Postcards from Thailand

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra promised there’d be no severe flooding in Thailand this year. Well, the rains have barely started to fall, and already six areas in Ayutthaya province are flooded, and this is the centre of the city of Sukhothai yesterday.

Image from Bangkok Post.

Plans to test the water drainage capacity in Bangkok were due to be held last week – water was to be released from dams upstream and passed through the city’s network of khlongs (canals). The test was called off because there was widespread flooding following a night of heavy rain.

This year was supposed to be different. Following last year’s devastating floods the government was supposed to have been focussed on flood prevention, and virtually unimaginable sums of taxpayer money have been forked out to that end.

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In a totally unrelated story, Police Colonel Dusadee Arayawuthi, is being transferred from the Public Accounts Anti-Corruption Commission, just as he was about to spill the beans on massive corruption in flood defence projects. The only reason given was that some unnamed phuyai (bigwig) wanted him transferred. He was also going to reveal large scale tax evasion in the grey market import of luxury foreign cars and widespread encroachment on national parks in two provinces by “influential figures and local politicians”. (The encroachers even had the gall to use illegal loans from a state bank to fund their acquisition of the parkland and then defaulted on the loans.)

In fact, he ordered his staff to investigate 595 flood prevention projects in the north east; checks revealed “irregularities” in every single project looked into.

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In another unrelated story, a recent study by the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce has revealed that “tea money” accounts for the disappearance of 30-35% of all government land, building and equipment expenditure. Some reports, however, put the figure much higher.

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Yet another unrelated story, a survey earlier this month by Assumption University revealed that 66% of Thai people think that corruption is acceptable. (With people under 20 that figure is 78%, which bodes well for the future.) Even just under 60% of civil servants thought corruption acceptable if it helped them with job promotion, transfer to a better job location or personal profit.

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And a final unrelated story: of the flood defences for the seven industrial estates in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani provinces which were severely flooded last year, not a single set of defences has yet been completed.

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According to the newspapers this morning, a Thai senator has “accidentally” killed his secretary. It seems that the two of them were having dinner in a restaurant. Whilst they were waiting for food the senator’s 9 mm Uzi submachine gun capable of firing 600 rounds per minute “accidentally” went off, shooting his secretary in the stomach. She died shortly afterwards.

What sort of person takes a loaded submachine gun to a restaurant? For that matter, what sort of private individual even owns a submachine gun?

Fortunately for the senator, he has parliamentary privilege, so won’t be arrested for his “accident”.

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For more than 50 years Thailand has been the world’s largest rice exporter. Now, thanks to the populist policies of Thaksin’s puppet government, it’s lost that position. That title now belongs to India, and by year end Vietnam’s rice exports will almost certainly have surpassed Thailand’s too.

It’s not difficult to understand why this has happened. Thai rice, thanks to the government’s rice mortgage scheme – a scheme designed to enrich the middlemen in the trade, not the farmers – costs as much as $170/tonne more than rice from competitor countries. Consequently exports have fallen almost 50% since last year, and the government now has 12 million tonnes of mortgaged rice in storage, progressively losing its taste, texture and value. The cost of this follow so far: 260 billion Baht (that’s 8.2 billion Yankee Dollars, or 5.3 billion Great British Pounds).

So, this is the cost of populist politics and politicians.

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In Thailand there are plenty of policemen who share a rather-too-close relationship with those they should be locking up. Indeed, there are plenty of policemen who should be locked up themselves for their manifold crimes, ranging from taking bribes to let motorists off for minor traffic law infringements (which is rampant in Thailand) to running brothels and casinos (both of which are apparently illegal in Thailand). The situation rather reminds me of the final line of Animal Farm:

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

It was a bit of a shocker, though, to learn that the National Police Chief, Priewpan Damapong, recently made a trip to Hong Kong to have a chin-wag with Thailand’s most famous convicted criminal and fugitive from justice, Thaksin Shinawatra, who just happens to be his brother-in-law (or rather, ex-brother-in-law because Thaksin and his wife technically divorced to prevent her assets being seized for his criminality).

Rent-a-mouth deputy Prime Minister Chalerm couldn’t see anything with the country’s top policeman hobnobbing with a convicted felon, replying “Why was it inappropriate?” when questioned by reporters.

However, for the rest of us, the only question that remains is whether Priewpan’s actions broke the law, or were simply an ethical breach of staggering proportions?

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