Burma Prepares to Debate on Its First Budget Plan

February 12, 2012                                    

Naypyidaw, Burma. Burma’s fledgling parliament is slaving over its first budget, a daunting task for the inexperienced body in a country where the army has long been used to dipping into state coffers at will.

It has been almost a year since Burma, after decades of military rule, embarked on a political transition with a new nominally civilian government.

For the novice lawmakers in the nation’s twin-chamber parliament — dominated by soldiers and former military personnel — that means once impenetrable dossiers are now open to fierce debate.

“We have a broad framework, but it is very complex,” said Aung Tun Thet, an adviser to the United Nations in Rangoon, referring to the draft budget prepared by President Thein Sein’s government in December. “It’s a very refreshing step forward. It’s a demonstration of the checks and balances between the legislative and the executive.”

During the long era of successive juntas, the budget was prepared by the government alone.

Although the army-backed ruling party holds an overwhelming majority, lawmakers have embraced their newfound power — debating laws, voting and shuttling bills between the two chambers.

Some of the spending plans will surely please the West. According to the Ministry of Planning and Development, the plan is to double the education budget and spend four times as much on health as in the last fiscal year.

It would be a welcome change. Burma has a record of committing just $7 per year per person to health care, a mere 1.8 percent of the total budget, one of the lowest health-spending rates in the world according to a 2009 UN report.

But the government is also seeking to spend 15.33 percent of the budget on the armed forces.

If the draft budget is approved, the army’s slice would officially rise 50 percent to $2.35 billion compared to the previous year.

But debates are made even more difficult because the earlier budgets were never published, de facto considered as state secrets.

Aye Maung, an upper house representative and chairman of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP), one of Burma’s ethnic-based political parties, said that he was ready to approve the request for more military spending.

“We can accept it,” he said. “But we don’t know whether this number is realistic or not as we don’t know the previous budget.”

In 2009, defense intelligence organization Jane’s Sentinel estimated the army budget to be around $1.5 billion.

But cheerleaders of Burma’s recent reform efforts promise the army will not be given free reign in this year’s budget.

Toe Naing Mann, son of former junta number three-turned lower House Speaker Shwe Mann, is one of them.

“The chief of the army does not want to participate in politics,” he said about Gen. Min Aung Hlain, who is one year into his new job.

The money discussions are expected to last a few more weeks. The result will be the first budget debated in parliament since the first post-colonial military coup in 1962.

Agence France-Presse

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