A few days ago, I asked readers to provide a hypothetical advice to the Cambodian government of what they will do if they become a Cambodian government advisor for one day. Many readers have commented and I selected six articles to publish, three are published below and three are published here. Please enjoy reading them.
By KhmerAngkor
With hundreds of “advisors” at his disposal, I don’t think Hun Sen needs any more advisors. However, with what I am going to say below, I don’t think Mr. Hun Sen would want me to be his advisor either.
Having said that, say hypothetically that if I am appointed as a Cambodian government advisor for one day, I shall try my best to advise him of what I think is best.
First, I will attempt to answer all the issues raised in Khmerization’s question one by one.
The Cambodian leaders, especially Prime Minister Hun Sen, must have the political will in carrying out reforms, in particular institutional reforms. Judicial reforms should be among one of the top priorities. In these reforms, the judiciary must be made independent and to make the judiciary independent, all the judges must be free of political pressures and influences. And therefore, all the judges must be appointed by the king, not the prime minister or any politicians. Independent judiciary will lead to a reduction in a culture of impunity as independent judges are not under political pressures to convict or exonerate criminals like in the case of Chhouk Bandith, where a deputy PM (Men Sam An) is using her political powers and her patronizing relationship with the PM (Hun Sen), to protect a criminal (Chhouk Bandith).
Other institutional reforms, such as the reforms of the police, the army and the bureaucracy must be instigated. Under these reforms, the chiefs of the police and the army must be made neutral through the nominations and appointments by the king. Political reforms shall be extremely important. Cambodia must have no more than one deputy prime minister. Currently Cambodia has no less than 10 deputy prime ministers. Also in each ministry, there must only be one minister and one deputy minister. Currently, Cambodia has many deputy ministers (secretaries of state and under-secretaries of state) in each ministry. This is a waste of state money, but importantly, it creates an oligarchy and autocracy.
Educational reforms are also a top priority, in particular in regard to decent wages. Paying the teachers decent and higher wages will reduce corruption in the classrooms. Currently, many teachers, due to unsustainable wages, have coerced students to attend tuition classes taught by them. This is a form of corruption because those who refused to attend, or have no money to attend the tuition classes run by the teachers, are penalized in the exam marks. The government must have zero tolerance of corruption. Currently, there is a high tolerance of corruption as corruption is rampant and chronic, practiced from the highest to the lowest echelon of government. The government must set up educational reform committee to reform, upgrade and improve the curriculum every year.
Health reforms must also be on the top of the government’s priority. I am convinced that if Cambodia can cut corruption significantly, Cambodia is able to provide health care free of charge, or with minimum costs, to poor patients. Rich Cambodians have to pay high taxes and a health levy, or medical charge contribution, to the government in order for the government to use these generous contributions to help the poor. Currently, the poor pay taxes, while the rich don’t pay any taxes, they evade tax or pay very little. To cut corruption within the health system, the authority must be tough with doctors, nurses and hospital administrators who extorted money from patients. At the moment, many doctors and nurses extort money from patients and left them to die if they don’t have the money to pay. In the West, health professionals are taught to observe medical ethics strictly, meaning that patients’ life are more important than anything else- save the patients first. Money is secondary. But in Cambodia, money comes first and they don’t care if patients die.
Corruption reduction
All financial transactions must be done electronically through bank accounts or bank/personal checks so that the authority can trace the origins of the money- avoiding money laundering and embezzlement as well as corruption. Public or civil servants, like teachers, police, army and politicians as well as business transactions, such as property sales transactions and trade transactions, must be done through bank transactions. These ways, everything is transparent and the teachers, the police and the army will never lose their salary as what has happened in the past and now.
The bureaucracy must be substantially reformed. Public and civil servants appointments must be based on qualifications and merits and experiences. All vacancies in the government ministries must be advertised and independent selection committee appointed to oversee the selection process to fill the vacancies. Hun Sen’s “advisors” must be reduced to a reasonable size, say, maybe 20 advisors only. Currently, he has between 500-1000 “advisors”. The reforms of the bureaucracy should involve the cutting down of the number of bureaucrats substantially as well as ghost civil servants.
Border issues
The government must send the troops out from city barracks, such as from Hun Sen’s compound and send them to border areas so as to boost troops on the border to oversee and guards important border points- with Vietnam or Thailand.
