The teacher, Ms Thida Pyone, asked what would happen if she refused. “One soldier pointed his gun at me and said, ‘If you choose your money over your life, then don’t go pay the bill,’” she recounted.
For weeks, residents say, troops have been going door to door alongside power company workers to extract payments in major urban areas, including the nation’s two largest cities, Yangon and Mandalay. “A slide into poverty of this scale could mean the disappearance of the middle class — a bad omen for any rapid recovery from this crisis,” Ms Kanni Wignaraja, director of the agency’s bureau for Asia and the Pacific, said in a statement accompanying the report.
“In the past 10 months, the country has lost all its gains from the past 10 years,” said Mr Hein Maung, an economist based in Myanmar. “The cost of doing business has increased substantially. There is a booming informal economy of drug trafficking, illegal logging, money laundering and other illegal businesses.”
Myanmar’s shadow opposition government, the National Unity Government, has urged the public to stop paying for electricity. In September, it said that 97 per cent of people in Mandalay and 98 per cent in Yangon had done so, costing the regime US$1 billion by that point. Opponents of the regime have also targeted lesser revenue sources, such as motor vehicle payments, by not renewing driver’s licenses or car registration. Soldiers have begun trying to collect more money by stopping drivers at random and inspecting their documents.
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