New feast for graft gremlin
Starting this month, residents of more than 83,000 villages and communities nationwide, including in Bangkok, have been brainstorming development projects for which they will seek financial support under the government’s Thai Niyom Yangyuen, or sustainable Thai-ism, programme. From a total budget of 16.4 billion baht managed by the Interior Ministry, each village or community will get 200,000 baht to fund its projects. This is part of the Prayut Chan-o-cha government’s plan to inject more than 100 billion baht into grassroots projects this year under the ambitious programme.
But no matter what it’s called, such large-scale financial risk is prone to corruption and inefficiency, with loopholes waiting to be exploited.
The Interior Ministry and several others will run and fund their own development schemes. The Agriculture and Cooperatives Ministry, in particular, will spend as much as 24.3 billion baht on various projects including those linked to career development and improving local farm products.
Like it or not, this is just another populist policy being implemented ahead of the general election expected in February. It’s seen as an effort to score points for a militarybacked party despite the regime claiming otherwise. The government is adamant the programme is aimed at redistributing the benefits of economic growth at the grassroots level.
However, the government can no longer afford to be complacent in the wake of allegations of widespread corruption involving several state programmes tasked with dispensing financial subsidies. These include a welfare scheme for low-income earners, an education fund for girls from poor families, and financial aid for ethnic people in the North.
Projects that involve financial subsidies are often vulnerable to graft and those initiated and run by the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) are no exception.
The Thai Niyom programme is not the NCPO’s first scheme designed to inject money into local communities. A year after the coup on May 22, 2014, the government launched a policy of spending 5 million baht per tambon to boost local economies.
Some time later, ministry inspectors were deployed to check on their status and their findings were nothing if not instructive.
They showed that the most popular projects proposed by communities involved repairs or maintenance work to public infrastructure like roads, dykes and community halls. Most of the projects did not result in sustainable employment as intended.
Substandard materials were used in many of them. Others aimed at improving people’s job prospects by, for example, offering cooking classes to locals ended up as food distribution events.
The findings indicated that local people only participated when the initial proposal was submitted, after which they were mostly excluded, especially in terms of budgetary oversight, which was controlled by community committees and local officers.
Moreover, the Thai Niyom scheme involves a much larger scale of budget allocation than those given to the aforementioned scandals.
The regime must be aware that more money means more problems, or in this case, even larger-scale corruption.
Unfortunately, the public has heard little about how the government plans to prevent corruption and promote transparency in all of the projects implemented under the Thai Niyom scheme.
What they hear repeatedly from the government is a bunch of attractive-sounding financial figures being bandied about, money that will allegedly be allocated to their communities.
Prior to making this latest financial injection for “the good of the community”, however, the government needs to design efficient mechanisms and measures to ensure the projects do not become tainted by graft.
They must also be tested for efficiency, transparency and cost-effectiveness. Otherwise, the Thai Niyom scheme may backfire rather than improving people’s livelihoods.