Natthawut's rise reddens cheeks

“I built it myself!” Well, maybe she did. Meanwhile there are certain shop owners in downtown Bangkok who see the new Deputy Agriculture Minister and can’t help thinking, “Hey, wasn’t that the guy who burned down my store?”

If there were a jury, it would still be “out” regarding Natthawut Saikua’s alleged role in the torching of centralworld and the Siam Theatre two years ago. He and his fellow red shirts insist they had nothing to do with those red flames in the sunset. People who dislike the colour red call him a terrorist, period.

Yingluck calls him the right man for the job. Natthawut is certainly a skilled orator – he even trained in communications at university. That might come in handy at the Agriculture Ministry when he has to calm down grumbling rubber planters from his home province of Nakhon Si Thammarat. 

Here’s a question he might have to orate about: how will debt-laden rice farmers benefit in the long term from the credit cards his party is going to give them? 

 

Experience pays

Another dubious new addition to the Cabinet is Nalinee Thaveesin. The new PM’s Office minister was last week a trade representative for the Yingluck government, and before that she was supposedly making deals with Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe.

The alleged African adventure landed Nalinee on a US Treasury Department blacklist in 2008. Washington froze her assets there and banned its citizens from doing business with her. Quite an achievement! 

Ask most people who Mugabe is and chances are they’ll shrug and say, “Some kind of wild animal?” That’s pretty close if you include “vicious and dangerous”. Decent folks would rather smack him than shake his hand.

Did Nalinee shake his hand? The US doesn’t say, but it does say she facilitated financial, real estate and gems transactions for his wife Grace and other allegedly evil Zimbabweans. 

Nalinee says she didn’t. washington says she did. One of them is right.