From ERA to RSA
I am so happy today that we are celebrating two ceremonies together – (1) the graduation and presentation of diploma for 316 senior officials coded the Social Peace Batch, the Social Equity Batch and others and (2) the Opening of Training course for 311 senior officials in 2013. As is informed by HE Sum Mab, Director of the Royal School of Administration, this is my 16th time to have my presence here. I failed to make only once last year because my father was in critical health condition.
However, all 16 visits I made so far to the school, from 1996 through to the present, show clearly how hard and indispensable effort the Royal School of Administration has been making to provide training for our officials. It is indeed one of the old schools in Cambodia. Former students to school are Deputy Prime Minister HE Sok An, Deputy Prime Minister HE Bin Chhin, Senior Minister Im Chhunlim and Minister of Information HE Khieu Kanharith, and more senior generation, HE Hor Namhong, the late HE Chem Snguon, the late HE Chan Sok, HE Var Kimhong. The school had its name changed twice. Firstly, it was ERA in French (École Royal d’Administration). Lon Nol changed it to École National d’Administration. They removed the term ‘royal’ and replaced it with ‘national’ before we change it back to Royal School of Administration in English (RSA).
I am so pleased that I am able to be here to present our graduates with their diplomas while honoring the launch of new training course for trainees who are senior and mid-level officials, together with the 7th and 5th generations of administrative staff. I consider today as a get together of ‘future officials’ who will soon perform their functions and duties. I say “future officials” is because we have come across the most competitive exam. According to what I learn from HE Sok An, in the entry competition exam, only 5% of examin takes passed, while the objective of the school was to screen for only 10%. It shows clearly that we have made a serious refinement.
Not People’s Master but Servant
As the school itself is one of the best in the country with highly experienced professors, in addition to everyone’s status as official and future official, I see no need to talk about any particular subject but to focus on some experiences and behaviors of officials for all of you – having graduated and being undergraduates. Most of you are young and have a long way ahead. Those of you who undergo training and retraining in the Royal School of Administration should learn that being Royal Government’s officials, we are not controllers or masters of the people. On the contrary, we are serving the people and providing them services. You all should remember this.
While being made official if you think you are the master or boss of the people, you are making a big mistake and violation to the moral ethics of officials. Remember always that primarily you serve the people and provide services for them. This is the basic elements when talking about virtue, moral and behavior of officials. I also do not like the way some behave in relation between officials. For instance, they always say “preah bat tien” (yes, your eminence or holiness) while holding two hands together before their chests (Cambodian way to show respect). In is true that in work we are addressing each other according the hierarchy but I’d rather be addressed as brother, uncle, grand uncle, etc., but please do not call me “grandfather” yet.
It is in this consideration that first you have to make yourself a good official who, in your walking, sleeping, standing and sitting, should memorize that you are to serve the people not to boss around. How long an official is going to be in service is how much do s/he is serving the people. There are people who have gone up the rank and fallen back. Some parties also lost after they had won. The most important reason of all is behavior of their officials. If you are in the Royal Government’s administration, it will depend on how polite and disciplinary you are while getting the job done for the people.
People Love When You Are, Miss When You Are Not
You may have heard or remembered that in order for them to work well in the land measuring project, I have instructed the youth-student volunteers that “they should make people love them when they are with them and miss them when they are no longer there.” It does happen. In various places, when the youth-student volunteers moved out of the operation area, some of them to go back to school, people wept missing them. The same is anticipated for us in the administration. We should have constructive and united behavioral relations to nurture solidarity. We serve the people well and they will give you their love. There is no good response (from the people) to ill action toward them. In this case, once they finish working for the people, they would chase you out by spreading salt after your trace like what they would do for bad spirit.
The same is true when there is a change of leaders in the Ministry. There is always someone to feel sorry for and someone to feel happy too. In nature of human being, one cannot meet everyone’s aspiration. The key is to satisfy the majority. Look, Buddha could not also satisfy everyone. The explanation for this is simple. If Lord Buddha is the one that satisfies everyone, we do not have Christ or Allah and we do not have other religions like Hinduism, etc. In the context of Buddhism, the Lord Buddha also faced with the defiant Mara. Allah also could not satisfy all. A chef also could not have his food liked by everyone. The importance here is that we must serve the majority. Unless you walk under rain without being soaked then you could get rid of other people’s criticism. While satisfying the majority, we also should not dissatisfy the minority as lethal enemy.
