Kapok: The bickerers

The contrast is quite shocking really: on the one hand, legislators who are either appointed or not even elected, but rather endorsed by corporations and traditional associations according to a method of selection in which one name corresponds to one seat — highly competitive indeed — and on the other hand truly elected members of that very same assembly, who have fought very hard to win their seat, and who will take every opportunity and use any mean to make the best out of this unique and very circumscribed forum of democratic debate to oversee, somehow control and to a certain degree make the whole system slightly accountable to the people of Macao.

And yet, the former are giving the latter lessons in solemnity! Complaining that posters and piles of paper cups with challenging messages directed towards the government are being detrimental to the dignity of this otherwise perfectly independent and reason-inspired body of “small circle” representatives who know only one thing: to vote in favor of whatever the government wants as long as their interests are preserved, even when they don’t actually understand and measure the ultimate consequences of the new laws.

The Land Law is but one example, but what an enlightening one it is! Conservative loyalists and self-serving legislators just realized a few months back that the law they had passed — “solemnly” one should add — in 2013 was actually making land grantees accountable for land they had failed to develop — usually after more than 25 years — and thus was somehow hurting either their own interests or the ones of their clients. They wanted (and still want) the law to be changed, or at least amended, or at the very least interpreted… in their favour of course!

The government they usually follow so blindly is now being deemed responsible for not explaining the ins-and-outs of article 48 — the non-renewal of concessions in case of failure to develop and operate, for being too slow in drafting an urban plan, for not providing the necessary authorizations in due course… in short, for fooling them! How can that be when they are supposedly one and the same? What a sense of betrayal they must have felt when the Chief Executive announced that he “strongly rejected” any amendment of the law! Mutiny was in the air. Article 75 of the Basic Law was being brandished: after all, a bill can be introduced by a legislator or a group of them if it does not relate to “public expenditure, political structure or the operation of the government“! Truly, a matter of rule of law and separation of powers! Montesquieu-inspired for sure. How solemn! How noble!

Luckily for us, the government learnt a lesson in May 2014, when it ended up being challenged by the street over the so-called Perks’ bill. Back then the proposal of law was favouring government officials themselves, and especially a soon-to-be- replaced highly unpopular governmental team widely perceived as both indecisive and incompetent. The mistake had been to trust the very same legislators who are now asking for the land law to be amended: for these people, anything goes and public opinion is of little consequence. Not being returned by universal suffrage, they are convinced that their own ceremonial hold over society through their positions in richly endowed associations can subvert any resistance, no matter how legitimate and prevalent it is.

Let it linger then; let it rot and wait for the right opportunity to change the rules of the game. Greed is acceptable only as long as it does not find echoes in unfairness. Apart for Zheng Anting who appears to be completely out of touch with public sentiment, nobody toys with mutiny claims anymore. The Chief Executive visits the Assembly and boasts about the generosity of the central authorities and his own accomplishments, and all the loyal legislators can do is ask for better-trained civil servants, more facilities for the elderly or free education for all in universities. Why and how? Only the frivolous poster and cardboard holders seem to care.

Published in Macau Daily Times on August 4, 2017

Kapok: Fooling the Fools

It is indeed always moving to see the rich and powerful coming to the rescue of the rule of law, or more exactly the rule by law, which has to be amended because it no longer suits the interests of the happy few. The proposed alteration to the Land Law is a superb lobbying operation in the name — name only — of the general interest adorned by distorted legal, economic and political arguments. It would amount to a good laugh if this human comedy did not involve billions of MOP and the healthy development of the city at a time of renewed challenges, hence the dramatic turn of the whole story.

From a strictly aesthetic perspective, it does follow the three unity rules of neoclassical drama: a unity of action (land developers failing to develop land plots), a unity of time (25 years of provisory land concessions) and a unity of place (well-situated land plots never opened to public tendering promising juicy returns). The ending of the play should be obvious: if you meet the deadline, you get wealthier; if you miss it, you forfeit your future gains and hand back the concessions. The problem is: the parties disagree on who is to blame for the failure.
The story of the 113 idle plots of land first surfaced back in 2009 thanks to a report released by the Land, Public Works and Transport Bureau (DSSOPT). In 2010-2011, 48 of these plots were recognised as not having been developed solely due to the inaction of the land grantees, and were thus meant to be recovered by the government at the leases’ expiration. Sixty-five were excluded because responsibility was shared, and the lack of proper regulatory work and planning by the government had impacted the delay. The Land Law was passed in 2013, and new constraints were imposed: article 48 states that “provisory concessions [of maximum 25 years] cannot be renewed.”
With a new government being sworn in December 2014, the formerly dozing DSSOPT sprang into action, and thus land plots started to be repossessed. In June 2015, the new Secretary for Transport and Public Works, Raimundo do Rosário, made it public that out of 48 land plots, 16 had been excluded from recovery. Even though a public hearing on the case was denied in the legislature, a CCAC enquiry commissioned by the Chief Executive concluded that the only dubious aspect of the story was the lack of “proactive, systematic, and scientific communication” about the exemptions that were deemed perfectly legitimate. This was despite the fact that some legislators were shown to have directly benefited from the technical derogations, such as Angela Leong, Chui Sai Cheong and Vitor Cheung Lup Kwan. Since then, other plots have been recovered, more are at risk and court actions do not seem to favour developers.
The legislator leading the charge for a revision to the Land Law, or more precisely a retroactive annexed interpretation of the law, is no other than Gabriel Tong. Mr Tong is an academic (acting dean of the law department at UMAC!), but he is also an appointed legislator and a partner in a law firm. He voted in favour of the Land Law in 2013 and now claims he was “deceived” at the time: I thought that these guys got their job because of their expertise? And can we be 100% sure that he has no conflict of interest in proposing the amendments? And then the developers would not be interested in (necessarily limited) compensations but rather to deliver on their promise? Why not earlier? Why act at best in the mid-2000s (UNESCO heritage dates to 2005), thus crippling the development of the city after the real-estate downturn of 1994?
By my own calculation, based on the market, the initial land fee, the premiums and today’s construction costs, they don’t want to pass on 300% return! When there is only one team on the soccer field, I don’t see the point in providing it with extra time after July 31!

Published on Macau Daily Times, July 8th 2016

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…