As it turned out, many local governments, particularly provincial administrative organisations (PAOs) and tambon administration organisations (TAOs), are now being run by dubious characters, including greedy politicians and local thugs who won their seats through vote-buying financed by national politicians to whom they pay allegiance. For many in the PAOs, municipalities and TAOs, the motivation is not to serve the community, but rather to get their hands on the huge community-development budgets.

By fiscal 2006, each PAO, already granted a high degree of autonomy in formulating policy and in the planning and coordination of infrastructure and development projects, was given a budget equivalent to 35 per cent of locally collected taxes. The PAOs are supposed to work closely with other local government agencies, including municipalities and TAOs, on how best to spend this huge portion of state revenues to improve people's lives. But the people serving on local governments either pilfer the huge amount of public money or award lucrative local community-development projects to any unscrupulous contractor who will offer them kickbacks and then deliver shoddy work.

Self-government by local people is a concept that was experimented with for decades before it was finally implemented, expanded and expedited after the 1997 Constitution made it mandatory for the central government to divest its powers and build up local governments to take over much of its duties. The problem is that the people whom these local governments are supposed to serve are still too politically apathetic and ignorant to play a proactive role by providing input on local needs, initiatives and problems, while at the same time monitoring their performance. Without checks and balances, there is no way to ascertain that local governments spend taxpayers' money wisely.

Grass-roots politics is supposed to be the bedrock of a truly democratic nation, but local government can be made to serve people only when people know how to assert their citizen's rights effectively.

One of the most important areas of decentralisation is education. The big question is whether the Kingdom, its teachers and local government officials are ready and equipped for the big change. Will the change spawn corruption at community schools, which have until now been quite professionally run from the highly centralised Education Ministry? Will it push already poorly equipped rural schools further behind in terms of quality of education? These important questions must be carefully thought through before decentralisation is allowed to proceed to the next level.

In the new charter, the drafters must find ways specifically to require future governments to make sure the decentralisation process is designed to educate and encourage people at the community level to participate in the full spectrum of self-government, from planning, policy-making and decision-making to tax collection and policy implementation. And the whole process must meet sound governance and public accountability standards.

But it cannot be emphasised enough that no matter how well-written the new constitution is, there is no substitute for people learning the right lessons about what went wrong with decentralisation and how it was been exploited to score cheap political points. Instead of promoting local government to serve citizens and meet their real needs, Thaksin used his populist policies to reduce the rural masses to mere clients who came to depend on his political patronage for crumbs from the table, bereft of dignity as citizens in a democracy.

The decentralisation process, which was stopped in its tracks in favour of his sinister populist schemes, must be relaunched, complete with greater public participation and adequate safeguard mechanisms to make sure it fulfils its intended purpose.