We have heaps of social work to fulfill such as implementing the art of resource sharing in the construction of Buddhist pagodas, water canals, wells, etc. in benefit for the poor and the vulnerable. These are jewels for the officials. Being arrogant after appointment to a position would make you isolated and no one is able to work with you no matter how competent you are. In order to fulfill a mission they need participation and in order to have participation we must pool together human labor and intelligence, though, as I said, we would never mobilize them all. The same is true that a political party would never assure sympathy from everyone. After all, as a political party, one has to come up with political platform and effective implementation for the majority of the population.
Capacity Building of Officials – Equity and Efficiency
We have come to the stage that strengthening capacity of our official is a necessity in response to the ongoing reforms. We cannot afford to be idle. We also have to make efforts to ensure institutional capacity building along with human capacity building. Having finished their studies in other faculty, many continue their studies in this school and we also have one other school not far from here which train judges, clerks, notaries, etc. No country in this world – Asia, Europe or America – ignores the path of reform. If we do not speed up, we will find ourselves in stagnant position. In Cambodia, we are making efforts to achieve four words in the rectangular strategy– growth, work, equity and efficiency. As you can see, the most important word of all is “efficiency” that stands last.
Here we have this batch of ‘Social Equity’ students. We cannot practice the model of everyone is equal like under Pol Pot, who uprooted those who were rich to make them equally poor and to be evacuated from Phnom Penh to live in the rice field altogether at all. It is impossible to eliminate the gap between the rich and the poor, not only in Cambodia but also elsewhere, the United States of America also included. We can talk about any dimension of equity but the one we are talking about here is firstly everyone is equal before the law and no one is above the law. It is, of course, not possible to make everyone live in similar house size because humans are made to be different too. We are talking about equity that people fulfill their obligations as citizens, officials and armed forces.
Planning – Critical for Leadership and Working Methodology
Efficiency is the most important objective. Whatever we do, we should think about its efficiency. I wish to remind you what I used to talk to the officials in the Royal School of Administration as well as in other places on leadership and working methodology, which are important for everyone working in state institution, sub-national level authority, non-governmental organization or political party. It is also applicable in family. The first step is planning. In a wider sense, it is the formulation of clear policy framework in conformity with given situation. If one would do whatever one thinks without planning, that is not leadership and working methodology. Worse still, this action will be very dangerous.
Formulation of long-term, medium-term and short-term political platform, which includes plan of action, is about 30% of the whole process. The formulated plan is like a roadmap for any given institution, political party, non-governmental organization or the Royal Government and other state institutions at national and sub-national levels. The formulated plan, either political platform or work plan in general, would serve also as unit of measurements whether one’s action is wrong or right. For example, some said Pol Pot’s policy is good but its implementation is wrong. I would argue it differently. Witnessing that people were killed and tortured how could that be a correct policy. It was a wrong policy. Evacuation of people from cities was the policy of the political and military organization of Pol Pot or Democratic Kampuchea.
Organized Implementation and Monitoring
The Cambodian People’s Party is preparing to organize its extraordinary congress on March 16-17, which is on Saturday and Sunday. What I wanted to talk about is the drafting of the political platform whose preparation procedure started six months ago. It is this long for a political party that has already statute and previous political platforms. It takes time to formulate a good political platform. However, it is just set of policies on paper. The next step is to organize the process of implementation of the formulated plan. At this stage, one needs to ascertain human resources who can lead the implementation. We are talking about the composition of who does what and budgeting, etc. The most critical issue in organization and implementation is to ensure success of the formulated plan or political platform.
