Kapok: The virtues of optimism

For reasons most probably linked to my carefree upbringing, I am resolutely optimistic about human nature, and the capacity for good rather than self-destruction. Given the present context, this has become a challenging position to hold: ineptocracy and populism prevail, and rational discourse has been submerged by emotive boasting. One of my secrets for this enduring optimism has been to keep my expectations low: being reasonably hopeful prevents roller-coaster effects, bearing in mind that what goes up will ultimately come down – and vice-versa.

When I read in some headlines this week that Mak Soi Kun, the legislator with the second-highest vote in 2013, was questioning the statistics provided by the Policy Research Office of the government in relation to population growth by 2020, it initially prompted a significant amount of exhilaration in my cortex: could it be that Mr Mak had read my column four weeks ago – the vanity of me! Could it be that the Study Report on the Population Policies of Macao is so obviously baloney that even a below-average – duty wise – legislator realises such and starts to question publicly the basis of such an important piece of decision-making material?

I had in mind that Mr Mak had fulfilled close to zero of the eight promises he made during his campaign, so, I went beyond the catchy titles, and confirmed that apples never fall far from the tree: instead of disputing the forecasted population figure of 710,000 by 2020 as too conservative, he was actually wondering why it was so high. Clearly, Mr Mak does not read Macau Daily Times, and obviously doesn’t get projections and reports from the Statistics and Census Office either, otherwise he would know that the DSEC has made a forecast of 752,000 by 2021 and that given the by-census latest results, the average growth rate of the past five years can reasonably lead us to believe that the population could reach 741,000 by 2020.

But then we will enter an electoral year, so Mr Mak was posturing as the true defender of the “real” Macao residents’ interests. The response of the head of the Policy Research Office was of similar nature: “this is actually just an indicative number,” he said, and of course only a limited happy few will be allowed to enter the gold-paved territory of our beloved SAR! No mention of the thousand hotel rooms opening in the next five years. No mention of the quadrupling of our territory because of the further integration with Hengqin.

Considering what Mr Mak stands for, this is worrying: he has Liaison Office endorsement; he works for the Nam Kwong, a company that openly states that it is “directly under the central government based in Macao”; and he, together with his second in command, Zheng Anting (a former junket operator), represent the Jiangmen communal associations – a very influential grassroots and pro-establishment network of associations of people originating from a neighbouring district (claiming up to 100,000 potential supporters), that benefits from lavish Macao Foundation funding. These are also the people who were directly involved in the Sin Fong Garden imbroglio. I don’t mind that Mr Zheng was not born in Macao, as he actually reflects the electorate: less than 39% of the 2017 electorate were born in Macao, whereas 54% were born in China. The question remains though: what interests are these people actually defending? And the same goes for Mr Chan Meng Kam (also not born in Macao), the so-called “king of the votes” who supposedly gives the communal interests of Fujian a voice in politics.

Contrary to some hasty news reports, there will be fewer people below 30 voting this year, compared to 2013: so indeed, the virtues of optimism will require due cultivation.

Published in Macau Daily Times on January 27th, 2017

Kapok: The missing links

The results of the public consultation pertaining to the “Macao Tourism Industry Development Master Plan”, conducted from May to July 2016, have just been released. Although their full integration into the final draft of the overall plan should not be known until mid-2017 (phase 3!), they make for an interesting read (a long one too: 843 pages!): everybody who says the contrary is a liar! From what I have read in the press, my feeling is that these 1,185 opinions collected over two months have been grossly underreported by the press. Laziness? Cynicism? Contempt? A bit of all three?

As has been noted before in this column, public consultations have become the alpha and omega of non-democratic governance, which is trying somehow to pay lip service to the concepts of engagement on the one hand, and accountability on the other. The bottom line is to provide an occasion for the people — the residents more than the citizens — to have a say, voice their concerns and make suggestions. It is of course extremely positive, as it implies a form of participatory outlook aiming at bonding the community together and avoiding the usual symptoms of disenfranchisement. People can blame themselves if they don’t seize that opportunity, and the government is somehow forced to act with added transparency and make room for more varied interests. Convenient, for sure.

