(Letter) – In reference to the paper by Dr. U. Myint ‘Reducing Poverty in Myanmar: the Way Forward’:
This is the most useless and counterproductive paper I ever read about poverty reduction in my whole career, as a diplomat, ambassador and mostly as an expert in development politics. Thirty-three paragraphs alone about how and why to define poverty is the most incredible insult to poor people I ever studied. Fortunately, I am not a Burmese, [but] if I was, I would be extremely angry about the way my tax money is used for producing totally unnecessary papers– Myanmar [Burma] and expert's archives are full of.
Any experienced working group would do this job in one hour, since Myanmar does not need any more papers produced by sophisticated authors, but a bundle of bold legal and organizational measures. The country and its economic situation has been studied by so many experts for so long that redoing it again is a shame and insult to all those experts outside and inside the country.
Just forget about academic exercises like this one. The author, for sure, is full of good will, but for the government it is an excuse for not taking action. There is enough expertise and knowledge in the country to reduce poverty at a fast pace, no need for this type of self satisfaction. It has the same value as Western sanctions–nearly none, except for the authors.
Poverty reduction in Myanmar is (basically) more than simple: introduce and practice a state of law, apply existing laws correctly, organize the banking system in a way people can use the kyat like real money and not like black market merchandise, including Mickey Mouse money like the FEC (which even retired minister General Abel promised to drop in 2001), reduce the incredibly high and abusive spread of tea money for everything and service in the country, make the government budget transparent and use it to build up education, health, and a working (technically) and efficient government, including infrastructure and services for the country.
There is no academic paper explaining why the main railway station in Yangon is such a dirty, disorganized, chaotic and extremely poor place. The simple answer: there is nobody responsible for cleaning it properly, organizing it in a professional way, and getting the poor people working there happy enough to do a better job. They need a reasonable salary, proper training and superiors who motivate them to do their work properly.
These are the basics to run a railway station and to run a whole country. No new government can solve those problems fast; they have to start by looking for the bottleneck priorities. And without creating jobs for the people at the same time there is no need to define ‘poverty’. Having no job or having a very poorly paid job results in poverty, that's all. And another bottleneck: if the government budget is not sufficient (and an excuse for not creating jobs), how can it be that mega projects, pipelines and dams are starting everywhere and private construction booms, filling selective pockets only?
Not my business to answer; diplomats don't interfere. Today, I was just utterly shocked by reading the above paper and I strongly suggest to government and non-government ‘experts’ to stop wasting time with unnecessary paper production–such papers work like the inefficient sanctions and will not help at all to reduce poverty.
Horst Rudolf
