After a visit to Almaty’s Children Hospital in September, Ainura Seitakyn, a young mother from Kazakhstan’s southern capital, was fed up with the dismal condition of the hospital toilets.
She returned home and, like most people these days, posted at length on Facebook, including photographic evidence of the hospital’s poor sanitary facilities. Seitakyn’s posts quickly went viral, and the pictures began to be shared by social media users in Kazakhstan, even reaching Baurzhan Baibek, the newly appointed (and increasingly popular) governor of the Almaty city administration.
Shortly after, Baibek visited the hospital and dismissed a series of top-level medical and managerial cadres, citing their apparent failure to address the issues in Seitakyn’s Facebook post.