There is one other step. It is the monitoring of implementation. This is important as it helps figure out right from wrong in the implementation process. Adjustment is also an element included too. In every implementation, there has to have a review of action. Leadership must have review. Take for instance the “new action of old policy” on land reform need to have regular monitoring to find out if the policy set out is responsive to the need, whether or not to make modification. For the abolishing of fishing lots and return them to the people for household fishing, we have to monitor if the people really receive it as their benefits.
We have conducted, in regard of the fishing lot reform, numerous review meetings. Some have resorted to various anarchic actions in the prohibited areas for fish species conservation. Should we not monitor the development, the fishing lots reform would only benefit a handful of people who committed acts of violation in the conserved areas. Monitoring is critically important as it helps identify where and what is wrong in our implementation process of the formulated plan or political platform.
Adjustment Is Important
I must have your attention that sometimes one needs to adjust the formulated policy too. For example, we have decided on the adjustment of our policy for investment on economic land concession when we identify its weak points, which create conflicts with local people’s community regarding the land boundary. People who occupied land in those areas of investment have not had their land possession legally recognized yet. We referred to the situation as illegal land occupation, on forest coverage land, for example, through logging, etc. Though there is order for confiscation, those land occupants do not leave. What do we do then? To extinguish the fire once and for all we have to (1) cease to provide economic land concession and (2) review or monitor our implementation so as to guarantee that people in concessional land have their land measured properly.
In fact, we have to redefine area of forestland since in reality some part of it is no longer under forest but cassava, rubber, etc. We then need to measure the land and issue land title for the people. I should have your attention here that whatever we issue is not always right. We may have to adjust something either actions of monitoring or the plan itself. That is the reason why from congress to congress, the ruling Party has to review its political platform whether it is responsive or not. Sometimes, the platform is outdated and no longer responsive. We need to change that.
Talking in percentage, we would have achieved 30% more while completing the organized implementation and monitoring stage. With the 30% achieved in the stage of planning, we have 60% with the success of leadership and working methodology. What is the remaining 40%?
Risk/Hazard Management
There never is a perfect plan or political platform. One needs to be prepared for dealing with force majeure cases. Take for instance who would think that the flood in the Year of Dragon was so small. That brought about risks for us to manage. In another instance, from 2004 through to 2007, everything was smooth and the economy generated two-digit growths, like in 2005 when we achieved 13.3%, but beyond anyone’s knowledge and predictability, it suffered the hit of world financial and economic crisis. While the US and European economic downturns were the fact, we had to adjust accordingly to deal with the crisis. That is the risk to manage.
We took certain measures. In banking, we immediately increased reserve requirement from 8% to 16% in prevention of risk of bank collapsing. When the price of oil went high, the cost of electricity in Phnom Penh also jacked up. I personally ordered to subsidize the electric price in Phnom Penh, which was about 20 million USD for that period. We then set out the policy of increasing expenses to generate growth and save workers from losing their jobs because factories may close down for lack of purchasing orders from the US and Europe. We need a package of money for use in training our workers, especially those without jobs, to gain new skills to find new jobs. These risks are happening at the same time.
In 2011, there was a war at the border and a heavy flood in the country to cope with at the same time. We had to face these situations when the financial and economic crisis was yet to dwindle. These were the risks or force majeure that no one could have known in advance. These risks require leadership skill to manage them. This is example of risk management in national level. Everywhere and every level, family included, must be prepared to any risks at all. At family level, it may have unexpected case of losing immediate family member, though old age and chronicle sickness could be something to prepare for.
Officials Found in Leadership and Work Methodology
In the course of doing all the phases, there appears to be two types of officials. The first group of officials is those who settle the problems on the spot. I mean leaders of provincial, district and/or institutions who actually take measures to deal with the issues facing whether it be drought or flood or others. We need this group of officials. A second group, who would first report to senior level and secondly leave all the blames on junior officials for similar situation. I urge you all to keep this in mind. Some of you will definitely become leaders since one third of the provincial governors have retired and more will continue in the year to come. Everyone should strive to become the first group officials.