Of course, the level of inclusion of opinions expressed by residents is discretionary and entirely up to the powers that be. In terms of decision-making, consultation corresponds to the very first and short steps of a long and tedious staircase. In some instances, the hope is that nobody will react and thus the consultation process amounts to little more than pretence and formality. In Macao, the number of consultations has inflated tremendously in the past few years, especially since their due processes were revised in 2011 — 86 are marked as completed and accessible on the government’s website. The executive intent has become even clearer since the website gathering these PR campaigns started to include at its bottom the “advisory bodies” (47 such committees) placed under the authority of the Chief Executive (CE) and his five secretaries: everybody is entitled to an opinion, but how and why it makes its way into a public policy is entirely up to people who make the actual decisions — people who are unfortunately not elected. Yet sometimes these consultations end up blocking a project too blatantly associated with the usual enduring vested interests of family businesses in Macao. Miracles do happen.

Reviewing the almost 1,200 opinions collected by the Macao Tourism Office would go beyond the scope of this column, although it is worth noting that the report encloses extremely stimulating remarks by numerous residents, among them (a few) academics and business stakeholders — including, notably, one of the licensed casinos. Doubts are cast over ways to achieve the four goals, but suggestions are always made — and the original document released for consultation was generous in pointing out the numerous challenges ahead. For me, the main issue resides in the lack of clearly delineated convergence between the master plan and the five-year plan announced by the CE last September. It is not too late!

There are, however, two flagrant absences in this report — quite unacceptable ones indeed. The first one concerns academic institutions, which are only present through (fortunately very stimulating) individual contributions. Policy recommendations have to be assessed by academia; otherwise, institutions are defaulting in their duty to socially engage with the community, and are thus malfunctioning. The other one has to do with the outright absence of the Portuguese community and especially the Portuguese newspapers: out of almost 600 pages of raw opinions republished in Section Five, not ONE (!) is written in Portuguese, except for two pages of an interview with Samuel Tong reprinted from Hoje Macau! Being snubbed for lack of relevance means that you have to proactively assert yourself and participate in public debate: otherwise, what is the use of having three Portuguese dailies read by fewer than 500 people? Folklore?

Published in Macau Daily Times, January 13th, 2017.

Kapok: Another tyranny of numbers

Back in August 2015, I remember musing about the irony that, on the one hand China was the place where the oldest census in the world had been conducted, back in 2 AD, and on the other hand that Macao, the cradle of the encounter between two great scientific traditions, was being run on the basis of extremely farfetched studies and vague figures — dubious in themselves and, far worse, rarely fully available or fully explained.

As I pointed out at the time, censuses constitute the backbone of any public policy, and thus head counts are crucial in determining what policies come first, with what kind of allocation of adequate means. All things being equal, if your population is getting younger, then you might consider building more schools, with roads leading to these and appropriate public transportation to cater to them. If on the contrary, your population is ageing, investing in retirement homes, day-care centres and the training of nurses to visit regularly senior citizens who are ever more physically impaired might prove a wise move. This is pretty straightforward.

At the time, I was aiming at the newly released — and fallacious — Study Report on the Population Policies of Macao, prepared by the government’s Policy Research Office. To my dismay (sort of), the report was actually an exercise in statistics sugarcoating and ex-post facto validation. Tough challenges got buried and recommendations were merely programmatic.

What got to be discussed at the time was the official press release on the report and the declarations made by Lao Pun Lap, the head of the Policy Research Office. To be honest, and even though I have strong reservations about the actual capacity of Mr Lao who has unfortunately been in the job since 2010 [was previously involved with the CEEDS, starting in 2006], the full report made available later in the year did provide interesting points for discussion, despite being overly descriptive rather than prescriptive — after all, the full report is 125 pages long [Please note that the official website is still not available in December 2016: http://www.ppmacau.gov.mo/].

Yet, the flaws of the two key findings that made the headlines in the summer last year — the conservative and optimistic acceptance that the Macao population would reach 710,000 by 2020 and the carrying capacity 22,000 people per sq. km by 2025 — just got manifestly confirmed.

