Sir Endra Tivriš Žovradai, Twice Tavari Prime Minister, Killed in Pneumatic Tube Accident
NUVRENON– Sir Endra Tivriš Žovradai, the current Minister of Defense, former Minister of External Affairs, and two-time Prime Minister, was killed on Saturday in a tragic accident when, according to the Office of the Prime Minister, the pneumatic tube system used by the Tavari government to transport classified documents between buildings “severely malfunctioned.” Sir Tivriš Žovradai was 78. The pneumatic tube system spans several city blocks and connects the Tavari government’s three largest and most critical facilities in the capital: Government Center One, Government Center Two, and the National Diet Building. Last overhauled during the construction of Government Centers One and Two in the late 1980s, multiple sources within the government said that the system is “notorious for breakdowns” and that only one person in the entire Tavari civil service is qualified to repair its central components.
“Our entire nation grieves the tragic loss of one of our greatest public servants, Sir Endra Tivriš Žovradai, Knight of the Amethyst Order, former Prime Minister, Cabinet member, Delegate to the Diet, and most of all a trusted and beloved confidante, advisor, partner, and friend to so many. On behalf of the entire Tavari government, I extend our sincerest condolences to Endra’s children and family. What occurred today should not have happened, and I take full responsibility for this unacceptable breach in workplace safety standards. The government will immediately open an investigation and leave no stone unturned until we are certain that what happened today can and will never happen again,” said the Prime Minister in a statement.
According to several sources, whose identities are being withheld because they were not authorized to comment publicly, the accident occurred when someone in the Office of the Prime Minister attempted to send a document through a tube routed directly to the Defense Ministry, but, just as they were loading the carrier into the tube, their wedding ring slipped off and fell directly into the tube immediately before the door closed and the system pressurized. Everyone who spoke with the News agreed that the person immediately pressed the emergency stop button, but that the button did not work. The ring emerged at the other end when, apparently, Sir Tivriš Žovradai opened the tube system to retrieve the document and fell upon being impacted. Orcs over the age of 70 have highly elevated chances of death from falls, and at age 78, Sir Tivriš Žovradai was not only well beyond the usual Tavari retirement age (60, raised from 55 by the former Prime Minister himself in 2002) but beyond the average Tavari life expectancy of 75. It is extraordinarily unusual for Tavari orcs to remain working beyond the age of 70, though public service is a job field known for advanced ages, especially top-level political appointees like cabinet ministers.
Endra Tivriš Avbómatti was born in Eštakai on May 7th, 1945 to Hendra and Alacandi Tivriš Avbómatti, the second son of the shrinemaster at Avbómatt Shrine, which is recognized by the Tavat Avati Shrine Association as the oldest active shrine in the Tavat Avati faith, dating to 304 CE. The shrine, which sees more pilgrims annually than any shrine outside of Nuvrenon, has been in the custody of his family since time immemorial, and is today headed by Sir Tivriš Žovradai’s niece, Ólendra Tivriš Avbómatti. By all accounts Endra is known to have been deeply devoted to the shrine he grew up on and was a devout Avatidar all his life, but as the second child the title of Shrinemaster was not to be his, so he sought his living as a lawyer.
After law school at the University of Dravai and completing a stint in conscription as a JAG officer with the Royal Tavari Air Force, Endra settled into a job in the legal department at Tivriš Insurance, owned by the family bašdõran conglomerate—cushy, loaded with perks for the son of a prestigious branch of Line Tivriš, and with what Endra later described as a “sinfully large corner office”—but immediately found it “crushingly boring.” The only thing he liked about the job was his assigned secretary, Vedra Rundra Žovradan, who soon became his wife. Upon their marriage in 1973, the couple selected a name combining elements from both their names—common today, but still a new trend at the time that, Endra says, earned him “a lot of raised eyebrows and weird looks from the good old boys at the office” because of a perception that it was “immature” of Endra to adopt a family name based on that of his wife, the younger partner. Endra quit his job at the “family company” shortly after.
Endra was picked up by the foreign service in 1975 because of his knowledge of the Packilvanian language, which he had studied in college. At the time, the Tavari Foreign Service was struggling to fill positions in Packilvania due to the ongoing Second Packilvanian Civil War, which would last for another ten years. Endra served in Packilvania for that entire decade (occasionally being evacuated and returned as the long war dragged on and occasionally threatened diplomats in the capital), only to be finally rotated to another posting once the war was over. He was then assigned to the Tavari Consulate-General in Xoi, shortly after the 1985 coup that saw the Xoigovoi monarchy restored for just two years before being overthrown once more. Endra served briefly as Acting Consul to Xoigovoi when his supervisor was injured in the outbreak of the 1987 coup.
Endra resolved to leave the foreign service after the coup in Xoigovoi and took the opportunity in 1988 to run for the Ino Province Legislative Council. While he ran as a member of the Democratic National Party, he was inspired to run by Social Democratic Prime Minister Bežra Išdašt Tovrenar, who by then had become famous for her opposition to the so-called “Tavari System” of bribes and kickbacks that had dominated Tavari business and politics for decades. Endra won his seat handily and in just two years as a first-time legislative councilor authored seven anti-corruption bills. He caught the attention of DNP party officials nationally and, when the National Diet went up for election in 1990 after Mrs. Išdašt Tovrenar’s death, he was placed on the ballot for Line Tivriš Delegate. The second son of one of the line’s most prestigious families won handily.
