Time to start building the anti-political machine

Politics is not a game, it is an earnest business," Winston Churchill once said. Wretchedly, here in Thailand politics is a game, perhaps a specific kind of game: gambling.

That’s why when someone is going to enter politics, we say he or she is going to “play” politics. And to “play politics” is considered a profession. 

In the 81 years of Thailand’s modern political history, since the change from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, the Thai game of politics has been rattling along a bumpy, unpaved road, using up 17 constitutions, each hundreds of pages long and costing millions of baht to write.

Diplomats, known to be good at “co-optioning” – that is, neither telling the truth nor lying – have tried to assure the international community that our politics is certainly “democracy in progress”, whatever that means.

Many of us are resigned to the fact that, in Thailand, politics is a necessary evil. By nature, Thais have a built-in “que sera sera” mechanism that help us cope. But that mechanism has gradually turned into an “auto shutdown” apparatus. We stop caring about politics – about its relevance to our life, about its ramifications for our children and the future of our country. In so doing, we have conveniently deleted the terms “political accountability” and “civic duty” from our lexicon.

While a majority of us thinks “if we can’t fight it, surrender”, a nation can ill-afford the political disarray and internal fracture that Thailand has been facing. The pending amnesty bill, pronounced as part of the path towards national “reconciliation”, will eventually pass through Parliament. Our politics is purely a numbers game. The prime minister went on television saying she was setting up a “political reform” commission to bring about sustainable political reconciliation. That was a tale full of sound and fury, but it signified nothing.

It’s time to start thinking outside of the box.

In the last 15 years, we have seen an alarming increase in the politicisation of many key institutions that affect our lives. The worst is the politicisation of our once relatively respectable and resilient bureaucracy.

During my father’s time, good government officials were proud bureaucrats who, despite their meagre pay, believed that they were bound by the duty of their positions to serve the country and the taxpayers. Today, most bureaucrats only care about hanging on to the coattails of politicians who have the power to lift them up through the ranks, regardless of their real merit, and to protect them from others on the opposite side of their armour. They are proud of their brown noses, and proud to show off their crony badges of “honour”.

For the past decade, the Thai bureaucracy has been politicised to an extent beyond our most deviant imagination. People are promoted or put in a “deep freeze” not because of their ability to carry out their duties, but because of what they can or cannot do for the politicians who are at the helm. In many ministries, there are price tags attached to each position. Honest government officials who happen to get in the way of the greedy hands of politicians are removed or demoted. They have no recourse to voice their grievances, and doing so will likely make their situation worse. So, they learn to play along, or look the other way when corrupt deeds are carried out. In many cases, bureaucrats deem it more lucrative to join the corrupt. Along the way, their self-esteem as bureaucrats vanishes; the term “honourable” fades from their consciousness as civil servants. Survival comes first, and last.

In 1994, James Ferguson wrote a book on the depoliticisation of development; he called it the “Anti-Politics Machine”. This is the machine we have to start building in Thailand. And bureaucracy is the first anti-politics machine we must try to rebuild and strengthen.

To move away from the hole into which we are sinking, we must seriously and urgently ponder the de-politicisation of bureaucracy, as the first order of the day. Bureaucracy covers every aspect of our lives, that’s why we have to start there.

Bureaucrats must be made to realise that they derive their honour from serving the best interests of the country, not just those of a handful of corrupt politicians. They must have some type of meritorious protection that will allow them to do their job free from the fear of political retribution.

Another “machine” is truly independent civic societies. They represent the check-and-balance mechanisms. Again, in recent years, these societies have disappeared for a variety of reasons. Some were bought off by politicians with infusions of government funds; some got disheartened by the lack of public support and money, and faded away. Our 2007 Constitution was written with the intent of encouraging strong civic societies, but it did not go far enough to provide the ways and means for their survival and protection. We all can learn from Mechai Viravaithaya, whose exemplary civic work has made a difference. He is much more than the lighthearted nickname we gave him, “Mr Condom”. Look up his Bamboo School, and be enlightened at how important it is for the nation to replicate what he has done.

And for better or for worse, we have to fight to keep the Constitutional Court and respect its rulings as final. Certainly, the court is not infallible, but its duty is to uphold the letter and intent of the highest law of the land. As such, it is a pillar that we must strengthen, not tear down.

It’s simply wrong to think that the affairs of the country are not our own affairs. Plato correctly said, “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” Participating in politics is a far cry from “playing” politics. For Thailand to have a chance to get out of its political dark age, where corruption and unjustified political whims reign supreme, we have to participate in the building of our anti-politics machines.

It is the duty of all of us to make sure that we do not live in a house where all the lights are on but nobody is home.