With the publication of the partial results of the 2016 population by-census (the last full census was in 2011), we now know for a fact that the average annual growth rate of the population increased dramatically in the past five years, at 3.3%, compared to an annual 1.9% between 2006 and 2011.

Our population is now 651,000, and if we use this latest yearly average growth rate, that means that the Macao population should reach 741,000 by 2020 and could make it to 765,000 by the next full census of 2021… It is to be noted that the projections posted on the DSEC website actually envision 752,000 by 2021, so one really wonders where the Policy Research Office got its figures from!

With the diversification drive in the making, the planned opening of thousands of new hotel rooms and the services appended to an ageing population, it is difficult to imagine the dynamic of the past five years being curbed, even though one cannot exclude populist measures to be adopted at the approach of the 2017 legislative elections to severely limit the number of new non-resident workers—the bread and butter of the population growth in the past decade.

A more numerous population would thus translate into a more pressing population density, meaning 23,000 people per sq. km.— still “not saturated”? And then, the district of Areia Preta and Iao Hon remained the most populated of the territory, home to more than 75,000 dwellers or a staggering 12% of the population. What is then the actual density in this northern part of the territory? What kind of peculiar social issues does this entail?

The full results of the by-census will only be made public in April 2017: this might explain why population issues just benefitted from a passing comment on only two pages out of 100 in the five-year plan released last September…

Published in Macau Daily Times on December 30th, 2016

Kapok: Frustrating exhilaration

Against all odds, the democratic fervour that has engulfed Hong Kong in the past two years appears far from being abated—quite the contrary.

The clear-cut victory of the pro-democracy camp in the geographic constituencies in September and the advent of a young boisterous generation of self-determination-leaning legislators served as a proof that the spirit of the 2014 Occupy Central with Love and Peace and the subsequent Umbrella Movement had not waned but instead transformed into a fiery force able to rock the boat of institutional politics from within.

Then came the so-called “oath-taking controversy” triggered by legislators-elect Baggio Leung and Yau Wai-ching, that ultimately led to them being unseated by Hong Kong’s High Court on November 15. In the meantime, the pro-establishment camp had ridiculed itself by engaging in self-deprecating bickering and absenteeism and the central authorities had been somehow convinced that a heavy-handed intervention in the form of a secretly sought interpretation of the Basic Law would “scare the chickens by killing the monkeys”.

Up to 15 legislators could fall victim of the ruling, if Wang Zhenmin, the legal advisor of the Hong Kong Liaison Office, was to be trusted. Ultimately, “only” four others are being submitted to a new judicial review instigated by CY Leung and his Secretary for Justice on December 2, including veteran activist “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung and Edward Yiu Chung-yim, the newly elected assistant professor representing the Architectural, Surveying, Planning and Landscape (ASPL) functional constituency.

Yet the whole process had but two consequences: on the one hand, the pro-democracy camp has regrouped and is now displaying a resolute unity in denouncing the illegitimacy of Beijing’s ruling: by equating the provocative independence drive of a few with the self-determination-leaning stance of the many, what was originally a discordant aggregate had been turned into a united bloc; on the other hand, the public is becoming ever more wary of the situation, and the public sentiment index released by Hong Kong University on December 15 indicates a plunge of 7.1 points compared to November—Government Appraisal faring the worst—with a level that is becoming dangerously close to the low tide of January 2016 when the disappearance of the Causeway Bay booksellers started to unravel.

No doubt that the announcement, on December 9, by CY Leung himself that he would not run—allegedly for “family reasons”—for a second term in the coming March Chief Executive election was intended as a gesture of conciliation or even a disguised admission of failure: the long-term dislike of and distrust in “689” (the number of votes he received in 2012) aka “the wolf” was yet again underscored on December 13, when another HKU survey revealed that Leung is now the least appreciated Chief Executive since the handover, at only 35 points, beating even the dwindling approval rate of Tung Chee-hwa at the time of the combined SARS and Article 23 crisis!

