The Thai Health Promotion Foundation has fallen foul of the anti-corruption vigilantes, who claim that the Foundation has been supporting all sorts of activities that are beyond its mandate, wilfully and wantonly squandering the taxpayers’ hard-earned money.
Well, no.
For a start, the tax money on which the Foundation survives comes from ‘sin’ taxes, so if you don’t smoke or drink, none of your tax money has been wasted. Academics who have participated in the multitudinous evaluations of ThaiHealth activities have noted that these have been almost uniformly positive. Thailand has had a lot of bangs for the bucks that went into the Foundation.
So the problem does not seem to be corruption as we normally understand it, i.e. money siphoned off into private pockets and work left undone, but rather that ThaiHealth has been working beyond its mandate. Sort of doing the wrong thing, but in the right way.
Their mission is ‘to inspire, motivate, coordinate, and empower individuals and organizations in all sectors for the enhancement of health promotive capability as well as healthy society and environment’. Which is pretty broad. (So broad that Prachatai has in the past received funding for its reporting on health and environment issues.)
But this is a lot broader than its detractors seem to think right and proper. They seem to be upset that ThaiHealth has not limited itself to funding doctors, pills and hospitals. This viewpoint sees healthcare as something you do only after things have gone wrong.
This would be a pretty stupid idea if you applied it to something as mundane as running a car. It would mean never checking your oil or your tyre pressure, and only taking action when your engine seizes or your tyres go flat. As a prescription for healthcare it would be disastrous and fly in the face of what everyone with a brain, inside and outside the medical profession, thinks is the sensible way to maintain a ‘healthy society and environment’.
Nobody wants a society riddled with corruption (well, except maybe the 64% who, according to an ABAC poll in 2011, thought corruption was OK if they profited from it). But anti-corruption movements for some reason tend to attract small-minded authoritarians focussed on one single fear: that someone somewhere is getting away with something. And they will do anything to stop it, no matter how many babies get thrown out with the bathwater.
Not so much the rabid right as the rabid righteous.
Former judge, constitution drafter and now anti-corruption commissioner Wicha ‘We all know elections are evil’ Mahakhun, for example, holds that corruption is worse than terrorism. Try saying that in any place run by ISIS.
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Thailand as 85th out of 175 countries worldwide, a ranking shared with the Philippines. The anti-corruptionists throw up their hands in horror and a Privy Councillor sends a letter to the latest team of constitution drafters demanding action.
No matter that this score puts Thailand joint 3rd cleanest in ASEAN behind squeaky Singapore and Malaysia (whose score may sink after the ‘how did that $700 million get into my bank account’ saga) and well ahead of Indonesia (107th), Vietnam (119th), Lao (145th) and Cambodia and Myanmar (equal 156th) (Brunei wasn’t scored). Clear room for improvement but not the end of civilization as we know it.
But the giveaway is the selectivity of the indignation. The anti-corruption crusaders have been suspiciously quiet about things like magic wand bomb detectors and large-than-life figures in Hua Hin.
One suspects that the guns were trained on ThaiHealth not because they went beyond their mandate, because they were too serious about fulfilling it. Especially that word ‘empower’, one which is not much heard from the government these days.
But if they want to look at another organization that seems to have strayed beyond its proper remit, then there is one that has got into all manner of things, from giving haircuts to running jails for civilians, and from writing patriotic songs to setting school curricula. In fact they seem to act as if they are running the entire country.
If they know who I mean.
About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).
