Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Uncivil Service (1)

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.