Flowering?

Flowering?

The 2008 constitution moves Myanmar away from the highly centralized politics and economics of the military period.  States and Regions came into being in 2010.  States and Regions are constitutionally the same:  States refers to areas defined by their ethnic makeup;  Regions are predominantly Burman, which is the largest ethnic grouping in Myanmar, but in 2014 it is far from clear how this decentralization is actually working.  It is not even clear if the current system is the endpoint or the start of the political change.

The Union constitution is, one would hope, an intermediate document.  There is the obvious oddity that the military appoints a quarter of all parliamentarians at the Union and State/Region level, combined with the stipulation that constitutional change needs a more than 75% majority.  There is the petty one that excludes people with a spouse or children who hold foreign passports from the presidency, thus barring the revered Daw Aung Suu Kyi, the leader of one of the key opposition parties, from the office.  But there are other, finer points, such as:

•  the Chief Minister of each State/Region is appointed by the President from the ranks of the elected and unelected members of the Region/State parliament;
•  the Chief Minister selects the civilian members as State/Region ministers, but it is the President who assigns the portfolios that they have;
• the State/Region minister for Border and Security Affairs is appointed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and always is a serving military officer.
• there is an emerging State/Region judiciary, but the appointments are made centrally.

The State/Region administrative layer is essentially missing.  The Union General Administration Department, which is part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, provides administrative support to the State/Region Ministries.  Interestingly, the Ministry of Home Affairs is constitutionally bound to have a serving military officer as its minister.  The jurisdiction of the State/Region ministries is limited and the lines between Union and State authority is often blurry.  Given the administrative and fiscal dominance of the Union, the States and Regions are very much in the shadows of the Union government. 

But still, Network Activities Group, the NGO that I support, is using the little bit of room that has been created to work towards change.  For example, small-scale fisheries have become a State/Region responsibility.  It is not a big economic sector but it accounts for a substantial part of income of poor households in Rahkine State, the delta and all along the Gulf of Motama.  These folk are economically vulnerable to the decline in fish stocks due to overfishing on and off shore, salinization of lands, and the periodic typhoon with attendant flooding.  NAG has facilitated the creation of village-based small scale fisher cooperatives that are then linked together at the District and finally at the State level, all with a view to provide these downtrodden a voice in the new State-level fisheries law and move it towards more of a co-management and resource conservation focus.  It is small stuff, except if you are a destitute fisher.  But this work has been made possible by the constitutional change in 2008, incomplete though it might be.

Mind-blowing for me wearing my Poli Sci hat is that the Centre for Economic and Social Development, a small local Think Tank, has to go and interview all kinds of people at the Union and State Region level in 2013 and 2014 to piece together a conceptual map of who is who and who does what.  

An unexpected aspect of under-development in Myanmar:  that machinery of politics is unknown. In Canada, that stuff is rote learning in the first week of Poli Sci 101.  Here it is a puzzle that, when put together, shows missing pieces and some pieces that are so fuzzy that you have to acknowledge that a part of the picture is still hidden.

Betel

Betel

The closest analog to betel chewing is snuff or chewing tobacco.  Almost entirely absent in the city now, it was ubiquitous in my early rural Alberta experience: the tell-tale round Copenhagen tin in a cowboy’s shirt pocket, the spitting in an empty cola can, the bulging lower lip where the user stashes his tobacco wad.

Betel stands are everywhere.  There is one near my front door, there are two down the street.  Betel sellers walk between cars waiting for green lights.  Betel is a green leaf that here in Myanmar forms the packaging for daub of lime and sometimes powdered nuts.  Chewing it leads to excessive production of red spit.  It is common to see a door of a car open up while standing before a stoplight, with the head of the driver leaning out to deliver a splat of red on the pavement.  Chewing it leads to staining of the teeth. 

  

It is an ugly addictive habit, like tobacco.  Men seem to chew it more than women, persons of lower more than persons of higher socio-economic standing.  Outside workers more than inside workers.   

Yesterday, a taxi driver had a particularly bad case of the spits.  He delivered it out of the driver’s side window while the car was in motion.  He did have a sense of aerodynamics in that he cupped his hand leeward of his mouth to give the spit some sideways momentum before the wind drag would whisk it backwards.  I moved over so as not to sit directly behind him.  My grasp of aerodynamics is weak, but the downside of betel spit coming back through the open back door window seemed substantial.