One way to assess what is going on is information. If we do not have clear information, data, plan, etc. we will not be able to organize certain plan of action at all. We may face failure and I have seen many already. I may give you an example, in the political stalemate of 2003 and 2004, the alliance of two parties was convinced that the Cambodian People’s Party would split and they would benefit from that. It was because of wrong evaluation of the situation that they all failed. They thought the Cambodian People’s Party would break, but it was they, who could not hold together. That is one example of misjudgment or wrong evaluation or assessment.
A Superstitious Call from the Opposition
I may tell you something from last night. It was after nine a.m. There was a call to one of my phones that I do not often use. The call was so repeating that I had to pick it up. From the other end I heard the voice ‘please do not put me off. It is not a wrong number. I want to ask Samdech if it is true that (1) your son Hun Manet will take over the post of President of the Cambodian People’s Party should Samdech Chea Sim pass away? (2) At your house in Tuol Krasaing, the soul of commanders of the Great Country (former Cambodia) had taken the souls of Hun Sen and Bun Rany because there had been three rounds of light around the house.’ They said I was so shocked and ran to the Royal Palace to seek help from the remains of Preah Borom Ratanak Kaod.
I would just tell the person that his power has not yet reached its peak. Would you believe that? If my soul was taken away, would I be able to stand here before you? How could they use this superstitious belief to deal with me? Has he not known the Khmer Rouge who hated me to the bone had finally died in the forest and some are in prison? If you want superstition, I still have some spirits that protect me. I already found out who you are and I just warn you to keep the current position of the (opposition’s) head of the working team in Svay Rieng province since there is a fierce competition now between the old and new ones.
Rule of Law and Independence of Court
You may ask Deputy Prime Minister HE Nhek Bun Chhay (of Funcinpec Party) about the miscalculation in 2003/4 that I have told you. They were of the opinion that the Cambodian People’s Party would split but it turned out to be different. The Cambodian People’s Party is not a nightclub but a political organization. The Party led the struggle against, and won over Pol Pot, while ending the war using win-win policy. It led the socio-economic development from the time when the people’s income was nil to now over 1,000 USD, from not a single Riel in the bank to over three billion USD in foreign reserve and from Phnom Penh was a ghost city to one of congested traffic. I would just tell the person that wrong or made-up information and psychological war is not the foundation for proper policy evaluation.
I brought this up just to give you an example for what I just said about making careful evaluation and basing on facts and not on psychological propaganda. We need to know where our weak and strong points lie. Like in boxing, we should learn about our opponent’s strength and weakness. With regard to the people, we also have to figure out what they need. For instance, the proclamation of the priority policy – water, road, electricity, human resources – formulated based on correct analysis of information and correct evaluation. In this instance, I would have your attention to the fact that some people, who is self-exiled, claimed he would come back, possible with a foreign leader’s plane. Whether he comes or not is not within the obligation of the Royal Government. It is purely legal matter.
They may not mix up between telling the Royal Government to conduct rule of law and observe the independence of the court and asking it to intervene in the legal process to release a convict. We cannot mix up political with criminal issue at all. The Paris Agreement was in fact something to have negotiation because there were various warring factions. This is a legal matter. Leaders of the Khmer Rouge have to be in jail. I would urge our officials to work on concrete plan or political platform, while refraining from issuing inapplicable policy just to take advantage of people’s support to win the elections. In Europe, countries have started to be pragmatic on their policy. Political leaders in those countries used to compete in the elections with promises made to increase salary, and when they bumped into crisis, they have to increase tax while reduce salary. They have to implement austere measures, reduce salary while taxing more. Some rich people in France have to move elsewhere.
Pumpkin Seed Officials
I have a piece of advice for everyone – do not make yourself officials of pumpkin seeds. I told this story a couple of times already, including here. The King gave seeds of pumpkin to various officials to grow. When it is time to harvest, there were four types of officials concerned. The first group of pumpkin officials told the King they had brought him so many pumpkins but the guards did not allow them through. The second group told they also grew them but did not picked the fruits. The third group told the king the rats ate all the seeds and the fourth group brought the seeds and gave them back to the king saying they used only three seeds. They could not grow them because the seeds were boiled before giving out to them.