But if there is one thing that the Hong Kong electorate has learnt from these troubling times it is that their voice will only be faithfully defended by a handful few, whatever the context and the venue, and even though these few cannot be the majority by institutional design they have to become more numerous: on December 11, the pro-democracy camp thus won more than a quarter of the seats on the Election Committee that will designate the next Chief Executive in March 2017. 325 seats out of 1,200! In the election committee subsectors of Social Welfare, Information Technology, Health Services, Legal, Education and Higher Education, the pro-democrats won all the seats and they won a majority in accountancy, ASPL, medical and engineering—all of these knowledge-based!

Out of curiosity I checked if this could ever happen in Macao—thus allowing some form of competition—but unfortunately, even in the more spirited social or education sectors, pro-establishment figures rule and command the votes, including present-day Secretaries and soon-to-be recipients of the Golden and Silver Lotus(es). In Macao, nothing short of universal suffrage can change the system.

Published in Macau Daily Times, December 16, 2016

Kapok: Between Scylla and Charybdis

It is again that time of the year when the executive power in Macao is trying very hard to look accountable to the people: the Chief Executive (CE) solemnly and rather painfully delivers his policy address to the Assembly for the year to come, then takes questions, and subsequently the five secretaries, who make up his high-powered government, take the stage consecutively to further detail the action plan in their respective area.

This year, as usual, the exercise starts on November 15 and concludes on December 6—that is three full weeks! Now add the three to four months of preparation for that ordeal—at least on the side of the civil servants asked to work out the details that will allow their revered superior to address any possible Q&A—and you have a real measure of the supposed importance of the whole operation that has all the apparent characteristics of a government’s programme.

In pure theory, the CE should not have to do this: after all, he is elected neither by the people nor by the legislature. Given the actual structure of government, he is only accountable to the 400 members of the election committee that designates him—although on both occasions Mr Chui was “running” unopposed—and to the Central People’s Government that appoints him—in that respect, a much more demanding patron. But article 65 of the Macao Basic Law states that “the Government of the Macao Special Administrative Region” is “accountable to the Legislative Assembly of the Region” and that “it shall present regular policy addresses to the Assembly” and “answer questions raised by members of the Assembly”.

So here we are, without clear rational justification, listening to programmatic declarations that, for the most part, will either fail to materialise on time, fail to materialise properly or fail to materialise at all. Examples are numerous: social and economic housing, bridges, light rail transport, Coloane hospital, diversification of the economy, reform of the judicial system,  “scientific policy-making” and “sunshine government”, and of course a “gradual” establishment of “a democratic decision-making process” that was conceived, back in November 2010, as the pivotal condition to making fewer blunders and being resolutely less corrupt.

The show follows a very predictable script in which, among other things, business-oriented legislators lambast the unjustifiable increase in the number of civil servants, decried as contradicting the professed drive to streamline and rationalise public administration. Maybe so, but does anybody provide elements of comparison? The ratio of civil servants to the population or to the labour force is actually double what we find in Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively… And a good 34% of the civil servants are employed by the security forces in Macao!

Turning to the budget, vociferous critics denounce the prospective 12.6% increase in expenditure for the coming year at a time of economic slowdown, targeting again the ever expanding costs in personnel. Maybe, or maybe not—actually there should be more investments given the vast public reserves—but who cares? The very same legislators will vote the budget without any amendment; the very same legislators never request mid-term reports on the budget, and it is rather ironic that while the First permanent commission examines the 2017 law on public finance, it is the Third commission that reviews the execution of the past budget (2015). The left hand is not exactly aware of what the right one is doing, and what indeed matters for most lawmakers is whether or not they will get their fair share of uncompetitive public procurement—something not discussed openly in plenary sessions!

When Ng Kuok Cheong walks out of the chamber to protest against the response of the CE who considers that political development and universal suffrage are solely decided and initiated by Beijing, he is actually putting in crude light the very fact that neither the government nor most of the legislators can be trusted for things to really change. Small circles are ultimately vicious ones.

Published in Macau Daily Times, November 25, 2016