When I said we should send troops to the border, I don't mean send them to stop smugglers. I mean send them out of Hun Sen's compound, out of the city barracks to the battlefields/border areas which needed protections against encroachments from Thailand or Vietnam. Currently, thousands of troops are based in the cities and towns and at Hun Sen's compound to protect his powers. We should send the troops out to the areas which needed protections, such as the border areas. This does not mean less troops on the borders. On the contrary, it means more troops on the borders and less troops in the cities and towns and Hun Sen's compound as those troops in the cities did nothing but to protect Hun Sen's power only. Worse, these troops, most of the time, got out of their barracks in the cities to rob and kill the people.
The Preah Vihear case
Cambodia should never hold any bilateral talks with Thailand regarding Preah Vihear case while the case is in the hand of the International Court of Justice ICJ). Cambodia should never agree to any re-adjustments of the demilitarized zone as proposed by Thailand and should leave the issue to the ICJ. In term of the Thai insistence of a joint management of Preah Vihear temple, Cambodia must be firm and reject outright this kind of proposal.
Border issues with Vietnam
Cambodia should not make any agreements with Vietnam using the 1985 and 2005 treaties as they are illegal under international laws because they were made when Cambodia was under Vietnam’s occupation. Any agreements and border demarcations with Vietnam must be based on treaties or maps kept at the UN in 1965. The agreements of exchanging lands with Vietnam signed a few days ago are premonitions that Cambodia is on the way to losing large chunks of territory to Vietnam.
Trades with neighbors
Cambodia had suffered huge trade deficits every year for many decades and as such Cambodia should create incentives for foreign investments rather than depends on imports. Currently, Cambodia imports almost everything, from garden vegetable to heavy machinery. To reduce dependencies on imports, Cambodia must impose higher taxes on imports of many products and manufacturing products, such as steel, cement or building material. On the contrary, we should provide incentives such as lower taxes or no tax at all for a certain period of time for those investors who are willing to invest in such manufacturing industries in Cambodia.
Border trades are the same thing. Our neighbors, especially Thailand, had on many occasions, tried to stifle Cambodia’s exports of produce such as corns, cassava, vegetable and rice by implementing its protectionist policies to supports its farmers. However, Cambodia had never retaliated and had allowed Thai produce and products to flow freely to Cambodia without any control. As such, Cambodia suffered huge trade deficits every year.
Some people asserted that the imposition of higher taxes will cause a price hike on imported products/produce that will further cause hardship to poor Khmer. This assertion is logical if we don't have our own products to compete with the imported products. Regrettably, my assertion is based on the influx of cheap foreign-imported products or produce (vegetable etc) to Cambodia which have killed off businesses of local Cambodian producers. The obvious example is the free influx of cheap produce from Vietnam and Thailand, such as live pigs, live chickens, lemongrass, lemon/lime, chilli, corns, cabbage, eggplants and even morning glory (trakuon) etc, etc. Now, because of these cheap imports, many Cambodian farmers, gardeners, pig and chicken farmers have gone bankrupt because they can't compete against these cheap produce. If the government can impose higher taxes on these imported produce, it will raise the price of these imported produce to the level of the price of local Cambodian produce or higher and as such our local produce/producers can compete with them on an equal footing. This is a way to protect our farmers against cheap produce from foreign countries. Currently, these cheap produce flow freely to Cambodia through the borders because the corrupt border guards receive bribe from the importers/smugglers who often evade taxes.
In term of steel and cement products, the higher prices won't affect the poor anyway because these products are used to build bridges, casino, hotels, office buildings and so on. If we impose higher taxes for imports of these goods and provide a very good incentives, like lower taxes or no tax for a period of time, for foreign investors in Cambodia, if they set up steel and cement factories Cambodia rather than import these products. With these incentives, many steel and cement companies and other businesses would rather set up factories in Cambodia than importing the products because they get the incentives and because it is cheaper to produce in Cambodia than importing them from overseas. These ways it provides jobs to Cambodians and revenue to the government in the long run.