In this case the worst type of officials are in group one as they not only cheated the King but also abused the guards. The second group was trying to get themselves excuses though they were not sure if it was true or not that they grew the seeds. It could either be true that the rats had eaten the seeds, as the third group told the King or they also knew the seeds were boiled, but dared not tell the truth. The fourth type of official is loyal because they tried them out and knew right away that the seeds did not grow. That is food for thought. We all should avoid being the first-group officials who for own gains could make bad report of others. I urge you to refrain from this kind of competition. Do not pick off the bud or lock one’s feet to get other to fall.
Issues of Reforms and Spokespersons
We have put out so many reform projects starting from anti-corruption, public administrative, legal and judicial reforms, the armed forces to those of the public financial managements. The Royal Government has now issued a tariff of services for national and sub-national institutions in providing service for the people. They should follow the price chart and perform better role too. The vital records offices, where officials issue certification of death, marriage and birth, should make efforts to go through the price chart while serving better by bringing the demanded certification to them. There is nothing wrong in doing that. There have been some problems so far. Let’s now make effort to ‘keep solidarity but fight for one’s own opinion at the same time,’ i.e. we must guarantee our solidarity but we also have to strive to get rid of inactive points or mistakes.
The Cambodian People’s Party issued a list of candidates for the fifth legislative term of the National Assembly’s elections. The list leaked out to outside community and some commentators picked on that and blamed us of ‘building up a dynasty.’ Let me remind them that there are 123 seats in the National Assembly. So, plus 123 reserved candidates, we have in all 246 or 250 candidates. We cannot just take anyone. I would take this time to remind the spokespersons to be careful in their job. There is a need to provide information but the provision of information should be careful and refrain from providing wrong information. Some people made comments on what I said without even listening or looking at the fact.
There was a time Surin Pitsuvan, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Thailand and members of ASEAN troika in 19987-98, came to see me. The ASEAN Troika then issued a declaration about some politicians being killed before the elections. At the time, Cambodia was not a member of ASEAN yet. I asked from where he got the story. He said he read it in the news. I said how he could base his work on what the press had said. There have been other cases too. We should verify the sources of both out-going and in-coming information. We respect and value freedom of speech/press, but we need to verify if what they write or broadcast is true.
For example, some people commented on what I said in Batheay district a few days ago about what might happen should the Cambodian People’s Party lose the people’s support. Members of the CPP who are currently paying for thousands of projects throughout the country would decide to stop funding those projects. They commented that the road construction project would freeze. No one is going to freeze those projects since they are from national budget. Some of the presses purposefully twist what I was saying. They wrote that if the Cambodian People’s Party lost the elections, the construction of the national road 6 would stop. I think this sort of press would not have readership in the future.
Appointment Interventions – Denied
About intervention in appointment so and so, it has to stop now. We all must follow the rule. This should not only be in the ruling party but across the board. Take for example we are reviewing the term of the governor and deputy governor of the city/province and district in May. I already made it clear whoever writes me a letter to intervene on behalf of so and so I will keep those letters in a blacklist. The Ministry of Interior will check all these and they will ask for my opinions or for my approval.
In this regard, I wanted to bring up this problem involving HE Kim Sophirith and Mao Muni. They met me twice and requested for intervention twice too. HE Kim Sophirit is now a member of the National Assembly. They were introduced by HE Ngo Sovan to see me in Takhmao in order to request permission to join the Cambodian People’s Party. They always have letters to intervene for so and so to take so and so positions. HE Kep Chuktema, Phnom Penh mayor, could have remembered that Mao Muni, then Sam Rainsy Party’s MP and now Vice President of Human Rights Party, came to see me and sought my intervention for his relative in the Ministry of Economy and Finance to take the post of Phnom Penh Public Works Office.
I would like to remind you to get rid of these inappropriate acts. If you work hard, you should make advancement yourself. In my life, I make my advancement myself and always have people who support me. I never depend on so and so to reach this rank and the Cambodian People’s Party still uses my name as candidacy of Prime Minister. Today I have talked about a topic, which may not be adequate or relevant to you but you may take it as a recommendation that we are not masters but servants of the people./.