Aged 45 when he entered the Diet, Endra was the second-youngest delegate at the time and remained such until 1994, when 34-year-old Shano Tuvria became the youngest Delegate (then) ever elected and bumped him to third. His ardent anti-corruption speeches and campaigns caught the attention of his colleagues and the public, and many credited him with keeping the legislature’s commitment to ethics reform alive after the Social Democratic party saw their fortunes and administration collapse without Mrs. Išdašt Tovrenar at the helm. Consistently popular among the public, Endra quickly advanced in leadership despite his “young” age and became associated with the DNP’s center-most faction. In 1999, after DNP Prime Minister Mani Ovrošt Tanadar lost re-election, Endra ran for and won the party leadership, becoming Leader of the Opposition. Three years later, Endra led the DNP to victory and became Prime Minister.
Despite being known as one of the most moderate members of his party, once elected Endra wasted no time passing a massive tranche of controversial legislation that was on the shopping list of the party’s right flank. He passed a law opening the Nandrat River National Forest to mining, which proved so immediately, overwhelmingly unpopular among Akronists that the government would not actually use the power granted in that law for twenty years. And after the Liberal privatization of the Tavari Postal Service passed with much less public controversy than expected and (at least initially) began to generate significant returns, Endra sought to beat the Liberals at their own game by launching more privatizations, including TavariRail and most of the country’s power plants (only the one nuclear reactor remained government-owned.) Unlike the Postal Service, however, privatizing the trains saw significant administrative hiccups, rampant delays in the months after the changeover, and allegations of corruption for the man once renowned for his ethics after a Tivriš-owned company landed the rights to the rail franchise in Ino Province.
Even more disastrous for Endra was the Volscine Civil War, which Tavaris entered in 2004 in an internationally surprising intervention on behalf of George Gray. Largely the brainchild of Endra’s Minister of Defense, Nama Oren Kantoreš, the Tavari involvement in the conflict was meant to bolster the Tavari position on Novaris and re-establish its credentials as a major power, but the Tavari military was plagued with significant logistical and strategic problems that rendered it mostly ineffective. Public outrage at the loss in the war, compounded with outrage regarding the trains, led to Endra calling for snap elections and losing control of the Diet in 2005.
However, the Liberal-Green coalition government of Nodri Randai Doranan that followed him, collapsed in infighting after only two years and failed to pass a budget in 2007, leading to elections. Abandoning his first term desire for economic reform, Endra instead pivoted the DNP to tax cuts and increased military spending, which proved popular enough to regain the public’s trust and put him back in office. His second term was much less controversial, and twice as long, as his first stint, and dealt primarily with such mundane topics as banking and insurance reforms and modernizing the country’s military equipment. The Crystal Bay-class nuclear submarines, the Royal Tavari Navy’s first nuclear-powered ships, first began construction in Endra’s second term, though the first would not be commissioned until 2019.
Sir Tivriš Žovradai enjoyed a decade of retirement before being called back into service in 2021 by Žarís Nevran Alandar as Minister of External Affairs, depending on the former Head of Government for his strong foreign policy experience and leaning on his wisdom—and, as necessary for political capital among her colleagues, his age. His appointment at age 75 was not without controversy, though Endra fiercely opposed any entertainment of the idea that he was too old, saying in 2021 “The only person on this planet who gets to decide when I’m done working is me. The day I can’t do this job, kick me outta my office with my stuff in a box and I’ll go back to playing golf, but retirement is boring as hell and so help me Spirits, so long as I can perform the tasks of the job, let me work.”
In June of 2022, citing his “remarkably long” career in public service and his “exceptional performance representing the country in critical External Affairs incidents such as the Second Packilvanian Civil War, the 1987 coup in Xoigovoi, the Volscine Civil War, and the 2021 negotiations with Meagharia,” Prime Minister Žarís Nevran Alandar awarded Endra a knighthood, the country’s highest honor. Shortly thereafter, the Prime Minister moved Sir Tivriš Žovradai to the Defense Ministry, where he replaced Nama Oren Kantoreš, once his own Defense Minister. While observers reported at the time that he was expected to remain in the job only as a caretaker, “no one expected his career to end the way it did,” said one unnamed source in the Ministry of Defense.
“None of this should have happened. None of this. A 78 year old orc should not have been working. The emergency stop button should not have failed. The government of a nuclear power in 2023 should not be using pneumatic tubes to send documents,” said the source. “The Tavari government’s inability or refusal to break out of gerontocracy and technological ineptitude have literally killed someone. What an embarrassment.”
Flags have been ordered to half staff for seven days. As a former Prime Minister, Sir Tivriš Žovradai is entitled to a state funeral, but no arrangements are yet publicly available. Sir Tivriš Žovradai is also almost certain to be enshrined at Avbómatt Shrine, making him the only Prime Minister to be enshrined in the Tavat Avati faith’s oldest holy site. The work of the Defense Ministry will continue with an Acting Minister, but one thing that will not carry on is the pneumatic tube system itself, which has been entirely powered down. In its absence, sources report, classified documents will be transferred between departments by fax.