The night-walkers of Uganda

media/TV jobs
304

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And finally... how a cockroach put 30 
people out of work
Luke Harding in Moscow 
February 22, 2008
Turkmen president sacks staff after an insect 
walks onto a TV news bulletin
For the people watching the news in 
Turkmenistan, it was another normal bulletin. But 
as the newsreader began reading the news at 
9pm, viewers across the central Asian country 
saw something unusual crawling across the 
studio table: a large brown cockroach. 
The cockroach ran the whole way across the 
desk and then disappeared. The programme, 
complete with cockroach, was repeated at 11pm 
that night. 
Horrified officials from Turkmenistan’s ministry of 
culture knew nothing about the cockroach until 
9am the next day. The results of the cockroach’s 
five minutes of fame were immediate and severe. 
The country’s president, Kurbanguly 
Berdymukhamedov immediately sacked 30 
workers from the main state TV channel, the news 
website Kronika Turkmenistan reported yesterday.
Before the cockroach incident, Berdymukhamedov 
had ordered Turkmenistan’s minister of culture, 
Gulmurat Muradov, to modernise the country’s TV 
channel. However, the new ministerial committee in 
charge of the modernization only works from 9am 
to 6pm. This allowed the cockroach to run around 
at 9pm unnoticed. 
Berdymukhamedov became leader of the oil-rich 
former Soviet republic in December 2006. The 
previous president, Saparmurat Niyazov, sacked 
several TV executives after drunken technicians 
forgot to broadcast his New Year’s speech to the 
nation. They eventually broadcast the speech at 3am. 
Those sacked in the cockroach incident included 
journalists, directors, camera operators, and 
technical staff. 
Berdymukhamedov has begun a series of 
mild liberal reforms in Turkmenistan. He has 
said that Internet cafes will open in Ashgabat, 
Turkmenistan’s capital, and he has said that 
school children should start learning foreign 
languages again. 
Last March the president restored pensions to 
more than 100,000 old people. In January he 
announced that opera and ballet are allowed to 
be performed once again in Turkmenistan .
Berdymukhamedov wants to end Turkmenistan’s 
isolation from the rest of the world in other ways 
too. He wants to attract more foreign tourists to 
Turkmenistan, especially to the new multibillion 
pound tourist resort on the Caspian Sea. The 
president has also visited Washington.
Berdymukhamedov’s dislike of cockroaches may 
have something to do with his previous career 
as a dentist. He graduated from Turkmenistan’s 
state medical institute in 1979, he has a PhD in 
medical sciences from Moscow, and he worked 
as a dentist from 1980 to 1995. In December 
1997, he was made minister for health.