In line with its communist neighbors China and Vietnam, Laos has launched an anti-corruption campaign to purge the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party of corrupt members. The exercise aims to restore public faith in the party’s governance after decades of fast growth that have enriched many cadres, but raised public questions about the distribution of the poor country’s newfound wealth.
Lao officials accused of financial misconduct have recently returned large sums of money to the national treasury, a state audit organization official recently told Radio Free Asia. The inspection official described the sums returned as a “huge amount of money,” though he declined to divulge the exact amount or name individual officials in the news report.
Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith, portrayed by some as a reformer, has cranked up a counter-corruption drive since assuming the appointed post last April. The 10th Congress of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party held in January 2016 saw the retirement of several elderly party stalwarts, including General Secretary Choummaly Sayasone and Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong, to make way for the promotion of a new generation of cadres.
Thongsing’s five-year tenure as national leader was marred by corruption allegations and suggestions of economic mismanagement. His finance minister, Phouphet Khamphounvong, a former central bank governor, was arrested in December 2015 along with four senior ministry officials on corruption allegations related to the issuance of bonds to finance so-called “ghost” projects, including provincial roads, that were budgeted for but never built.
The State Inspection Authority (SIA), an internal government watchdog, recently released data reported in local media that showed millions of dollars worth of state funds had been embezzled by ministries and provincial offices in the past year.
In 2015, an SIA report presented to the National Assembly showed state corruption had cost the country more than 1 trillion kip (US$123 million) between 2012 and 2014.
The SIA said it had recently investigated 71 officials across the country and made 25 corruption-related arrests, though it did not say if the party members had been criminally convicted. As part of an SIA nationwide audit of officials’ assets, which is reportedly almost complete, 1,900 officials and central level civil servants and more than 140,000 working in provincial administrations have declared their private and public finances. Analysts believe that accounting could lead to more arrests and a deeper purge.
Thongloun, who served as deputy prime minister since 2001 and concurrently as minister of foreign affairs from 2006, has not been implicated in any of the scandals and is seen as a relatively clean set of hands in Laos’ notoriously corrupt and unaccountable context.
He is thought to have impressed party cadres by his pledges to introduce new measures to tackle rising poverty levels and expand the government’s anti-corruption efforts. Laos’ gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is less than US$2,000, one of the lowest levels in Asia.
Although hard to gauge in Laos’ highly censored media environment, Thongloun is viewed favorably by the general public, according to Ian Baird, a Laos expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. “There seems to be a lot of support for him since he’s creating a more transparent atmosphere for discussion and generally setting a more progressive agenda,” Baird told Asia Times.
In May, Thongloun ordered a ban on the export of timber, a move aimed at ending the rampant logging that over the past two decades has decimated Laos’ once verdant landscape. (Laos is geographically the size of France, but has only 6.7 million people.) Some provincial officials have reportedly ignored his central commands, highlighting a growing disconnect between provincial and central party cadres that some say is compromising his anti-graft drive.
Thongloun has also sought to open Laos up to investment from countries other than China and Vietnam, the landlocked and underdeveloped country’s traditional communist allies.
At the Association of Southeast Asia Nation (Asean) summit hosted in Vientiane in September, Thongloun welcomed Barack Obama as the first sitting US president to ever visit Laos. That had raised speculation that the US would begin to trade and invest more in Laos, though under the new Donald Trump administration those prospects are less certain.
Like his party predecessors, however, Thongloun has brooked no dissent, witnessed in a mounting crackdown on social media users advocating democratic change. Lao citizens have been denied democracy since the Communist Party took power in 1975, following a three decade civil war, and the one-party government has harshly repressed nearly all forms of expression and association ever since.
As with China and Vietnam, the party’s continued legitimacy depends on a growing economy and clean governance. The economy has expanded between 7% to 8% in recent years, albeit from a low base. Phuong Nguyen, associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Southeast Asia Program in Washington DC, said in a recent press interview, “As long the government continues to deliver economic growth, it can withstand dissent and continue to rule.”
With a rising cost of living and increasingly ostentatious displays of wealth by government officials and local administrators, the party can ill-afford rising corruption perceptions. Complaints of yawning inequality between the people and officialdom have circulated on social media, online ire that has perhaps in part fuelled Thongloun’s highly public anti-corruption drive.
It remains to be seen how long party members will support and tolerate Thongloun’s campaign, particularly if probes are launched into powerful party families, academic Baird said. If he pushes too hard, it could cause a backlash that jeopardizes his own position. If he goes too soft, Thongloun risks frustrating a general public that is increasingly sensitive to wealth disparities and has so far seemingly supported his initiatives and rule.
Laos is less than half the size of France
anyway the coruption is continueing
Corruption in Lao PDR has become a culture in Lao PRP for 41+ years since communists takeover. There is ONLY 1 panacea that will work: Regime Change to Democracy by the people for the people – not the most efficient but the best and less evil tool to filter out corrupted officials.
Will $90 million go to the cleaning of UXO or just around $1 million go to UXO cleaning and I am sure $89 million go to the Lao Leaders pockets.
My observation of the one Prince that sided with Communism (compared to the one that sided with the U.S. and the one that favored nutrality) …. because he abhored the lust for materialism, and favored a desire for the common good … failed. Failed in carrying his ideals if that is what they really were, through to the Lao leadership that actually took over with North Vietnamese and formed the eventual government. I was in Laos in 1969/70, 1998, 2014, and December, 2016. In the last visit I traveled as far as Vieng Xai and appreciate there is a thread of electrical power and cell phones. But the paved roads really do stop for the most part at the city limits of Vientiane, and the other areas are seemingly all but forgotten (except by the Chinese that are buying it). The sales price of a tiny store front in downtown Phonsavan at $400,000.00 USD speaks loudly about the wealth disparity, and probably corruption. The reported availability of a "brick" of uncirculated $400,000.00 cash in banks in Laos outside Vientiane speaks even more. Money "trickling down" to the masses has never worked in America. Good luck Laos. I genuinely wish the best for all of you! Wish I was back there.