In less than a week, Macedonia's culture sector lost two directors. The director of the National Gallery was dismissed after an extraordinary inspection found irregularities in its operations and part of the annual programme left undelivered. The director of the Krushevo Historical Museum, Miha Odzaklieski, handed in an irrevocable resignation after the scandal over Kosovar rapper Don Xhoni filming his music video "Sexy Mama" inside the Makedonium.

The Makedonium, the monument dedicated to the Ilinden Uprising, is protected cultural heritage. According to the Historical Museum, the production company submitted a request, there was a Board decision allowing the space to be rented out for filming, and a fee was charged - around 500 euros. The Cultural Heritage Protection Office, however, says it never received any request for a filming permit.

In his resignation, Odzaklieski claims he broke no law, no rulebook and no Board decision, and that the procedure was part of an established practice the institution had used before. That may be the most alarming sentence in the whole story. If renting out a national monument for a music video was routine, how many times has it happened before without anyone noticing?

Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said he would ask for the dismissal of the director and the Board members and apologised to the public for the failure. The Board then resigned as well. This is not the first problem with the Makedonium this year: in July the public reacted to metal structures put up on the monument, for which the Heritage Office also said it had given no conservation approval.

Party quota before expertise

Odzaklieski was not just a director. He heads the Krushevo branch of ZNAM, a coalition partner in government, and is one of the signatories of the movement's founding initiative. At the National Gallery, meanwhile, then-minister Zoran Ljutkov denied when the director was chosen that it was a political deal with Vredi, a party in the VLEN coalition. By his account, all four candidates met the requirements, and three of them had the same copy-pasted programme.

That is the heart of it. The law requires a degree, work experience and paperwork, and a committee checks whether a candidate meets the requirements. But once several candidates clear the formal bar, the final word belongs to a politically appointed minister - and that is where procedure ends and politics begins. Both directors fell fast. The more important question is on what criteria they were chosen at all, and by whom.

Resignations and dismissals are necessary, but that is accountability after the fact, once the damage is done. If the way people are picked to run national cultural institutions doesn't change, the next scandal is only a matter of time. And next time it might not be a music video, but something an apology can't fix.