Kapok: NIMBY, Macao style

Back in November 2010, Chief Executive Chui Sai On’s intent was clear and the direction chosen unhindered: “Regarding the development of tourism products, after heeding public opinion, and conducting analyses and assessments, the Government proposes an underground mall at Sai Van Lake Square as a trial location for developing a souvenir shopping complex and night market. This will showcase Macao cuisine and delicacies, and will become an integrated tourism project, after upgrading the relevant facilities through an open bidding process.” Of course, not everything went as planned.
First, the initial consultation for the project of a Sai Van lake permanent night market only occurred in November 2011. In the meantime, due processes for “public consultations”, the new fad in benevolent and opinion-led governance in lieu of democratic procedures, had changed: one round of public consultation would not be enough anymore, and a second round taking into account the lessons learnt from the first one would have to be organized. In that particular case, we were lucky rules had changed and government agencies had been slow in putting Mr Chui’s candid words into practice. The first public consultation was not only a disaster, but also marred by irregularities and opacity. Depending on who was doing the counting, opinions gathered ranged from a few dozen up to a maximum of 180, and only 8 such opinions had disapproved of the plan… But these results, without further comments, were only made public in October 2012(!), whereas regulations for public consultations state that it should take no more than 180 days after completion of the process.
Dissent and protest — too bad for consensus building — were soon to be heard: residents from the area started petitioning; concerned groups dealing with environmental and livelihood issues went marching and cycling around the lake, and even business interests made it clear as early as November 2012 that the whole project was plain wrong, both in intent and sustainability. Interestingly enough, David Chow Kam Fai, husband of legislator Melinda Chan Mei Yi and Macau Legend Development chief executive, expressed in a long op-ed published in the very conservative Macau Daily News his doubts about the “free market” side of the “open bidding process” — being the CEO of Fisherman’s Wharf Investment Ltd. might have made Mr. Chow pretty perceptive of the issue lying beneath less than fair competition. In reality, apart from the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau that had been entrusted with the project, only one public figure openly continued to support the scheme: legislator Chan Chak Mo. Incidentally representing the cultural sector in the Assembly, but mostly his own interests as the executive director of restaurant operator Future Bright Holdings Ltd, Mo nonetheless finds time to be the president of the Association of Macao Restaurant Merchants, the main organizer of the yearly Food Festival since 2001 precisely set on the banks of the… Sai Van lake!
So, a second consultation round was organized from December 2012 to March 2013. The press had already echoed vociferous sessions held with the general public, and even raucous exchanges with associations convened in closed-door meetings, including the usually pro-government General Union of the Neighborhood Associations and the Federation of Trade Unions that had expressed either a resolute opposition or suggested a relocation and a downsizing of the whole plan. But the official results of that consultation that came out on September 19 surpassed all expectations. More than 1,100 opinions were collected and an additional survey was conducted over the phone by the University of Macao with 1,529 respondents to envision what kind of facilities could be developed around the lake: overall, the initial night market project freely inspired by Clark Quay in Singapore and Tamsui night market in northern Taiwan was rejected by more than 70% of the population, and if a good 60% of the people surveyed over the phone want more facilities, they believe these should be more in line with green paths and walking/jogging tracks. From the “positioning”, the project itself to the localization, all three were heavily rejected: could this be the start of a “Not-In-My-Backyard” movement, with Macanese characteristics?

Published in Macau Daily Times, September 27th 2013

Kapok: The Art of Swallowing

Where on the planet can you concurrently have a vivid discussion on several controversial points of a much-needed and yet much-delayed Land Law and Urban Planning Law on the one hand, and a very contentious consultation process on a half-baked new plan to develop one of the most iconic parts of Macao next to the Macao tower on the other hand? How can one not see that there is a blatant contradiction in praising boisterously albeit against one’s own nature the many virtues of due processes and transparency, and at the same time trying to force-feed the public with a much-opposed and ill-designed plan? Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, said it himself: “The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed!” There is no lie here, just mere concealment, so Macao’s modern interpretation of it is rather “the bigger the pill, the easier it will be to swallow!”
One can feel that we are in an election year when the total number of votes for the Urban Planning Law only reached 19 “in favor” (out of a theoretical total of 29) during the first plenary reading on February 4th. Even a figure like Kwan Tsui Hang from the Macao Federation of Trade Unions, a traditional government-leaning vote-bank, decided to abstain on the grounds that “too many rules and mechanisms will be defined by administrative regulations, including the master plan”, thus excluding any oversight from the Legislature, the sole body with some members returned through universal suffrage, and forsaking too much discretionary power to the government, supposedly in the overall and superior interest of the community. The same goes for the Land Law, for which many criticisms were heard because the secretary for public works had a hard time explaining why a law would insist so much on the exceptions to open-bidding and public tendering when the government would feel that it was in the public interest; isn’t this law precisely designed to avoid the lack of transparency that used to prevail when public tendering was the exception rather than the rule? Does anybody remember that this state of affairs was quite instrumental in securing Mr Lo’s predecessor a spot in the Coloane prison for an extended lease of close to 30 years?
Now, turning back to the Sai Van lake night-market project, supposedly aimed at beefing up tourism in Macao while preserving traditional culinary delights and promoting local (if not locally-made…) memorabilia; what is wrong with governmental agencies, led by the IACM? In just five arguments delineated in a long column published in the Macao Daily News, the communist-backed Chinese daily with the widest circulation, former legislator David Chow Kam Fai hit the nail on the head in late November: the plan is against the principles of “free market.” The first stage of consultation is meaningless (only 63 opinions gathered) and results were never properly divulged; this will destroy irremediably a unique and peaceful natural scenery. The whole plan is pre-ordained and is devoid of any fairness, and finally SMEs will never be given a chance to thrive. Given the very strong opposition coming from society, the New Macao Association is perfectly right in insisting that the real issue of this consultation should be whether or not the whole project is desirable, rather than misleadingly focusing on the modalities. All the newspapers in Macao, including again the very conservative Macao Daily News (nonetheless inflating the number of participants in the latest round of consultation to 100 instead of the commonly printed figure of 40) had to report that the government was facing a very strong popular opposition, the whole project being seen as a mere nuisance bound for disaster if one recollects the ill-fated Nam Van lake bars.
Mr Chan Chak Mo, one of the two indirectly elected legislators representing “culture and social affairs” (don’t ask me how only businessmen come to represent “culture” in Macao), is a staunch proponent of the night market: can we allow this to happen just for “personal” convenience? Remember, Mr Chan is also the one who has been entrusted with the organization of the second-rate and back-to-the-future Macao food festival…