I think I got this all wrong. I thought we just had a bunch of incompetents running the place. Understandable, in a way. I mean, when over a hundred of your first choices are banned from public office for five years, you're bound to see some really ropey substitutes take to the field.

 

That, I assumed, is why we've got a doctor and nurse in charge of the nation's finances, a judge responsible for the schools, a teacher looking after the country's natural resources, and a political scientist running agriculture.

 

And apart from these cases, where we all have to hope that On The Job training really does work, we have the straightforwardly dodgy cases. The owner of a public works company will be giving out road-building contracts. The Minister of Public Health fondly dreams that he's richer than Big Pharma. And the Minister of the Interior seems to think wars on drugs are won by increasing the body count over last time.

 

Not forgetting of course, our dear PM, whose ability to forget history, even when he was there at the time, turns the country into an international laughing stock. He can't even remember his own face in a photograph if the other person caught on camera happens to be a certified tyrant.

 

But in a way, this is what comes of using the lottery of an election to choose the country's leaders. Yes, we could and should have something better, but well, that's just how things turned out.

 

Not so when we come to appointments. And here we see a novel recruitment policy at work. A notorious night-club brawler is given the job of persuading the youth of the country not to get blotto. A police officer involved in human rights violations is tasked with protecting people who have been victims of, er, human rights violations by the police.

 

The principle seems to be that if we want someone to safeguard something, then you should find someone who has a proven record of stealing, corrupting, violating or otherwise buggering up whatever it is we want to safeguard.

 

This strategy will become more apparent as further abrupt transfers and appointments are made public. Prachatai has come into possession of certain documentary evidence that shows the way the national administration is drifting. The selection of winning candidates for even the most peripheral, nondescript positions shows an alarming trend.

 

The coach of the national football team, for example, is about to undergo a change, according to documents leaked from the Ministry of Tourism and Sports. Experience in managing leading teams, professional coaching certificates, and even a career as a player at the international level, all count for nothing. The job is about to go to a "feller who knows some fellers in Hong Kong" so whenever you want Thailand to win, you just give them the nod, guaranteed, you could bet your house on it. Which they probably will.

 

The search for a professor to assume the chair of modern languages at a leading university has passed over candidates with prestigious degrees, long lists of professional publications, and fluency in a number of languages. The successful applicant is instead someone whose acceptance speech, according to a tape made available to Prachatai, consisted of "Well, like, I mean, yeah, I fink that's real nice, innit?"

 

The next Chief of the Marine Police is a person whose previous experience on water is restricted to the pedaloes on Lumphini Park lake. The Office of Road Traffic Management will soon be headed by a former driver of a Number 45 bus whose specialty was setting down passengers in the outside lane. And the Ministry of Culture will soon announce that the Director of the Office of Archaeology will be someone who is currently a current gang-leader of rag-pickers and garbage sifters at Soi Onnuj municipal dump.

 

But perhaps most surprising of all is the rumour that the position of Prime Minister will fall vacant much earlier than has been expected. Head-hunting has not yet started and so no applications have been submitted. But the search committee has already begun drafting the necessary qualifications. The first requirement, Prachatai is reliably informed, is a publicly verified history of repeatedly and consistently denying any desire to take the job.

 

I wonder who'll they get for that.

 

About author:  Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire). And if you believe any of those stories, you might believe his columns