Dogs

 Dogs

These two dogs live on the auxiliary power plant of the mobile phone store next door.  Few people notice or interact with them, but nobody seems to harbor them ill will.  As with most dogs in my environs, they are ignored and, by and large, they ignore the people around them.  Somebody who knows as little as I do about Myanmar, suggested that the reincarnation thinking of Buddhism contributes to the easy co-existence of so many people and stray dogs in my busy little street.

The dogs of my street do have a social life amongst themselves.  It feels a bit like the jets and the sharks, each small pack controlling a couple of meters of Shan Kone street.  The packs become more active after the market shuts down and the street quiets down around 10 or 10:30 pm.  A sudden yelp in the night is common, as is the communal howling at whatever.

I would say that my street has some 15 or 20 stray dogs.  They all tend towards a single beiges brown appearance.  Different streets have marginally different colour schemes, reflecting, I would think, the dominant male’s genes.  You have to think that the lack of the watchful eye of the Myanmar Kennel Club, many of them are interrelated in complicated ways.  The females especially can look worse for wear after a continuous cycle of pregnancies and babies.

The dogs scrounge their food among the market stalls, they sleep on the street.  They are not petted nor do they particularly want your attention.  Two solitudes.  Imagine my surprise when I saw a women coming out of a grocery store with food she had obviously bought for some dogs.  They knew what was coming and were sitting in a row awaiting the treats.  She talk to them, scolded one, and then give them each a bag of chips.  What’s behind that?

Safety

Safety

Opening my front door is easy.  It is never locked.  The iron gate in front of the door is another story.  I reach through the bars and, using a backhand key move, I open the padlock and remove it from the latch.  Then I slide the gate open, step out, and repeat the procedure to close the door.  Standing in the hallway makes it easier: no need to reach through the gate.

The gate before the door is standard issue in my and many other buildings.  It is also common to see ironworks surrounding balconies and bars in front of windows.  Raz0r wire is ubiquitous on already 6 foot high iron or concrete fences.  Across the road from my office, which is located behind an always open, but guarded gate, workman have been busy for weeks to increase a fancy villa’s security wall from six to eight feet.

I can imagine some reason behind the security fences around large private residences.  Until very recently and still to a large extent, doing well financially suggest close ties to the government.  The recollection of anti-government riots in 1988 and 2007 may induce a crony capitalist to build a high fence with razor wire.   

But I have seen razor wire around meditation centres; and what about my front door in a country that the CUSO security briefing describes as "the safest of all the countries in which we work?"

The Toyota Probox Dx

Toyota Probox Dx

The Toyota Probox DX, the stripper version, is the backbone of the Yangon taxi industry.  And taxis make up 37% of all vehicles.  To be more precise, taxis make up 37% of vehicles (plus or minus 5%, 19 times out of 20) during the morning rush hour on U Wisara Road.  Adjusting loosely for a bias in the timing of my sampling, taxies are not less than 25% of the car fleet here.

I am puzzled by the enormous number of taxis.  It may be a symptom of a rising middle class that would rather not use the old and often very full public busses, but hasn’t reached the stage of private car ownership.  The benefit for a foreigner is obvious.  Ready availability of cheap rides.

The car fleet is relatively new.  I would guess the average age of vehicles is 7 or 8 years.  This is a major benefit in terms of smog.  Cuba with way less vehicles manages to choke you with ill-adjusted carbureted engines and no-filter diesels.  Yangon’s fleet expanded rapidly in the last four years, after the lifting of a punitive import duty.  Japan’s second hand car market is the main supplier, hence the overwhelming market share of Toyota and the prevalence of computerized fuel injection systems.

The traffic in Yangon is pretty easy to understand; less easy to navigate.  The key principle is to take every opportunity to enhance your position in the melee, even if that means using part of the oncoming lane to reach an improved standing in the queue.  Changing lanes is mostly done by presenting the vehicles in the other lanes with an increasingly hard to ignore fact.  First, you stick your nose a little bit into the next lane, which will lead to the cars there to squeeze by you while riding their horn.  And is there is a bit a gap, you nose further until the drivers in the other lane do not have enough room anymore to get around you.  They will honk, but admit defeat.