Cronyism

ONE famous local businessman explained that cronyism in Myanmar started in around 2000 at interview with foreign media broadcasting. Since then, there have been increasingly cronies culture within our home land. Some famous cronies have ruled the business cycle of Myanmar with the aid of authority who are either related to them or corrupted by them to get favorable permits. Anyway, the word 'crony' has been popular among people, regardless of you like or dislike. Whatever state projects arisen to be done, people need not guess who is going to take it because those cronies are automatically qualified to grab those opportunities. The most profitable projects like natural resource extraction would be passed to their companies without regarding the benefit of country or people. As a result, they have become privileged and super rich in not only region but in the world. Let it be.

In Myanmar, people used to think of their cronies as a negative image because they think they are playing state own resources as like their heritage and take it by grant. Now government changes a bit from previous military junta to civilian parliamentary government. The political landscape has been changed visibly and cronies keep succeeding their business from government's privatization efforts. They are only few who could effort government tender to own once state owned properties. As country begin to open and suddenly become Asian's latest frontier market. It make cronies become even richer from their fixed assets recently taken from government through unfair tenders. Recently, cronies approached to main opposition party's social related charity show and got criticized. 

In fact, every democratic countries are having such business society less or more. The party leaders need to get financial aid from such super rich people while they are trying to campaign to get people's vote. Their battle to get power will not come true without country's richest men help. In return, the ruling party direct or indirectly favor those people who had supported them while they were powerless. It show some form of inter-dependency between them. We got to accept the trend with the broad-vision. If the world's leading democracy countries cannot step out of those trend, then seeing such thing in Myanmar which is very young in democratizing process is not a surprise. I personally think that giving a favor to local Buddhist cronies is better than seeing Muslim/Chinese immigrant's dominants on our home soil.