It wasn't long ago (exactly five weeks to be exact) that most people thought nobody could really come up with any platform that could win the grass-roots vote better than Thaksin's Bt30 universal healthcare for every Thai citizen.

Who would have thought that Public Health Minister Mongkol na Songkhla, one of the much-maligned old bureaucrats in the interim Cabinet, could within days of taking up office declare a stunning new twist to what used to be labelled Thaksin's most entrenched policy? His alternative policy is to make it all free.

Coming from a veteran of the country's public health administration, Dr Mongkol's pronouncement certainly isn't pork-barrel politics. He has a one-year term as public health minister and he certainly isn't looking to get votes from the country's poor. His reasoning is clear and simple: the Bt30 price tag was there only as an election sloganeering gimmick of Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai Party. It was plainly a political vote-canvassing trick more than anything else. In fact, officials would tell you that the cumbersome paperwork involved in collecting Bt30 from every patient, instead of offering the service free, in the end cost more than the token fee charged.

The politicians exploiting this political plank to gain votes from villagers deliberately refused to tell the truth to the voters - that it's taxpayers' money that takes care of the health services under the scheme. And it comes to Bt2,089 per head per year. The previous government also very conveniently forgot to tell the people that the money didn't come from the prime minister's own pocket or his party's coffers. It's all our money. And it was scandalously squandered for one obvious reason: to keep them in power.

It's also typical of how the populist platform was conceived and run: the most talked-about programme was one of the most controversial, opaque and mismanaged. It was clearly lacking in good governance and accountability.

As Dr Kasem Watanachai, a privy councillor and former education minister under Thaksin's first cabinet, pointed out, the country's public health policy for the past five years had some disastrous effects on doctors, nurses and medical schools, indeed the whole medical community. There was never any genuine and realistic performance assessment because politics dictated every aspect of the operation. Good governance was abandoned, again because political consideration of the powers that be took precedence over national interests.

Dr Kasem is undoubtedly more qualified than most people to comment on the ill effects left behind by Thaksinomics. He was one of Thai Rak Thai's founding members. He was also the first education minister after Thaksin took over as premier five years ago. And when he left after only a few months in office, it was in disgust. When he said last week that the Bt30 medical scheme was nothing but "an election campaign's marketing gimmick", he was clearly speaking with the authority of an ex-insider.

Like most of the populist programmes trumpeted by the previous government, the egregious error of judgement in the implementation of the Bt30 health service wasn't in the declared intention to help the poor. The colossal mistake was in the deliberate political spin put on the scheme - to make it sound so simplistic and exclusive and that only a rich businessman with an overwhelming political mandate could wave this magical wand.

The secret of moving away from ruinous populism is not to make a clean sweep of all the wasteful and politically oriented projects. The most effective way for the Surayud government to engage the grass-roots electorate in a new, more substantial, more sustainable "sufficiency" initiative is to expose the five years of despicable "corporatisation" of politics, with one single purpose in mind, all the way from the top to the village level: the flooding of the villages with so much free stuff from their own tax money that they didn't ask any questions and stopped thinking for themselves.

Each of Thaksin's populist schemes must be placed under close scrutiny and an independent, fair and frank assessment of its real contribution to people's quality of life must be made as soon as possible and as honestly as possible.

Once the real cost-benefit report on all those pork-barrel projects (the Village Fund, One Million Cows Project, government-operated lotteries, SML grants, Bangkok's Fashion City, the Elite Card etc) is verified for everyone to see, the real task of building the foundation of a self-propelled, independent and self-sufficient grass-roots movement that interacts effectively and continuously within a genuine democratic system can earnestly begin.

When all is said and done, it will become clear that in a lot of those cases, it was not the populist schemes that caused the serious problems. It was the exploitation of otherwise worthwhile projects for the selfish political ends of a corrupt regime that brought about the tragic results.

The key guideline is therefore for the interim government to separate the wheat from the chaff and move on with a clear vision and determination.

In other words, get back to basics. Improve on the substance, engage the people in real development work and get rid of all the political puffery. Superficial, colourful packaging and short-term marketing gimmicks mustn't be allowed to replace the real crux of the issue: the quality of the product.

We have already wasted too much valuable time debating a proper burial for the ghost of Thaksin's populism. It's high time we moved on.

Suthichai Yoon