Rear Window | The long goodbye!

Severo Portela

The PRC’s State Council – under Premier Li Keqiang – has appointed Chui Sai On as the next Macau Special Administrative Region Chief Executive. Chui received nearly 96% of the 400-member strong Election Committee to return as MSAR Chief Executive.
For those unfamiliar with the ‘small-circle’ method – inflated for this particular procedure – we had better recall article 47 of Macau’s Basic Law: “The Chief Executive of the Macau Special Administrative Region shall be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed by the Central People’s Government”. Whether you think it’s an anachronism or not, Chui’s election is constitutionally sound, as it would be even if the option to be followed were the implicit second: through consultations held locally. In both alternatives there is no mention of democracy or universal suffrage.
Now we should focus on the substantive matters arising from the transitionary political schedule: from today until December 20, the MSAR Executive, its chief and the soon-to-be-disclosed government team of secretaries go into a kind of a deferred period.
Even Chui Sai On, who succeeds himself with a second and final five-year term, has to cope with an acting group of secretaries and the day-to-day running of government business, plus, and at the same time, if not all at least some substitute secretaries in-waiting panorama. To make the overlapping recipe worse we have only to add the time factor to picture an overly long goodbye.
In this kind of situation, one would say that the next Chui administration is the talk of the town, whether it’s simple gossip or more informed insiders trying to guess, disclose or endorse the coming group of secretaries. And we would be wrong.
In spite of Chui’s hints of a substantial reshuffle, within the same model of five government portfolios, the name-game is scarce and played mainly in the shadows. As a form of amusement we’ll take for our own reading the solitary exercise Portuguese daily “Hoje Macau” did on the subject of candidates.
Omnipresent helping hand to Chui Sai On, Alexis Tam, features in three different scenarios of a five head government, making him the only one to have an indisputable place: the rule of probabilities points to the new Secretary Tam.
As solid as Alexis Tam is Lionel Leong in the Economy and Finance portfolio. Probably the nuclear office of Macau’s Government, the new Secretary would likely do better without the Tourism Bureau under his wings. As for the other incumbents, seasoned players believe that no one has a chance of keeping their positions, as well as the presumed pretenders aligned by HM: Ho Veng On and Andre Cheong.
The final line-up will depend on the hypothesis that the five-portfolio constraint has to be re-written in order to split the Administration and Justice sectors. Unfortunately the idea has been turned down!
Finally, we do have to say that what is more important than the redesign of government and the “who is who” in Chui’s team of secretaries is reorganization at the department level: replacements and mergers. The idea is to make departments, offices and other administrative entities more responsive to the secretaries and to the public and not to act as a buffer zone upwards and downwards.
In a metaphor for the political process,Typhoon Kalmaegi came as a reminder of what is to live between gusts and dead calm.