stroke, and their father, after losing his entire family, disappeared.
The president’s uncle Kasym perished in WWII; his father died at the age of 63.
It cannot be denied that Kemel Tokayev deserves being remembered. The question is would he get as much attention as he is getting now had his son not been our president?
President Tokayev himself is being portrayed as a reformer, in contrast to the previous autocratic president and the entire collective “Old Kazakhstan”.
The impression is that we are also being made to believe that Tokayev is our leader because there are no other alternatives – without him the country would be torn apart by internal crises and external aggressors. Hence, in the current difficult geopolitical and explosive internal political realities he is irreplaceable as our leader. At the same time, he is modest and does not like flattery, according to the official message.
The problems is that such “irreplaceable leaders above reproach” are usually found in authoritarian countries.
By Maksat Nurpeisov
