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Kanye West's government nightingale

2026-07-09 18:37:25Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA FIONA KOPALI
Kanye West during a concert

Vjosë-Narta is home to pink flamingos and curly-billed pelicans. Among the birds that enjoy special protection, the nightingale holds an honorable place, but unlike flamingos and pelicans, the nightingale does not need pristine lagoons, it needs a stadium built specifically for it.

I have no problem with Kanye West's concert per se, on the contrary, I join the sympathizers of his music, and I couldn't help but be happy when I found out that he would come to Tirana. The problem is that this activity was presented as completely private, and ended up being financed by the State Reserve Fund with 400 million lek, translated as only 4 million euros. As the exchange rate has come, it drops to a full 4 million and 250 thousand euros.

On July 6, 2026, the Council of Ministers approved Normative Act No. 3, establishing the partial financing of the organization of the nightingale Kanye West concert with 400 million lekë, a figure that is not cheap, but that suits the format of the government. The act states that the fund is taken from the Reserve Fund of the State Budget and transferred to the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports. The law does not ask whether the artist is famous, it only asks whether the use of the Reserve Fund for this purpose was allowed?

Law No. 9936 " On the Management of the Budget System" defines the Reserve Fund as a fund created to finance non-permanent and unforeseen expenses at the time the budget is drafted. Article 5 is even more explicit, stating that the Reserve Fund is used only for expenses that were not known and could not be foreseen during the preparation of the budget.

The key word is "only" , not "also" . Only. This means that it is not a bag of gold that the government dips into every time an interesting project comes up, but an extraordinary fund for extraordinary situations, historically used for floods, earthquakes, fires, epidemics, natural disasters or civil emergencies. Not to cover the financial difference of a private activity.

Article 45 of the same law makes the logic very clear. If a ministry requests additional funds, it must explain why the expenditure was not planned, why it cannot be postponed to the next year, what benefits it brings, and why it cannot be financed by cutting other budget items. Only if these conditions are met and there is no other solution, the Minister of Finance may propose to the Council of Ministers the use of the Reserve Fund.

The law treats this fund as a last resort, not a first resort. The government did not stop with using the Reserve Fund, it also used a Normative Act, relying on Article 101 of the Constitution, one of the strongest and most exceptional provisions of the Albanian Constitution. It allows the Council of Ministers to issue acts that have the force of law only in cases of need and urgency, in other words, only when the situation is so extraordinary that it cannot wait for the normal parliamentary procedure. This is why the Constitution obliges the Assembly to convene immediately and review the act within 45 days, because the Normative Act is not a faster way to govern, but an exception to the rule.

Law No. 9936 does not stop at defining the conditions for the use of the reserve fund, it has also thought through the part of the "bill" to the public. Article 3, point 15, clearly defines it as a fund for "non-permanent and unforeseen" expenses, a definition that clearly did not recognize Kanye West's talent for transforming into a "national emergency" within a few days. But the law goes further: Article 63 obliges the Council of Ministers to submit to the Assembly, within the month of June, a consolidated annual report on the use of the reserve fund.

Transparency, then, is not a choice that the government makes to itself when it pleases, it is a legal obligation, with a date and deadline. This makes even more amusing the question of how a concert planned for months, with private organizers, a signed contract and tickets on sale for a long time, was suddenly discovered as "unpredictable ", precisely in the category that Article 63 wants to be overseen by the Parliament, not to be decided silently, at the last minute, by the Council of Ministers. The only thing that was unpredictable was the lack of ticket sales.

According to the Prime Minister, the emergency was so that Albania would not be embarrassed. In his post, he explained that the intervention was made "at the last minute", so as not to embarrass Albania in front of about 25 thousand foreigners from 80 countries, so as not to lose the opportunity to promote tourism and generate economic income from the cancellation of the concert. The irony is that most of Kanye West's concerts in Europe have been canceled: Great Britain, Italy, France, Switzerland and Poland now bear the seal of shame from the cancellation of his concerts, which is expected to have a very bad impact on tourism and the future of the reputation of these countries. Thank God, we solved it, we will eat the shame with the bread that will be sold during the concert.

In 2023, with Decision No. 168, dated 24.3.2023, of the Council of Ministers, approved on the basis of Article 100 of the Constitution and Law No. 45/2019 "On Civil Protection", the government approved, with great care, the national document on Disaster Risk Assessment. Experts tried to predict every possible risk for Albania: earthquakes, floods, fires, pandemics, but no one, unfortunately, predicted the biggest risk of the summer of 2026, an American with unsold tickets. I think a new Council of Ministers is needed to urgently add this category, for the first time in history, "artistic shame" as a threat to national security. They say that the government is expected to reach out to the people as well, it will turn even neighborhood bars that do not have full tables into a national emergency.

We must bear in mind that the concert was not born as a state project, we were told that it was a completely private activity. Although Minister Gonxhe said on May 1 that the state had contributed to bringing the nightingale to Tirana, he then changed the version. As happens in this industry, private organizers negotiated with the artist, contracted the performance, and put the tickets on sale. It is not known how much Kanye West was paid for the concert in Tirana, but the artist himself has stated in the past that his fee for a performance is 8 million dollars (about 7 million euros). When sales were not going at the expected pace, public calls were launched to buy tickets, and the state decided to intervene with over 4 million euros to help the Albanian organizers, not Kanye, because he does not receive the money after the wedding. Saving national dignity did not cost even 7 million euros, but only 4.

In a market economy, when a business wins, it does not share the profits with taxpayers. So why, when it runs into difficulties, should the losses be shared with them? Kanye did not share with us the profits from his other concerts that were not canceled. Neither did Ylli Limani in two nights of concerts supported by the Municipality at the height of the protest, and many other concerts sponsored by the state have not been accounted for. In a state of law, it is not enough that the result be good, the path to achieve that result must also be legal.

If the state decides to finance a concert of this level, it is not enough to pay the artist or the organizers. Albanian copyright law brings a series of other legal obligations. Fees for the public performance of musical works must be paid, it must be clarified whether media such as Top Channel that advertised the sale of tickets can broadcast the concert in the future, to promote culture and tourism, of course with written approval from Kanye. The rights of authors, composers and songwriters must be respected. Payments must be made to the collective administration agencies of copyright, along with fiscal and tax obligations related to the activity, drinks must be sold with an invoice, etc. So, if we are saving Albania from artistic shame, let's do it completely, while also respecting copyright. Because legal shame is just as expensive as artistic shame.

A month ago, the Prime Minister declared that Albania does not belong to Albanians. Today we have a very clear meaning of that expression, it belongs to Kushner and Kanye. A functional state is measured by the way it uses power and public money, and if tomorrow every project that risks failing can be declared an "emergency", then Article 101 of the Constitution loses its meaning. If every marketing problem can be financed by the Reserve Fund, then the Reserve Fund is no longer a fund for disasters, but for extinguishing the fire of unsold tickets. We cannot predict earthquakes, but the way we respect the Constitution, yes. Kanye can sing the lines of his song in Tirana like this: I ain't saying the government is a Gold Digger. .. but it ain't shy when the public gold gets bigger.

*Fiona Kopali is a lawyer in technology, media and telecommunications law, LLM, Queen Mary University of London


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