Land issues
Land titles should be issued to all the people who can prove that they occupied the lands through their ancestral inheritance and provide proper compensation to those evicted. Any companies that failed to observe this policy will have their concessions taken off or withdrawn and/or penalized severely. Currently, the government has a policy of robbing from the poor to give to the rich- evicting people from their lands without proper compensation in order to take these lands to give to the rich. Such policy, not only that it cannot alleviate poverty, but it would speed up the pace of poverty instead.
This advice means nothing to Mr. Hun Sen, but I still it anyway.
May Buddha bless Cambodia.
***************************************
Anonymous said...
As what I have thought all along, most of the bloggers here have no clue on how to solve the problems!!
They are only good at pointing fingers and blaming others on the issue.
Here are my ideas:
1. Cleaning up and improving on corruption.
2. Improving education system by increasing teachers’ salary and hold them accountable for the results and their performances.
3. Promoting moral conduct based on Buddhist principles.
4. Promoting Khmer literature around the region (eg for Khmer Krom in Vietnam and Khmer Surin in Thailand).
****************************************
Anonymous said...
To me, first the government has to create jobs for the people.
Second, provide a stable salary to all kinds of employees, make sure they have enough salary to cover their basic needs.
Third, fire any employees who violate the laws or regular rules of the companies or government’s rule. This way could change the behaviors of employees or at least it will make sure that all employees to do their jobs properly. But we have to warn the employees first, second and third so as to give them the chance to change their behaviors. The behaviors which I referred in here mean corruption. This is how we maintain the strength of nation. After that everyone else will follow.
To have a strong nation first we have to start to change the behavior of our government and their families, second for the rich people. For example, we have to put the kids of the top government officials in jail or kill them if they are against the laws or they have killed poor people without any reason or any things that they do to harm other people’s life which is against the law.
And this law also need to be applied with the rich kids too because they think no one can do anything to them if their parents have money and power. If our government can do this, I think everything will really be easy to manage.
By KhmerAngkor
With hundreds of “advisors” at his disposal, I don’t think Hun Sen needs any more advisors. However, with what I am going to say below, I don’t think Mr. Hun Sen would want me to be his advisor either.
Having said that, say hypothetically that if I am appointed as a Cambodian government advisor for one day, I shall try my best to advise him of what I think is best.
First, I will attempt to answer all the issues raised in Khmerization’s question one by one.
The Cambodian leaders, especially Prime Minister Hun Sen, must have the political will in carrying out reforms, in particular institutional reforms. Judicial reforms should be among one of the top priorities. In these reforms, the judiciary must be made independent and to make the judiciary independent, all the judges must be free of political pressures and influences. And therefore, all the judges must be appointed by the king, not the prime minister or any politicians. Independent judiciary will lead to a reduction in a culture of impunity as independent judges are not under political pressures to convict or exonerate criminals like in the case of Chhouk Bandith, where a deputy PM (Men Sam An) is using her political powers and her patronizing relationship with the PM (Hun Sen), to protect a criminal (Chhouk Bandith).
Other institutional reforms, such as the reforms of the police, the army and the bureaucracy must be instigated. Under these reforms, the chiefs of the police and the army must be made neutral through the nominations and appointments by the king. Political reforms shall be extremely important. Cambodia must have no more than one deputy prime minister. Currently Cambodia has no less than 10 deputy prime ministers. Also in each ministry, there must only be one minister and one deputy minister. Currently, Cambodia has many deputy ministers (secretaries of state and under-secretaries of state) in each ministry. This is a waste of state money, but importantly, it creates an oligarchy and autocracy.
Educational reforms are also a top priority, in particular in regard to decent wages. Paying the teachers decent and higher wages will reduce corruption in the classrooms. Currently, many teachers, due to unsustainable wages, have coerced students to attend tuition classes taught by them. This is a form of corruption because those who refused to attend, or have no money to attend the tuition classes run by the teachers, are penalized in the exam marks. The government must have zero tolerance of corruption. Currently, there is a high tolerance of corruption as corruption is rampant and chronic, practiced from the highest to the lowest echelon of government. The government must set up educational reform committee to reform, upgrade and improve the curriculum every year.
