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Daw Suu's Letter from Burma #43



Mainichi Daily News, Monday, September 30, 1996

CORRUPTION LURKS BENEATH SERENE SURFACE
"Uncivil Service (1)"

Letter from Burma (No. 43) by Aung San Suu Kyi

     Visitors to Burma seldom have much notion of the complexities of 
everyday life in our country.  On the surface, things appear smooth and 
serene, and it is only those who are familiar with states ruled by 
inefficient dictatorial regimes who are able to see what is really going on.
     Take a taxi through the streets of Rangoon and observe the cars going 
by:  Almost all of these vehicles are running on black market petrol.  The 
price of petrol sold at government pumping stations is 25 kyats a gallon (15 
U.S. cents for 3.8 liters).  However, as no car is entitled to more than 
four gallons a week (some are entitled to less) of this official issue, 
people are forced to resort to additional sources of supply.  This black 
market petrol has gone up in price within the last month from 180 kyats to 
350 kyats a gallon and most of it is leaked out from government departments.
     There is more to running a car than finding a good source for petrol. 
 Car licenses have to be renewed annually.  Owners have to ask the 
Department of Road Transport Administration for a date on which their 
vehicles can be inspected and passed as roadworthy.  If you do not want to 
go through the rigmarole of making an appointment in advance, you pay a 
certain sum of money to have car checked immediately.  Then you go on to 
bribe the person assigned to check your vehicle.  Otherwise, you will be 
sent back to change the lights, or to repaint the chassis, or to replace 
some part of the engine.  People have been sent away as many as four or five 
times to undertake repairs "necessary" to make the vehicle roadworthy until 
they saw the light and produced several hundred kyats.  It is no use 
complaining or getting angry, the employees in the Department of Road 
Transport Administration have to make ends meet.
     Making ends meet is the overriding preoccupation of civil servants in 
Burma.  Their pay is ridiculously low.  A director-general, the highest 
ranking civil servant, earns an official monthly salary of 2,500 kyats, the 
equivalent of about 15 U.S. dollars.  This is not even enough to feed a 
family of four, modestly, for a week.  Consequently civil servants have to 
find ways and means of earning extra income.
     There are those who would say that Burmese people are resourceful by 
nature.  It is more likely the case that all peoples who have to live under 
a system where following the straight and narrow path too often leads to 
impecuniosity learn to be resourceful.  And in such situations, 
"resourceful" is often a euphemism for "dishonest" or "corrupt."  If you 
happen to work in the electricity department in Burma you quickly learn that 
you can supplement your income by making deals with householders who do not 
wish to pay their electricity bills in full.  And you soon find out that you 
can squeeze a regular, tidy sum from entrepreneurs of businesses, such as 
ice making, for whom an electricity cut would be catastrophic.  A lineman 
can make a supplementary income amounting to thousands of kyats a month if 
he happens to be fortunate enough to be in charge of an area where a number 
of vulnerable enterprises are situated.
     If you work in the telecommunications department too, you put your 
"resourcefulness" to quick use.  When a telephone fails to work the owner 
has to appeal for repairs.  And the most effective appeals are those a solid 
pecuniary nature.  As in the electricity department, the pay-up-or-be-cut 
tactic can assure a regular source of supplementary income.  The long 
waiting list for telephones also provides employees in the 
telecommunications department with opportunities for exercising their 
ingenuity.  They can "cooperate" in the transfer of already connected 
telephones to different owners, or they can expedite the connection of a new 
telephone.  All, of course, for a certain consideration, which could amount 
to a five-figure sum.
     The Inland Revenue Department, as might be expected, is a section of 
the civil service where employees can earn "on the side" sums many times 
larger than their regular salaries.  The best customers of this department 
are businessmen who have no inhibitions about evading taxes.  But that does 
not mean honest businessmen who wish to declare their incomes correctly are 
safe from the resourcefulness (or capacity, if you wish) of the personnel of 
the department.  Their taxable income is arbitrarily assessed at a rate far 
higher than the correct one until they decide that honesty is not, after 
all, the best policy in dealing with such matters and agree to cooperate 
with the officials concerned.
     The corruption of the civil services is not just an urban phenomenon. 
 Farmers have to sell a quota of their harvest to the government at 
stipulated prices well below the market rate.  The state employees who weigh 
the grain at rice depots manage to put aside a substantial amount of rice 
for themselves.  This rice they sell at the market price to those farmers 
who have had bad harvest, so they can produce the necessary government quota 
for which, of course, the poor farmers are only paid the state price.  It is 
no wonder that civil servants are generally viewed as public predators 
rather than public benefactors.

********

This article is one of a yearlong series of letters.  The Japanese 
translation appears in the Mainichi Shimbun the same day, or the previous 
day in some areas.