The Cancer of Corruption, PDC Style

U Hla Thaung has been a chairman of Kayan Township Peace and Development Council, Yangon for about 2 years. When he took the office there was 60 staff working under his management. However, within the 2 years of his rein, 22 of the staff members had resigned. A reporter Lay Nge' tried to find out why.

All the Council employees were required to attend 4 or 5 meetings a month. Anyone who missed a meeting would get a week's wages cut from his/her salary. Many of the staff only earned a basic minimum wage (Kyat 30,000) and if you miss 2 or 3 meetings in a month, you have very little money to bring home. What happened to all the penalty money? It all went straight into the pocket of Chairman Hla Aung.

The SPDC military government kindly provided each of the civil servants with K60,000 over a six month period as an extra bonus of which Chairman Hla Aung intercepted K35,000 from each worker too. Each employee was compelled to sign a receipt saying that they had received the full K60,000 . It was also an obligation for all members of staff to contribute to other maintenance costs such as cleaning, gardening, magazines and journals for offices and also clubs and unions fees, which all added up to K5100 a month each.

When there was no other way to steal any more of his staff's wages, Chairman Hla Aung came up with another novel technique. At weekends, the council employees were forced to cultivate vegetables on council land for the benefit of the Chairman himself!

When the bullying became too much to bear, the employees reported the conduct of Hla Aung to the senior officials but no action was ever taken against this blatantly corrupt Council Chairman. Over the last 2 years, 22 members of staff had decided they had had enough and left the comparatively secure jobs.

So, did the Kayan Peace and Development Council replace those 22 vacancies? And more importantly, how could the council staff carry on working under such corrupt mismanagement?

Here is the answer. What happened in Kayan simply reflects conditions in all other township PDCs across the country. Corruption, bribery and bullying is endemic in every department, every rank, all over Burma.

The ‘top of the chain’ military government, known as State Peace and Development Council has managed to pass down the mismanagement and lawlessness to the very bottom of the pile and created a massive collapse of the economy and as a result the civilians are facing with waves of starvation, crime , prostitution and despair.

How could civil servants survive, with very little salary and no law to protect them from being bullied by their bosses? The answer is simple. Just bully anyone down the line - your staff and the public. But what if the public report bullying to the senior managers? Nothing. Because they are all operate in the same way. They all have the same ugly backsides to cover up. Once you started digging up others dirt, your own is bound to be exposed as well. So, that’s how Myanmar has ended up as the poorest country in the world. The military cancer of corruption that has spread to the entire national system is ultimately fatal now that democracy, the only antidote, has finally been lost.

(after origial text in Burmese by LAY NGE)

(Nay Chi U translated the အဖိုးႏွင့္ေျမးစရိုက္တူသူခ်င္းမို႔ article posted in Kaowao Newsgroup. )