Vietnam was once lauded for its COVID-19 response, becoming a poster child for South-East Asia in the early days of the pandemic.
But the health crisis in the one-party communist state provided ample opportunity for corrupt officials to line their pockets.
A far-reaching scandal involving overpriced COVID-19 testing kits has seen high-level figures expelled from the party and charged with wrongdoing.
This week, Nguyen Thanh Long was sacked from his position as health minister and arrested after becoming embroiled in the multi-million-dollar case.
He is the latest in a long line of officials netted by the country’s “blazing furnace” anti-corruption campaign.
Hanoi Mayor Chu Ngoc Anh, a former minister of science and technology, was also expelled from the party and arrested.
They are being investigated over abuse of power in connection to the COVID kits, but it Is not the only instance of pandemic corruption in the country of 100 million people.
In April, Deputy Foreign Minister To Anh Dung was arrested for allegedly receiving bribes when organising repatriation flights for Vietnamese nationals stranded abroad.
So how did the testing kit scandal come undone, and can the anti-corruption campaign mend the public’s damaged trust?
Alleged price-gouging and profit
The $240 million scheme saw health officials allegedly bribed to supply hospitals with overpriced test kits manufactured by Viet A.
The kits were marked up by 45 per cent, costing about $US20 ($28) per test.
The head of the company reportedly confessed to paying $47 million in illegal kickbacks for the tests to be purchased at the inflated price, making a $29 million profit.
It was a marked fall from grace.
The development of one of Vietnam’s first COVID PCR test kits — a joint project by Viet A Technology and the Military Academy of Medicine — was a source of great pride in the country.
The kit was completed in just one month and tests were being deployed in early March 2020. It was initially seen as one key to the country’s early success in keeping COVID-19 at bay.
At the time, company director Phan Quoc Viet said more than 10 countries were interested in purchasing the test kit, including Australia, and Viet A was later awarded a medal by the state President.
In April of 2020, the Ministry of Science and Technology claimed the Viet A test kits were approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization (WHO).
But this was false. The WHO later issued a public report saying the test was “not eligible for WHO procurement”.
Further, it was revealed earlier this year that Viet A had imported 3 million cheap rapid test kits from China between September and December 2021, and passed them off as locally made.
What is the ‘blazing furnace’ campaign?
Never in the history of the Communist Party of Vietnam have so many officials been arrested and convicted of corruption, according to Hai Hong Nguyen, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Futures at the University of Queensland.
Dr Nguyen said hundreds of officials, including dozens of members of the powerful central committee and even members of the Politburo, had been arrested and prosecuted in recent years.
It is under the auspices of Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong, who launched the “blazing furnace” anti-corruption campaign in 2016.
“He used the image of dried timber and the furnace … when we put whatever kinds of timber or wood into the furnace, it will be burnt away,” Dr Nguyen said.
Dr Nguyen said it was a symbol of the party’s commitment to stamping out graft, adding the party saw corruption as a threat to the survival of the regime.
“That’s why the party had to punish those who committed corruption,” he said.
“People see that the government has the power, and they gain the benefit of … the sacrifice of the people — it’s unacceptable.”
He said a one-party state, without independent checks and balances or a free press, combined with a health emergency, created fertile ground for corruption to run rampant.
Nguyen Khac Giang, a researcher at Victoria University in Wellington, said the Viet A scandal was “a classic example of state capture”.
“They have a private company colluding with very high-profile state agencies and state officials to manipulate a state policy, which is zero COVID,” he said.
“And then they have this monopoly to provide the test kits around the country of 100 million population, which is really huge.”
He said government officials had been accused of abusing their power to enrich themselves or others, creating a huge scheme of price-gouging and corruption.
He said accusations of corruption were particularly egregious during a public health crisis, as people in a pandemic were more reliant on their government to protect them.
In relation to the repatriation scandal, Mr Nguyen said many Vietnamese people living overseas during the pandemic were migrant workers who needed to return home due to a loss of income or because their family members were terminally ill.
“But then when they wanted to get on a flight to go back to Vietnam, they had to pay a very inflated price to get home, and because of that many of them couldn’t go back to Vietnam in time for their own emergencies,” Mr Nguyen said.
He said the same could be said of the Viet A scandal, as people had put their trust in the COVID-zero approach.
“So they keep testing and testing without questioning the motivation and without questioning the effectiveness of those measures,” he said.
“But then once they realised that it actually didn’t serve the overall wellbeing of the Vietnamese people, but actually served the very few elites and state officials and to enrich their own pockets, they, of course, felt enraged.”
Finding ‘someone to blame’
While the arrested officials will face court, the judicial system is not independent from the government.
Dr Nguyen said the swift punishment of those allegedly embroiled in the scandal was a way for the government to demonstrate it took the issue seriously.
Mr Nguyen agreed, but said there was also an element of scapegoating.
Vietnam did not record any COVID deaths in the first six months of the pandemic and managed to halt a second wave after an outbreak in Da Nang.
But it was a different story by mid-2021, when the devastating Delta wave was spreading across Asia, and the Omicron variant saw a spike of more than 200,000 daily cases in March this year.
At the end of 2020, Vietnam had just 1,500 cases. Now it has recorded more than 10 million cases and 43,000 deaths.
“Now is the time to find someone to blame for all the mess of this inability to move the strategy from zero COVID to a ‘living with COVID’ policy,” Mr Nguyen said.
“I think it serves as a way for the government to legitimise itself in the eyes of the of the public.”
Dr Nguyen said while Vietnam had made strides in combating corruption over the past decade, the success of the campaign was hampered by the lack of independent mechanisms.
Mr Nguyen agreed, saying that by trying to solve corruption by removing corrupt people but not fixing the structural problems, “it’s impossible for Vietnam to actually move forward”.
He added there were some parallels with China’s anti-corruption campaign under President Xi Jinping.
“[In China] the anti-corruption campaign was initially very welcomed, but then gradually, increasingly [it was] being used as a tool to clean up opponents of your factions, and used as a tool to consolidate power, especially by the police and by the repressive forces,” Mr Nguyen said.”
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