NEWS ANALYSIS, AUGUST 25, 2001

According to Asia Pulse, Vietnam Communist government is starting a large project so-called "e-government." The leaders hope the system will be of great help to administrative management, reduction of paper works and bureaucracy. Hanoi Ministry of Trade has held many conferences concerning the related matters and imminent problems they are to face with.

Asia Pulse quotes Hanoi Deputy Trade Minister Le Danh Vinh as saying that the Communist government is hatching sweeping plans to move its services to the online world. Luong Cao Son, director of the Office Informatics and Telecommunications Center said that 6 public service departments in Saigon and Hanoi would be fully computerized and networked by 2005 as part of the first phase.

According to Son, as reported by Asia Pulse, ordinary people will be able to access public information through the click of a mouse and there will be no paperwork, no queuing and no bureaucracy. The Hanoi government will develop a database on law, trade, land, finance, imports and exports, population and civil servants' profiles, and accelerate the development of e-commerce.

In the Asia Pulse's report, David Barn, an IBM executive, said that the move would help public employees become more productive, reduce duplication and manage data better. It would help the Vietnam Communist Party's government lure more foreign investment, improve policy decisions through better information gathering and analysis, and bolster public technical skills.

While some government officials appear optimistic, common opinions of many others and people outside are greatly concerned about a lot of serious problems. The biggest problem is the awareness of local authorities on the project, too new and complicate for them to understand and to act accordingly.

Many provincial leaders, i.e. provincial party secretary, and district leaders as well, seem to be ignorant or uninterested about the project. They are not active to boost the effort, to authorize sufficient funds for installing, maintaining, upgrading and procuring necessary equipment. This causes incompatibility between the systems in the network.

Local authorities in the Communist regime enjoy an autonomous ruling power, much greater than that of their counterparts in other non-Communist countries. They may refuse to comply with plans initiated by the central government, except for political security matters. They always have thousands of reasons such as "regional situation and demand" to act or not.

Though many local leaders are from younger party ranking members, their average formal education is still low, few of them went beyond primary school grades. Their education of Marxist-Leninism does give them good help with their leadership in domains regarding guerrilla warfare, political security and people mobilization. They could find no good help from Communist teachings concerning free market economy and such new concept as e-government and e-commerce.

But without local governments' active participation, such e-government would certainly be existing in the sheer rhetoric.

Another problem will be technical personnel. Though a lot of information technology engineers have graduated in recent years, there is a great shortage of capable experts due to low grade training. Moreover, key jobs in state sector are given mostly to experts who are faithful party members and party leaders' close relatives and people having good connections at a high level.

Asia Pulse also notes that engineers would rather look for jobs in Saigon or Hanoi than in the provinces. This aggravates the problem of personnel in localities far from the two large cities.

Other problems include high telecommunication costs and poor infrastructure. But to many Vietnamese, the most difficult problem that has rarely been referred to by the press is about the information collecting phase.

The Communist administration in Vietnam has been notable in its fabricated statistics. Under the Communist regime, reports by almost all agencies, installations, units, branches at all levels in the government are not reliable. The situation has been made worse by the excessive and often-abused power of local party leaders. They are prone to exaggerate their achievements in statistics reports whenever possible.

So far, no measure against the bad practice has been effectively implemented. In the 1980's, there were articles regarding the issue published on state-run newspapers. One of the articles said that if statistics reported by Thanh Hoa province had been true, this province would have had a great surplus of rice. In fact, people in Thanh Hoa have always suffered from severe shortage of rice. But so far, the article still remains an article.

The administrative systems would also play a part in the ill performance of the e-government plan if it should be established. Each locality or agency might invent its own way of doing paperwork. No unified procedures even a systematic archives keeping is expected in the near future.

Besides, government finance and budget transparency that is a must in market economy, won't become a credible reality. The VCP governments at all levels have to provide large budgets to support the operation of the secret political security and to maintain the party activities. It should be noted that Hanoi would never disclose the scale of salary paid to party officials at all levels by tax payers' money, including the "unlimited services and spending for a Politburo member and his or her family."

It is clear that the VCP government in Hanoi has taken the right direction, but whether it will be successful is another story. With such situation, even the most sophisticated hardware and software could only produce false information, even if the central leaders are really willing to improve their government activities to render better services to the Vietnamese people.

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