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A total of 28 Seoul city councilmen have been indicted at once for receiving money from Seoul Metropolitan Council Chairman Kim Gui-hwan during the 18th general election and the vote to choose the chairman of the city council. Four of the indicted councilmen have been charged with taking W2-W3 million (US$1=W1,121) for their help during the mid-April vote to choose the chairman, while the remaining 24 have allegedly took W600,000 to W1 million in early April, before the general election. There are 106 seats on the Seoul Metropolitan Council, so almost one-third of the councilmen have been indicted. This is unprecedented. The Seoul Metropolitan Council's image has taken a hard hit, and by-elections to fill vacant posts may be inevitable depending on the results of the trials.
All of the 28 indicted councilmen are from the ruling Grand National Party. The reason council chairman Kim bribed only GNP members was because there was no need to pay off members of other parties. Out of the 106 seats in the council, 100 are from the GNP. When a GNP councilman wants to become chairman, he only needs to bribe people in his party. This type of incident was probably not restricted to the election of the chairman. The Seoul Metropolitan Council has made several decisions that were hard for the public to accept, including allowing private crammers to operate at night, only to reverse them. There was little room if any for opposing views, since the lot of them belong to the same party.
This incident should be seen as the result of a monopoly in regional governments. A similar case is taking place in a ward council in Gwangju that prosecutors are investigating. Just like Seoul, Gwangju's city council is monopolized by a single party. A provincial council that cannot even keep itself in check cannot possibly keep a local government head in check.
Everybody will probably agree that corruption is the biggest problem facing our local governments. The reality is that customarily in our local governments, a political party is not a group that takes in public opinion, but the root of cryonyism and corruption. We must put limits on the system of nominations by the political parties in local elections and boost the number of proportional representation seats in provincial councils. Reforms of the local administrative system should also be discussed in this regard. There are less than two years left before the next local elections.
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