Strong bureaucracy IMPORTANT TO POLITICS

How we can strengthen the bureaucracy and make it truly accountable is a question as tough as how we can reform Thai politics. The current charter draft proposes a system that takes away some powers from politicians and gives them to selection panels. Whether that will work remains to be seen.

We can easily see that politics and the bureaucracy are closely linked, and they are almost inseparable in the badly muddled national strife. 

In addition to the Education Ministry’s turmoil, we have a former Department of Special Investigation (DSI) chief facing a probe into his assets, a “democratically transferred” official helped spark the collapse of the previous government, and there was bureaucratic involvement in what was said to be graft on a massive scale in the rice-pledging scheme.

Could the Education Ministry purge have been effected by a democratically elected government? The answer is yes. But another question is, Why didn’t the clampdown happen?

All elected governments changed education ministers for fun. Those ministers, to be fair to them, did not have time to settle down before being moved elsewhere, let alone look at suspicious activities of high-ranking bureaucrats at the ministry.

But the Education Ministry case is just one of many. Looking back, the transfer of Thawil Pliensri from the National Security Council was a destabilising factor in the Yingluck administration. His transfer became controversial because it paved the way for the promotion of Priewphan Damapong to the top police post, underlining a key problem in Thai politics – nepotism. Thawil’s case left the public polarised over the extent to which 

 the democratic mandate can be exercised.Then, as the dust stirred up by the Education Ministry purge remains in the air, ex-DSI chief Tarit Pengdit has been targeted for his alleged unusual wealth. He has been describing himself as a “political victim”. 

But in truth, Tarit is a sad reflection of what has gone wrong in the bureaucracy. He pulled no punches against the red shirts when the Democrats were in power, spearheading the crackdown on “terrorists”. Videos of him denouncing the red shirts’ activities went viral after he made a dramatic u-turn when the Pheu Thai Party came to power. From |a man who hunted down red-shirted “terrorists”, he became the man leading the hunt for the “hunters” of the red shirts.

We can blame individual bureaucrats, or we can blame the country’s overall structure, which leaves the bureaucracy so vulnerable to political intervention or temptation. What bureaucrats do nowadays is 50 per cent work and 50 per cent speculating on what politicians will become their next bosses and how best to kow-tow to them.

Democratic principles empower election winners to chop and change the bureaucracy so it complies with and effectively implements their policies. The question is, where should the line be drawn? 

In the case of the Education Ministry, there are also other questions. If the bureaucracy was not corrupted by politicians, would it corrupt itself? And what should be done with a corrupt bureaucracy? Who should spearhead the overhaul?

To add to the headache, the Education Ministry corruption must be different from the rice-pledging scheme corruption involving the Agriculture Ministry or the Commerce Ministry. Some bureaucrats may have just gone with the flow, while others must have simply been crooked opportunists. 

The problems, it seems, are at every step of the way, and they just confirm the mammoth task facing those attempting to reform Thailand.