Health reforms must also be on the top of the government’s priority. I am convinced that if Cambodia can cut corruption significantly, Cambodia is able to provide health care free of charge, or with minimum costs, to poor patients. Rich Cambodians have to pay high taxes and a health levy, or medical charge contribution, to the government in order for the government to use these generous contributions to help the poor. Currently, the poor pay taxes, while the rich don’t pay any taxes, they evade tax or pay very little. To cut corruption within the health system, the authority must be tough with doctors, nurses and hospital administrators who extorted money from patients. At the moment, many doctors and nurses extort money from patients and left them to die if they don’t have the money to pay. In the West, health professionals are taught to observe medical ethics strictly, meaning that patients’ life are more important than anything else- save the patients first. Money is secondary. But in Cambodia, money comes first and they don’t care if patients die.
Corruption reduction
All financial transactions must be done electronically through bank accounts or bank/personal checks so that the authority can trace the origins of the money- avoiding money laundering and embezzlement as well as corruption. Public or civil servants, like teachers, police, army and politicians as well as business transactions, such as property sales transactions and trade transactions, must be done through bank transactions. These ways, everything is transparent and the teachers, the police and the army will never lose their salary as what has happened in the past and now.
The bureaucracy must be substantially reformed. Public and civil servants appointments must be based on qualifications and merits and experiences. All vacancies in the government ministries must be advertised and independent selection committee appointed to oversee the selection process to fill the vacancies. Hun Sen’s “advisors” must be reduced to a reasonable size, say, maybe 20 advisors only. Currently, he has between 500-1000 “advisors”. The reforms of the bureaucracy should involve the cutting down of the number of bureaucrats substantially as well as ghost civil servants.
Border issues
The government must send the troops out from city barracks, such as from Hun Sen’s compound and send them to border areas so as to boost troops on the border to oversee and guards important border points- with Vietnam or Thailand.
When I said we should send troops to the border, I don't mean send them to stop smugglers. I mean send them out of Hun Sen's compound, out of the city barracks to the battlefields/border areas which needed protections against encroachments from Thailand or Vietnam. Currently, thousands of troops are based in the cities and towns and at Hun Sen's compound to protect his powers. We should send the troops out to the areas which needed protections, such as the border areas. This does not mean less troops on the borders. On the contrary, it means more troops on the borders and less troops in the cities and towns and Hun Sen's compound as those troops in the cities did nothing but to protect Hun Sen's power only. Worse, these troops, most of the time, got out of their barracks in the cities to rob and kill the people.
The Preah Vihear case
Cambodia should never hold any bilateral talks with Thailand regarding Preah Vihear case while the case is in the hand of the International Court of Justice ICJ). Cambodia should never agree to any re-adjustments of the demilitarized zone as proposed by Thailand and should leave the issue to the ICJ. In term of the Thai insistence of a joint management of Preah Vihear temple, Cambodia must be firm and reject outright this kind of proposal.
Border issues with Vietnam
Cambodia should not make any agreements with Vietnam using the 1985 and 2005 treaties as they are illegal under international laws because they were made when Cambodia was under Vietnam’s occupation. Any agreements and border demarcations with Vietnam must be based on treaties or maps kept at the UN in 1965. The agreements of exchanging lands with Vietnam signed a few days ago are premonitions that Cambodia is on the way to losing large chunks of territory to Vietnam.
Trades with neighbors
Cambodia had suffered huge trade deficits every year for many decades and as such Cambodia should create incentives for foreign investments rather than depends on imports. Currently, Cambodia imports almost everything, from garden vegetable to heavy machinery. To reduce dependencies on imports, Cambodia must impose higher taxes on imports of many products and manufacturing products, such as steel, cement or building material. On the contrary, we should provide incentives such as lower taxes or no tax at all for a certain period of time for those investors who are willing to invest in such manufacturing industries in Cambodia.
Border trades are the same thing. Our neighbors, especially Thailand, had on many occasions, tried to stifle Cambodia’s exports of produce such as corns, cassava, vegetable and rice by implementing its protectionist policies to supports its farmers. However, Cambodia had never retaliated and had allowed Thai produce and products to flow freely to Cambodia without any control. As such, Cambodia suffered huge trade deficits every year.
