Who's in charge after democracy in Bhutan?

Happiness Land struggles with new Democratic Order

Bhutan vaulted from a feudal monarchy into a parliamentary democracy in 2008. That followed a royal edict in 2006 by the Fourth Druk Gyalpo (Dragon King) declaring abdication in favour of his eldest son and mandating democratic elections in 2008.

King Jigme Khesar Namgyel and Queen Jetsun Pema

For a mountain people who revere their King and don national dress every day, this sudden devolution of power has been most unsettling. Who is The Boss now? No one seems to know. None dare claim the role either.

Fourth King Jigme Singye crowns
Fifth King Jigme Khesar Namgyel

The civil service has been left floundering between an elected parliament of newbies still unclear about their remit and a monarch who stepped back. 

While the civil service acted on orders of the monarch, it was beyond challenge. That certitude has evaporated. The demand for transparency and accountability plus a proliferation of newspapers, has put the powerful bureaucracy on the defensive. 

The new democratic dispensation allows elected representatives to criticise administrative shortcomings in open debate. The newspapers amplify that embarrassment. This is an entirely novel experience for civil servants. They feel insecure and unloved. 

The resulting reluctance to take action on many pressing issues across the spectrum of administration, is beginning to slow down and paralyse the system. 

Even routine queries from the press are parried by bureaucrats for fear of being blamed for giving the 'wrong' answer. The civil servants feel they have been left high and dry without any precedent to follow. There is a leadership vacuum.

While devolution of power to the masses has a Utopian ring about it, the reality is that 70% of Bhutanese society is agrarian. The issues which preoccupy them are elemental - tilling the very limited (9%) arable land, tending livestock and eking out a subsistence in barren mountain terrain with difficult logistics, poor communications and a freezing cold most of the year. 

The finer points of parliamentary democracy and a free press seem too far from their lives to matter much. All the democratic noise and fury plays out in the capital Thimpu, where about 100,000 of Bhutan's 725,000 population and all its 12 newspapers reside.

Gross National Happiness (GNH) excites the UN

      Prime Minister Jigmi Yoezer Thinley & Keynote Speaker
President Laura Chinchilla Miranda of Costa Rica at the UN

The Fourth King Jigme Singye Wangchuk is credited with musing about the need to re-define traditional GDP factors about 40 years ago, for a more inclusive matrix of social progress and well-being. That evolved over time into the Happiness Index introduced in 2005, for which Bhutan is now universally lauded.

The trashing of the capitalist narrative in the USA and Europe, climate change effects from abuse and depletion of Earth's limited resources plus anger at the "1%" has coalesced into a search for alternative development models which put people and the environment ahead of profit. Bhutan's GNH approach is becoming an interesting model for many more nations.

In July 2011 the General Assembly of the United Nations unanimously adopted Resolution 65/309 empowering the Kingdom of Bhutan to convene a high-level meeting in New York on GNH - at its 66th session in April 2012. 

Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley led the discussions which received wide international media coverage. That has given the tiny landlocked Himalayan Kingdom sandwiched between China and India, an outsize international profile. The Bhutanese leadership basks in that limelight with great pride.

Perhaps too much GNH distraction?

Western academics have turned Bhutan's GNH into a conference-tourism industry. There is talk of a Centre for GNH to be built in Bumthang - a 10-hour drive through twisting hairpin bends and bumpy stretches - to facilitate international studies and research about the concept. Every other month there is a forum, seminar or international dialogue about GNH. There is no shortage of academic pilgrims journeying to Bhutan to talk GNH to death.

What is most curious about GNH seminars is that the speakers tend to be foreigners who do not live in Bhutan. The Bhutanese wisely stay out of the lecture circuit. They listen attentively and smile.

At the top where it matters, there is considerable GNH-fatigue and frustration with the hard realities Bhutan must confront. The young king, the deputy chairman of the National Council and the leader of the opposition are all railing for effective action to fix all the obvious problems.

India bankrolls the Bhutan economy, supplies most of its imports, builds its infrastructure of bridges and roads and provides unskilled labour for construction. Most of Bhutan's expatriate teaching faculty for schools and colleges are also recruited from India.

All of that has led to a 'rupee crunch' which saw the Ngultrum, previously accepted at par with the Indian rupee, being discounted by Indian Banks and traders. Now that has turned into a rigid demand for rupees only. Petty border trade is grinding to a halt with severe disruption to small business.

Bhutan has run out of rupee reserves to pay for its one-sided Indian trade. Emergency loans from India and conversion of Bhutan's US$ reserves into rupees is propping up the situation for the moment.

Panic measures by the Monetary Authority to stop loans and slow down rupee transactions fail to address the fundamental problem of the utter imbalance of Bhutan-India trade flows. It is one-way: Indian goods and services imported into Bhutan which have to be paid for in rupees. Bhutan has little to export to India other than hydroelectric power (which is financed, built and traded by Indian energy companies).

