People Survive On Less Than $1.9 A Day In A District Of Atyrau Province That Is Richer Than The Whole Rest Of Kazakhstan – OpEd

According to the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2024, developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Human Development and Poverty Initiative, 1.1 billion people live in acute poverty worldwide, meaning they dispose of less than $1.90 per day as living expenses, with 40 percent living in countries experiencing war, fragility, and/or low peacefulness.

The Zhyloi district, with its center in Kulsary, an oil workers’ town in the Atyrau province of Kazakhstan, is not experiencing war, fragility, and/or low peacefulness, yet there, as it turns out, are people there, too, who live in such poverty that they dispose of far less than $1.90 a day per person as living expenses while being at the heart of the Kazakh State’s gas and oil producing industry, that provides the very basis of economic and social well-being of the republic’s 20 million-strong population considered an upper-middle-income nation.

The paradox of that situation doesn’t end there. What’s more, the Zhyloi district definitely is the richest district in the country. As of October 1, 2022, the population of the district was 86,118 people, and the town of Kulsary accounted for more than 70 percent of them (65,964 people in 2023). That is, the Zhyloi district is, first of all, the oil workers’ town of Kulsary. Being just a part of the Atyrau province, it is potentially richer than any province of Kazakhstan, except maybe the Atyrau province itself. It is potentially richer than many individual post-Soviet States, as this is the largest oil-producing district in Kazakhstan, with over 40 oil fields with total reserves of 2.5 billion tons. But this all has seemingly been of little use to Kulsary, where more than two-thirds of its population is concentrated.

On February 10, 2025, residents of the town of Kulsary took to the streets, asking for employment opportunities. They said unemployment had reached a critical level, with many able-bodied citizens left without income and forced to live on  [state] benefits that would end in six months.

“What should we do next? Here is what we ask: the local companies should provide people with work on a 14/14 system (shift work). Now, we are being laid off. And we have come here to be heard. This is not a rally or a provocation. We just want to show how many people have been left without work”, – said the protesters. Among the participants of the action was Zhanargul Sagynbai, a district activist, who noted that there had been about 100 people gathered for the rally, although there are actually more of them [unemployed ones in Kulsary]. She referred to a situation in one family where four able-bodied members are forced to live on the income of the daughter-in-law, who earns only three thousand tenge [around US$6] a day from trade.  If this sum is divided by the number of able-bodied family members, each would get US$1,5. Surely, there are also children in that family. So, one can just imagine living like that.

It would seem that such a protest action was due to be an event of general importance in the country as its social and economic well-being is, among other things, built on the Zhyloi district’s oil and gas industry. However,  it remained largely unnoticed in the Kazakh mainstream media. The central authorities of the country, as far as is known, paid no attention to it. In this sense, official Astana seems to be putting their trust merely in the State and pro-government Kazakh media and bloggers. The latter ones, as far as can be judged, largely follow the classic models of Soviet propaganda before the perestroika period. That is, they mainly display the achievements of the country and speak negatively about those who criticize the ruling regime and its policies, and sometimes, about, say, striking oil workers in Western Kazakhstan, asking for employment opportunities, or demanding higher salaries and better working conditions. 

Here’s how Miras Nurmukhanbetov, а Kazakh journalist, described one such case a while ago: “In short, those ‘opinion leaders’ focus on several aspects. These are ‘dependency attitude’ [i.e.  ‘parasitic attitude’, ‘parasitic way of life’, or ‘parasitism’], ‘repatriates’, ‘already high salaries’ and so on, with a direct or indirect conclusion that ‘it is beneficial for someone to rock the boat’… But it is obvious that those opinion leaders to a greater extent promote the latent position of official bodies and the no less official KazMunayGas [national oil and gas company]. The authorities, for obvious reasons, cannot voice it, so as not to worsen their already shaky image. However, they believe that they were able to form a negative opinion about the strikes among at least part of society. By and large, the formula ‘divide and conquer’ is again set in motion, dividing Kazakhs into ‘ours’, who are supposedly objective and earn their bread (with caviar), and into ‘troublemakers’ who strive to stand out from others.

Here, it must be emphasized that part of the audience of those public opinion leaders needs this to calm down and find excuses for themselves because almost all of them have nothing to do with Mangystau province and the oil-producing West [Western Kazakhstan] as a whole. This has always been the case, and it has been repeated after almost any socio-political excesses. But in this case, we are witnessing a real escalation of the situation, when such bloggers, as conductors of the authorities’ opinions, ‘appoint’ those to blame instead of looking for ways for dialogue”.

Kazakhstan’s revenues from Western Kazakhstan’s oil and gas fields feed the national budget and are being used for supporting the subsidy-dependent provinces, which are composed of the country’s all other regions: Central, Eastern, Northern, and Southern Kazakhstan. At the same time, people in the oil-producing region are increasingly getting bogged down by social, economic, and environmental problems, exacerbated by persistent drought and water scarcity. Not without reason are the richest provinces of the Republic of Kazakhstan, with an average per capita GDP comparable to that of some EU Member States, have now been called by Russian experts ‘the destitute West’ of Kazakhstan.

It should seem astonishing for West Kazakhs to be called by Russian experts ‘destitute’, and ‘Barbarians’ by Chimkent Kazakhs in conditions when, say, in 2008, per capita income in the Atyrau province of Western Kazakhstan was almost 15 times higher ($23.6 thousand) than in the South Kazakhstan province ($1.8 thousand), which then included Chimkent. It is clear that people there (in Western Kazakhstan) mostly can’t be happy with such a state of things. That seems to be the reason there are often demonstrations and strikes over there.

The situation in Kulsary described above is pretty strange on its own. It seems to be even weirder when you take in that here, we speak of a district on the territory of which over one-third of the budget revenues of the Kazakh state were generated in, say, 2018. And that is no exaggeration. Over a third or more than 35% of the Kazakh republican budget revenues planned for 2018 (without transfers) for 5 trillion 528.4 billion tenge fell to share of the Tengizchevroil LLP (TCO) alone. It’s easy to verify if one wants to. The TCO operates a license that includes the unique, supergiant Tengiz field and the adjacent, smaller but still significant, Korolevskoye field. Both fields are in the Zhyloy district territory, the center of which is Kulsary, a town that, less than a year ago, has been badly hit by the devastating water floods. In 2023, the TCO produced 28.9 million metric tons of oil. That is more than the peak figures of Kazakhstan as a whole in the Soviet years and just a little less than what Azerbaijan produced in 2023: 30.2 million metric tons of crude and gas condensate.

However, even with all this, some people have to struggle to survive on less than $1,9 a day in the Zhyloi district of the Atyrau province, which is richer than the whole rest of Kazakhstan.

This is the way things are.