Some people asserted that the imposition of higher taxes will cause a price hike on imported products/produce that will further cause hardship to poor Khmer. This assertion is logical if we don't have our own products to compete with the imported products. Regrettably, my assertion is based on the influx of cheap foreign-imported products or produce (vegetable etc) to Cambodia which have killed off businesses of local Cambodian producers. The obvious example is the free influx of cheap produce from Vietnam and Thailand, such as live pigs, live chickens, lemongrass, lemon/lime, chilli, corns, cabbage, eggplants and even morning glory (trakuon) etc, etc. Now, because of these cheap imports, many Cambodian farmers, gardeners, pig and chicken farmers have gone bankrupt because they can't compete against these cheap produce. If the government can impose higher taxes on these imported produce, it will raise the price of these imported produce to the level of the price of local Cambodian produce or higher and as such our local produce/producers can compete with them on an equal footing. This is a way to protect our farmers against cheap produce from foreign countries. Currently, these cheap produce flow freely to Cambodia through the borders because the corrupt border guards receive bribe from the importers/smugglers who often evade taxes.
In term of steel and cement products, the higher prices won't affect the poor anyway because these products are used to build bridges, casino, hotels, office buildings and so on. If we impose higher taxes for imports of these goods and provide a very good incentives, like lower taxes or no tax for a period of time, for foreign investors in Cambodia, if they set up steel and cement factories Cambodia rather than import these products. With these incentives, many steel and cement companies and other businesses would rather set up factories in Cambodia than importing the products because they get the incentives and because it is cheaper to produce in Cambodia than importing them from overseas. These ways it provides jobs to Cambodians and revenue to the government in the long run.
Land issues
Land titles should be issued to all the people who can prove that they occupied the lands through their ancestral inheritance and provide proper compensation to those evicted. Any companies that failed to observe this policy will have their concessions taken off or withdrawn and/or penalized severely. Currently, the government has a policy of robbing from the poor to give to the rich- evicting people from their lands without proper compensation in order to take these lands to give to the rich. Such policy, not only that it cannot alleviate poverty, but it would speed up the pace of poverty instead.
This advice means nothing to Mr. Hun Sen, but I still it anyway.
May Buddha bless Cambodia.
***************************************
Anonymous said...
As what I have thought all along, most of the bloggers here have no clue on how to solve the problems!!
They are only good at pointing fingers and blaming others on the issue.
Here are my ideas:
1. Cleaning up and improving on corruption.
2. Improving education system by increasing teachers’ salary and hold them accountable for the results and their performances.
3. Promoting moral conduct based on Buddhist principles.
4. Promoting Khmer literature around the region (eg for Khmer Krom in Vietnam and Khmer Surin in Thailand).
****************************************
Anonymous said...
To me, first the government has to create jobs for the people.
Second, provide a stable salary to all kinds of employees, make sure they have enough salary to cover their basic needs.
Third, fire any employees who violate the laws or regular rules of the companies or government’s rule. This way could change the behaviors of employees or at least it will make sure that all employees to do their jobs properly. But we have to warn the employees first, second and third so as to give them the chance to change their behaviors. The behaviors which I referred in here mean corruption. This is how we maintain the strength of nation. After that everyone else will follow.
To have a strong nation first we have to start to change the behavior of our government and their families, second for the rich people. For example, we have to put the kids of the top government officials in jail or kill them if they are against the laws or they have killed poor people without any reason or any things that they do to harm other people’s life which is against the law.
And this law also need to be applied with the rich kids too because they think no one can do anything to them if their parents have money and power. If our government can do this, I think everything will really be easy to manage.
3 comments:
I love the idea of reducing Hun Sen's advisors from 1000 to 20. In the West, many leaders don't have more than 20 advisors and they are more busy than Hun sen.
The other one is to send troops out of Hun Sen's compound. Hun Sen has a large private army. This is illegal because he uses national resources to protect his family. In the West, the Secret Service are controlled by the state and whenever the U.S president goes anywhere, he only needs about 10 secret service agents to protect him. Hun sen goes anywhere, he must have at least 400 troops to protect him. This is waste of public money.
Hun Sen is a coward and scared of dying. At the public speech, he also said, He will give out a free warehouse of weapons, if anyone dares to remove him.
Yet, he himself has over 5000 bodyguards, bullet proof cars, bombs squads, and underground tunnels.
Dear Khmers,
The best advice Hun Sen should get:
Once the Viet Masters achieve their gaol ( s ),
they will put Hun Sen to sleep forever !
So Mr. Hun Sen, change the course.
Us Khmers will help you.
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