Episode #124: Power to the People
“The history of access to energy in Myanmar is very much influenced by the geography of the country, and by the political priorities of a Bamar-dominated government.”
So begins Guillaume de Langre, who worked for several years in Naypyidaw as an adviser to the Myanmar Ministry of Electricity and Energy (MOEE). De Langre describes the challenges of providing electricity throughout the country over the past several decades, and the role that access to energy is playing in the current democratic revolution.
For many of us who have hardly known daily life without one or more power outlets within reach, it’s hard to even begin to fathom how much everyday life and business are impacted by a lack of electrical access. From the opposite perspective, de Langre explains how those who have lived without electricity for so long can’t even imagine how they will best utilize the newfound access. “If you ask someone who doesn't have electricity, who hasn't lived in an electrified life yet, ‘How are you going to use it? What kind of appliances are you are you going to buy? How is it going to change your daily schedule?,’ many are not quite sure how to respond. You realize that once people get electricity, it opens up a world of possibilities for them that they hadn't even foreseen before.”
Yet from Myanmar’s early days of independence, the country has been “very much dark,” according to de Langre. He points to nighttime satellite pictures of Southeast Asia from the pre-2000s in which almost the entire landmass of Myanmar is completely black. The only exceptions are the main urban centers of Mandalay and Yangon, and then from the 1990s, tourist areas such as Inle Lake and Bagan. He explains, “The Tatmadaw showed that it wasn't really interested in developing access to electricity to much of the country.” During these years, the military was so busy fending off various ethnic insurgencies and the occasional democratic uprising that is simply didn’t see any value in overseeing the development of an infrastructure. With no attempts made to connect rural villages to a national grid, military leaders told municipal authorities they were on their own in developing their own power sources, a herculean task that no regional committee could possibly manage. “It was just not part of their definition of what governance was supposed to be,” de Langre says by way of explanation.
While this may appear to be gross mismanagement to outside observers accustomed to governments that provide at least a modicum of services, de Langre says that one has to try to understand the nature of the military leadership at that time. Simply put, “The Tatmadaw never saw itself as a proactive agent of development of the country.”
Yet even so, it may seem strange that the military did not want more a more prosperous economy, which would have required a more efficient and widespread electricity grid. De Langre explains that the military followed a Soviet style plan of state-owned industries where actual productivity was never the goal. “In order to understand the Tatmadaw’s economic thinking, you have to understand that first and foremost, it’s based on extractive industries, not productive activities, and those are very, very different economic models. The model is based on extracting natural resources, and… you can do that without a massive national grid and without building massive dams.” This style of governance essentially trapped Myanmar’s workforce by limiting its potential for productivity, which caused the economy to stagnate.
Things changed in 2000, when building roads in addition to providing access to electricity suddenly became a priority. Although de Langre can’t pinpoint exactly why, he suspects it was part of the so-called “Road to Democracy” that the military had been promising. “A change of mentality among the ruling elite of Myanmar that the central government does have a role to play, and actually a complete reversal in their perspective, where they started centralizing everything, and expanding access to electricity became a monopoly of the central government,” he notes.
Following this initial shift in the 2000s, both the Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi administrations tried to move the country to more productive industries, which required a more efficient and expansive grid. This brought about a rapid transformation, with state-owned enterprises being transformed, overall reforms in MOEE, and World Bank funding channeled towards electrification. To many foreign professionals in development fields, the first step in improving life in Myanmar was ensuring a functioning light bulb in every home. The changes this brought were instant and tangible.
“It was just completely a change of paradigm that suddenly electricity was coming to communities in the country,” de Langre explains. “And there was this sense of excitement that you could feel, whenever you went to communities and you asked them, ‘What is the one thing that is going to change your life and that you're most looking forward to?’ And you would just have hundreds of people screaming at you ‘Electricity!’ So there was this expectation, this optimism that ‘It's coming, it's coming, it's finally coming! We've been waiting for it for so long…’”
But when villages finally did get connected, usage rates went up far higher than anyone had expected, further straining the system and causing the MOEE to lose hundreds of millions of dollars through its energy subsidies. Explaining the system during these transition years, de Langre says, “If there's any discrepancy between the price at which the companies are selling electricity to the government, and the price at which the government is selling electricity to you, then that's the subsidy. That's the gap between the cost of supply, and the income per unit that they that they collect.” In fact, de Langre notes that the government ended up spending more on energy subsidies to wealthier customers than even on education, and more than anything else in the budget other than defense; this ultimately led to sharp price hikes in 2019.
This led to exploring plans for alternative energy sources, like solar or imported power plants, several of which were in place on the eve of the coup. However, once the military’s illegal seizure of power threw the country into complete instability, investors balked at what had become high-risk projects overnight. Moreover, resistance attacks took place on several dams, as well as on power lines around Naypyidaw, followed by harassing anyone who attempted to repair them.
Further compounding the military’s energy-related problems, many people have been refusing to pay their power bills to help cut off funding to the military as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement. De Langre notes that in the three months following the coup, only 2% of Yangon residents paid their utilities! And after a few bill collectors were killed, some now show up in villages with an escort of armed soldiers who threaten to cut off all power then and there unless the debts are paid.
Many observers have noted how the 2021 Democracy Movement is markedly different from uprisings in the past because citizens now have more to lose, namely, the tangible benefits they gained in the transition period, such as improved education, job opportunities, and overall human rights. For de Langre, it is no different with electricity, with millions now losing the easy access to energy they had come to depend on. For this reason, he feels if there is any strategic thinking at all in the military, one of their most essential tasks would be restoring power to as much as the country as possible. On the other hand, he doubts this would be a top priority, reminding us again of the military’s ambivalent stance about infrastructure and improving the lives of the people.
To de Langre, the key point now is managing expectations on the part of the Burmese people. In other words, after years of anticipation about what electrification would bring, finally getting it but then quickly losing it after the coup, what are people thinking as regards the future of energy access? De Langre has heard that many are optimistic, thinking that an imminent return to democratic leadership will restore the plans that had already been in place. But it’s more complicated than that. “What the coup did was that it created this giant disruption,” de Langre notes. “[There has been a] massive shock in a sector that now has been destroyed overnight, and it's going to get take a very long time to rebuild. So what needs to happen right now among businesses in Myanmar is an adjustment in expectations about the quality of electricity supply, they can either adjust to that by investing in rooftop solar, they can adjust to that by investing in mini-hydro turbines, and if they're rural businesses next to a river, they can invest in plenty of alternative solutions.”
Sadly, de Langre also believes that even if the military was defeated, “it would still take years to fix the damage done to the energy sector by the coup… It will take years for companies to trust again and to lower their perception of risk.”