No thriving private sector to drive growth?

Entrepreneurial energy to drive a private sector to promote import-substitution and to generate export earnings is needed. Some have blamed excessive regulatory hurdles and difficult bank credit for the lack of a domestic private sector.

The agricultural sector is disorganized, handicapped by lack of silos to store rice, grain, vegetables and fruit and has to cope with long supply-chains across difficult mountain roads to get produce to market. 

Rural-urban migration depletes the availability of educated youth to organize the agrarian economy. University students all aspire to join the civil service for the prestige it still carries plus the job security and pension it entails.

The capacity for government to absorb university graduates annually is running out. Already 75% of the government's operating budget goes to pay salaries to its civil service. 

There is 9% youth unemployment and rising crime in Thimpu from drug and booze addiction compounded by undisciplined low-level imported labour.

Politicians and newspapers are gearing up for the second general election due 2013. Unless elected representatives in parliament can lead a bottom-up, self-sufficiency revolution across Bhutan to deliver a 'democracy-dividend', time is running out rapidly for Happiness Land. 

ENDS

Hong Kong's freewheeling press spoils chief executive circus

Where did CE wagon go off the rails?
Only four months ago it looked a neat circus act. Two dancing bears, Henry and CY enter the ring and begin their routines. They check regularly with the ring master for approval. A third untrained bear, Ho, securely chained, is allowed in to add drama. The audience knows the story. The act is predictable but vaguely entertaining like familiar Cantonese opera. The hero known by all beforehand, will emerge victorious from the noise and distraction.

But for the raucous, unruly press of Hong Kong, the circus would have played to script. It was not to be. The editors took a keen interest in the candidates who wished to rule HK. They searched their past and their present for clues to who they really are, what drives them to seek such power, who is behind them and why.

Tang plays more than women and wine cellars
The Ming Pao newspaper first disclosed the illegal construction beneath candidate Tang’s twin mansions in Kowloon Tong. Tang was the administration’s second most senior officer when the government initiated a long-overdue clampdown on unauthorised structures to property. Chief executive Donald Tsang asked his team to make sure they were clean on this. Henry decided not to reveal his underground secret.

It now appears Tang could have submitted false building plans for approval, omitting the grand basement complex below his swimming pool. He would have required an architect to sign off on the planning submissions. There is a trail of professional breach of code and trust. It was fraud.

His pattern of response to misdemeanours has been to deny wrongdoing, then fudge the issue and when caught, find a scapegoat. Then become contrite, ask for a second chance and promise good behaviour. But vote for him please.

Even more serious than his extra-marital affairs and illegal construction work, was his clumsy attempt to pin the 2003 Harbour Fest fiasco on civil servant Mike Rowse. That backfired when Rowse sought a judicial review which found for him in 2008. Tang had asked for minutes of meetings to be deleted which were material to any inquiry. The government’s internal inquiry in 2004 pinned blame on Rowse and docked a month’s salary following its disciplinary process.

Tang chaired the Economic Relaunch Strategy Group set up to revive the economy after the SARS scare in 2003. The HK Government had underwritten up to HK$100million of the Harbour Fest program whose main organizer was the American Chamber of Commerce. That had to be paid out in full when the event overran its HK$1 billion budget by HK$13.3 million.

The “Accountability System” which Tung Chee-hwa the first CE put into place to justify political appointments, was nowhere to be seen as Tang and his boss Tsang evaded responsibility.

Chief executive on junkets with oligarchs
The Sun, a free tabloid of the Oriental Daily Group caught current chief executive Donald Tsang wining, dining and luxury yachting with tycoons and mobster bosses in Macau over the weekend. That forced Tsang to stage a homely interview with RTHK for primetime news channels, portraying himself as a humble civil servant on a much needed break with friends. He denied being a luxury private plane and yacht beneficiary, enjoying the high life with tycoons and gambling godfathers, as the territory’s press would have him.

The South China Morning Post front paged drawings of the three floors of Donald’s luxury complex in Shenzen across the border where he says he will retire when his term ends in June. A local architect who commented on the plans in the report, observed that a 300sf garden seems to have been added after the building plans were approved by the authorities - which in HK would be regarded an illegal structure.

Independent press a nuisance
Both Tang and Tsang would have dearly loved a situation where media know their place and are afraid of political strongmen. Where editors would self-censor or can be fired. Where publishers can be instructed to suppress information. Where newspapers can be licensed and their right to publish cancelled on edict.

There is little else to check the abuse of the oligarchs, their collaborators in government and ideologues eager to turn the territory into a police state.

Hong Kong needs to be wary of the next chief executive resurrecting the discarded Article 23 Security legislation which seeks to curb the freedoms of press, assembly, protest and distribution of information. And of legislators who will rubber stamp it.

Once such a dangerous law is allowed onto the Statutes, it will be near impossible to get rid of it.

ENDS