COMMENTARY
Billions spent and very little to show
- Published: 23/10/2009 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: News
Splurge till you drop. Ask and you won't get. Nearly a century after King Chulalongkorn's departure, which is being commemorated nationwide today, our kingdom has been effectively split into two countries.
The divide goes deeper than the confrontations between the Democrats versus Puea Thai, Prem versus Chavalit/ Thaksin, yellow versus red, or even between Siam and Patani..
Here I am referring to a Thai-land-of-wastefulness, and on the other hand folks have to fight tooth and nail for years before they receive a single satang of compensation from the powers that be. And even then they may still be accused of being too greedy.
Two developments this week are more of the same national phenomenon. On Monday, Matichon daily reported how a disciplinary inquiry was recently concluded at the Science and Technology Ministry. Minister Khunying Kalaya Sophonpanich said some senior bureaucrats were found guilty of paying over two billion baht to a consultant and a contractor tasked with building a nuclear research centre that never was. The multi-billion-baht turnkey project, under the then Office of Atomic Energy for Peace (OAEP), was supposed to house a 10-megawatt reactor and the country's largest dumpsite for radioactive waste. Besides rows of buildings, now the headquarters of the OAEP's offshoot the Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology, the state-of-the-art reactor never materialised in Ongkharak, Nakhon Nayok.
Intriguingly, the investigation team only reported on the lesser portion, of about 200 million baht, that the OAEP had granted to Electrowatt Engineering Ltd (EWE). They kept mum on how to address the whopping payment of another 1,800 million baht to US-based General Atomics (GA). Of course, there is no mention about uncovering the irregularities and feasibility of the whole project in the first place.
Then on Wednesday, we learned of the latest plight of the 12 cobalt-radiation victims. Five years ago, the Civil Court ordered Kamol Sukosol Electric Co Ltd to pay those who had lost their limbs or relatives the sum of 640,276 baht (which would mean slightly more than 50,000 baht per person). Both parties appealed - the plaintiffs asked for 12 million baht, and the company did not want to pay at all. And now the Appeals Court has decided to stand by the lower court's verdict, saying the designated compensation was already "sufficient".
In effect, over a decade after the incident took place, the only compensation the dozen had got was 5.2 million baht in total from the OAEP (found guilty of negligence by the Administrative Court in 2002).
Both the Ongkharak project and the cobalt victims thus merely confirm the trend of two Thailands. On the one hand, we see a growing number of monuments to profligacy - the scandal-plagued waste water treatment plant at Klong Dan, the ever-hopeless Hopewell railway project, the expensive but ineffectual Pak Moon dam, to name a few. Then there are the unbelievably overpriced supplies, the billions of baht paid to contractors who rarely delivered but still got paid, and to numerous consultants to study, say, the Kaeng Sua Ten dam and other mega projects relentlessly pushed by government after government. Imagine how the money we could have saved would have been sufficient to cover free education for 15 years for every kid, plus real healthcare services and not the half-baked system we have now.
But no, we have to scrimp and save. And who else should bear it if not ordinary citizens? Sometimes we can bargain the price tag down. Like the villagers in Ayutthaya, who get 414 baht per rai that has been inundated in order to keep Bangkok dry during the rainy season. Or drag out the compensation process for as long as possible until these people yield to any pittance thrown their way.
Sometimes we might not even have to pay them at all. Just ask the people at Map Ta Phut. Have they ever been paid any funds by the Board of Investment through all these years?
- Vasana Chinvarakorn is a senior writer for Outlook, Bangkok Post.
About the author
- Writer: Vasana Chinvarakorn
- Position: Feature Writer
