Skopje mayor Orce Gjorgjievski posted a message to citizens on social media: "Caring for Skopje has no breaks, no holidays and no long weekends. Only through shared responsibility can we keep it clean and tidy. Let's keep the city beautiful!"

SDSM responded with a statement calling that appeal an admission of incompetence. "When the mayor calls on citizens to clean up - that is an admission that he himself cannot," the opposition party said, labelling him the "drone mayor" and asking how much he paid for the artificial intelligence solution acquired for the City of Skopje.

The rhetoric is familiar. The questions are concrete.

SDSM claims the phrasing was borrowed from prime minister Hristijan Mickoski and that VMRO-DPMNE officials send out messages to cover incompetence instead of delivering concrete solutions. That is a party talking point and it reads like one.

But the same statement contains three things that are not rhetoric. First: the capital's waste problems still have not been solved. Second: no responsibility has been established for the pollution of the Lepenec and Vardar rivers. Third: nobody knows how much was paid for the artificial intelligence procurement for the City of Skopje, how the company was selected, or whether there is any connection to the mayor.

Of those three, the rhetoric is the least interesting. The third is the most interesting - because it is verifiable, and the answer is one freedom of information request away. A procurement is a procurement. It has documentation, it has a value, it has a selection procedure. Either it gets published, or the question hangs there with every implication the reader supplies on their own.

Where "shared responsibility" stops

The mayor's appeal is not objectionable in itself. No reasonable person argues that citizens should throw rubbish in the street. The problem with messages like this is the boundary: shared responsibility means the citizen does not dump and the utility company collects. Those are not the same kind of responsibility and they are not funded from the same place.

The appeal comes during a holiday period when municipal services are carrying out their regular duties in the field. If those duties are being carried out properly, the appeal is a nice message. If they are not, the appeal is addressing citizens about a problem that is not theirs.

The difference between those two versions is not political. It is measured in tonnes of waste collected per neighbourhood and in the dates a container was last emptied. Those are figures the City of Skopje already holds.