Myanmar: Fuel Price Hike

Thursday, August 16th, 2007 @ 00:24 UTC

by Preetam Rai

Countries:
Myanmar (Burma)
Topics:
Governance

Dawn gives a Burmese middle class person's view of the fuel price hike in Myanmar and wonders how the daily wage earners will come with the hike.

1 comment

  • Than Tun

    Fuel price hike in a country where the military regime is the only one that will not have an impact with the hike. None of them has to pay for it and the soldiers who drive their cars get extra income by siphoning off petrol to sell it in the black market.

    How can they know any price hike will make a huge impact on common man? The need to raise the price is mainly because of their mismanagement. Accountability is not their strongpoint anyway.

    They all are very selfish even though they may preach you about the love of your country. If they can save a few cents out of their pockets they will not hesitate to use the government car to go miles to buy a bag of peas if it’s cheaper. There is no consideration in how much he is spending on petrol (because he doesn’t have to pay for that.)

    Are there anyone in Burma who one can call ‘middle class’? To me there’s only two classes now; one that wears trousers and the one that do not. The trousers people that includes the Chinese businesses that do business with the military in a relation they called ‘quanxi’. The one who do not wear the trousers are the poor and helpless who are groing in numbers each day with the so-called middle class shrinking to almost out of existence.

    This could be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Days of turmoil are not that far now.

    # 2007-08-30 at 13:37 pm
    Reply to this

Join the Conversation

Authors, please log in »

Guidelines

  • All comments are moderated. Do not submit your comment more than once or it may be identified as spam.
  • Please treat others with respect. Comments containing hate speech, obscenity, and personal attacks will not be approved.