Getting HCMC Moving
Or trying to, at least
Good morning! Welcome to the latest edition of the Vietnam Weekly exclusively for paying subscribers, written by Ho Chi Minh City-based reporter Mike Tatarski.
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I’ll have more on the impact of Typhoon Yagi on Friday, but the powerful storm’s devastating impact continues. As of this writing the death toll stands at 82, mostly from landslides, with 64 people missing and over 750 injured. (These numbers don’t appear to include a landslide that buried an entire village in Lào Cai yesterday, leaving 15 dead and 105 missing as of the evening.) Nearly 50,000 houses have been damaged, millions are without power, and on Monday a bridge over the Red River collapsed with vehicles on it. Rivers across the north have passed flood levels not seen in over 50 years with more rain on the way, threatening Hanoi, where traffic has been banned on historic Long Biên Bridge, and surrounding provinces. The widespread damage from the coast to the mountains is shocking to see. For more on the situation thus far, check out reporting from Reuters, AFP, and Channel News Asia.
Yagi will, unfortunately, be one for the history books. If you want to help, Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation is accepting donations for emergency assistance here.
On to the news.
This article includes original reporting from a former reporter at VietnamNet whose name isn’t included per their request.
While provinces across northern Vietnam deal with disaster response, life goes on here in the south. For Ho Chi Minh City, that means more gnashing of teeth over the inability to spend money on key projects.
This is a topic I’ve covered many times here for a reason - HCMC’s performance is critical for Vietnam as a whole, and the country will not be able to meet its socio-economic goals if its commercial center loses its competitive edge, as some experts have warned.
Plus, high-level officials continue to discuss it publicly.
Last week, Vice Chairman of the HCMC People's Committee Võ Văn Hoan lamented the fact that many public agencies do nothing while waiting for decisions from above.
Last month, Hoan said the city will struggle to attract private investment if it keeps following a “public management mindset” that requires permission for every step even when private finance is involved.
According to VnExpress International, he provided an example of “an independent hospital where 99% of the funding comes from private investments and only 1% from public funds. Despite being predominantly privately funded, all finances are managed as if they were public, complicating routine activities such as infrastructure repairs and staffing changes, which require government approval.”
City chairman Phan Văn Mãi has joined the chorus as well, recently stating that the heads of many municipal departments don’t actually know what the tasks of their respective departments are since they assigned them to their deputies. VnExpress quoted him saying: “Many tasks are handled and resolved daily by the acting deputy director, so the director is unaware of them. This is not acceptable."
Last week, he announced that four high-profile project management boards badly missed their promised budget disbursement for August: