The feudal solution

 23 jan 2006

Thaksin has made the defeat of poverty one of his major goals. On the stump at the last election, he promised ‘I will fix the economy by fixing the problem of poverty. Good brothers and sisters, four years ahead, there will be no poor people. Won’t that be neat?’

During last week’s show, an awful thought flashed through Chang Noi’s mind. There is probably only person in Thailand who is more popular and entertaining than the prime minister. That’s Mum Jokmok, the omnipresent television host, actor, film-maker and clown. Had Thaksin decided to challenge Mum for the top spot on Mum’s home ground of comedy? The sight of several of the most powerful people in the realm standing in a hardscrabble village collectively advising some shattered villager how to raise her annual income by an amount they might spend on lunch hovers dangerously between pathos and the driest humour imaginable. Was it coincidence, or a refined sense of irony, that this show was staged in a place whose name translates as “It might work”?

But this deserves to be taken seriously. There is already talk of the At Samat model or the At Samat solution. Now the show is over, we need to define this model, and understand how it is going to work.

Last week proves that if the prime minister spends a working week in a single amphoe, it can change the lives of many of that amphoe’s families. Even before he arrived, the amphoe was transformed by officials desperate to look busy. The caravan moved through the amphoe scattering largesse which will undoubtedly make a difference. The local people’s enthusiastic welcome was genuine. They got something out of it.

Thailand has 876 amphoe. Let’s assume that around half of these need to be submitted to this model, and that the prime minister takes a couple of weeks holiday a year. It will take about nine years to apply the model, assuming the prime minister devotes his full time to the task. That’s too late for his own deadline for kissing poverty goodbye, which is now down to three years. Perhaps we need to get round this by thinking outside the box, as he so often urges. One way to cut down the time would be to have lots more prime ministers. But then he also had two or three other ministers and over a dozen senior bureaucrats with him at all times. These will have to be multiplied too.

Thaksin argues that the model is replicable without his presence, and that the show was an extended practical class for local officials. It’s hard to imagine the average district official conjuring up instant land deeds, over-ruling the credit practice of various official loan agencies, mandating government expenditures on a whim, or handing out thousand-baht notes with no more chagrin than you or I feel when we drop a one-baht coin on a crowded bus. Still, let’s grant that some of the model is replicable. What is the method behind the model which will make poverty history?

The first part of the model seems to be the process. A powerful figure strides around handing out solutions in the form of advice or goodies. Watching the villagers, Chang Noi was first reminded of helpless children. The exercise books probably prompted this comparison. Later, images of the queues of waiting hopefuls recalled the scenes of supplicants in wat murals. The press dubbed the prime minister as Santa Claus. For a time Thaksin referred to himself as a doctor treating the patients of poverty with various kinds of medicine.

But what the scenes from At Samat most strikingly recalled was the behaviour of an old feudal lord, striding among the serfs, handing out baubles.

The next part of the model lies in the advice which the prime minister handed out to many of the supplicants. Basically, he told them they were not trying hard enough. It was their own fault they were poor. They needed to be more entrepreneurial. They should make something new and sell it somewhere else. In some cases, he offered loans and training that could help them, but mostly he was simply battering them to try harder.

The final part of the model is the hand-outs. Mostly these were in the form of land deeds or loan promises. If there were to be one lasting effect of this exercise, it might be some progress on the long-standing problem of lack of land titles. But the supplicants outside this amphoe should perhaps not hold their breath in anticipation. The last five or six governments have vowed to solve this issue, and the land administration agencies have defeated every one of them.

Striking was the number of times that the prime minister reached for his own wallet as the source of the solution. Certainly, this shows his generosity, and these personal gifts may be among the most tangible and effective solutions from the whole week. But these gifts also hint at the limitations of this model. In too many cases, there was no other solution except charity.

Most experts on poverty eradication in the world today agree on the critical importance of rights and empowerment. People need tools to overcome the host of disadvantages and disabilities which combine to make them poor. The At Samat model offers a counter-thesis to this view. In this model, poverty eradication depends on the exercise of power by somebody with lots of it. The best is a prime minister with a retinue of people holding executive power, and with a bulging pocket. A poor substitute, but a more practical and replicable version of the model, is a paternal local official.

The At Samat model reaches back to an age before the trend towards participation, decentralisation, rights, and local activism over the previous two decades. In many ways it reaches back beyond the era of democracy and perhaps even the Enlightenment. The At Samat model is the feudal solution.