Let’s have bureaucrats empower people
The outcry about the Khon Kaen deputy governor’s letter l ast month to launch a programme to “stop citizens from being stupid” has largely been placated, following public apologies. But this incident reflects the flaws in the long-standing attitude of the bureaucracy in Thailand towards citizens. Right from the very start, the Thai bureaucracy was designed to control the destiny of the populace, not empower them.
In fact, rural Thai people have little say in their own destinies. They only have the fate (or karma, some would say) which brought them into being as citizens of our great country. For a majority, there are few choices. They were born and dwell in the rural areas and remain there because of the great rural-urban divide in the quality of public services, the dire underdevelopment of education services, and the ensuing tragedy of the very real cognitive deficiencies embedded in bureaucratic values.
The Thai bureaucracy is an entrenched organisational culture and value system, particularly for those working for the Interior Ministry, which is transmitted from one generation to the next, sometimes literally via patrimonialism. In this culture, the bureaucrats are the rulers of people and consider themselves naturally far more superior in intelligence than the ordinary citizens they rule.
While the attitudes of bureaucrats in other ministries may seem somewhat more positive, they also view citizens as subjects. Consequently, they do not see themselves as public service providers but, at best, as administrators. The phrase “civil servant” is rarely used to represent the occupations of this group of people who earn their living as public employees funded through taxes paid by ordinary citizens. It is ironic citizens have to pay taxes to employ the bureaucrats to rule them, thus depriving them of the ability to control their own destiny.
The bureaucracy in Thailand is designed to shackle ordinary citizens to the view that they are crippled and unable to escape from the intrusion of the policies imposed on them. In the case of the deputy governor’s letter described above, it implies that the government officials of Khon Kaen province are far more intelligent, knowing how to free the ordinary citizens from the ignorance they are in. Clearly this kind of “father-knows-best” paternalistic attitude creates a wall to discourage civic participation.
In our country, we often see powerless citizens trying to speak, yet their voices are not heard because the bureaucrats ignore them. Occasionally, ordinary citizens might win a battle, but in the end, they always emerge as overall losers in the protracted war against the bureaucrats for freedom of self-determination.
As an example, the people of Thepha district in Songkhla might have been able to find some justice when the government called for a temporary halt to the building of a coal power plant pending a new environmental impact assessment. In the end, it is very likely the bureaucratically self-selected team will issue the new results of a onesided environmental impact assessment to again justify the decision to construct the coal power plant.
In another recent event, the construction of the judges’ housing project at the foot of Doi Suthep National Park in Chiang Mai has been carried out with the notion that the houses are built on public land and did not encroach on national park land. Here again, this illustrates the attitude of bureaucrats is that they have the power to grant themselves permission to use public land without public comment. Their decision is tantamount to saying ordinary citizens do not have the constitutional right to protect themselves or the environment from the adverse effects of any government decision.
Already a group of people from Chiang Mai are walking to Bangkok to submit a petition to Prime Minister Prayut Chano-cha to use his special power under Section 44 to halt this mega-housing project for the judicial workers. What effect this will have remains to be seen, but history tells us the bureaucracy protects its own decision-making processes.
In another case, the Forest Industry Organisation, a business arm of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, decided to disregard the environment for their own benefit. A eucalyptus plantation, intended to feed a giant paper mill, will replace more than 200 rai of a community forest. The bureaucrats see this as an exercise of their exclusive right to make a decision without any due consideration of the plight of the powerless villagers, whose lives will suffer even more from the loss of natural foods and products which they gather from the forest.
Quite often, bureaucrats think that with the power and the intellectual capacity that they feel they possess, they have a monopoly on solutions addressing the plight of ill-fated citizens. They think that whatever policy they devise is always an effective solution for the problems in our society.
There is always the seemingly intractable problem of the overpriced lottery, which has deep roots in the exploitation of low-income earners by bureaucrats in tandem with the politically and economically powerful in our society. It remains to be seen if the proposed plan to print and sell the tickets in set numbers by the allknowing Government Lottery Committee Members will mitigate the problem. In fact, if ordinary citizens have a chance to participate in regulating the lottery quota as active stakeholders in the committee, this may be the best solution.
Finally, the plight of people and the problems in our society, including the perceived stupidity of the citizens, is largely due to our malfunctioning education system.
First, we need to change the attitude of the bureaucrats. If we can convince the bureaucrats to adopt the premise that the focus of managing public services should be people, this would actually develop our country. This would require the bureaucrats to transform themselves into public servants. Their responsibility should be to help citizens think and articulate clearly, while participating in making decisions.
Rather than exercising control, a new cadre of public servants should not only support but help empower citizens to meet their common interests.
Peerasit Kamnuansilpa is a founder and former dean of Khon Kaen University’s College of Local Administration (COLA). Sirisak Laochankham is a lecturer at COLA.