Malaysia will set up a tsunami alert centre in the prime minister's department. The cabinet minister in the PMD, Dato' Seri Nazri Aziz, explains why: "We were all caught by surprise on Dec. 26. We do not want that to happen again." The Jakarta summit on the tsunami response agreed to set up a regional tsunami centre linked to the worldwide tsunami alerts. That is not good enough for Bolehland. "We do not want to be dependent on the regional centre." Why? So that the centre would be unmanned as Malaysia's early warning systems were on December 26, when the tsunami struck?

In this, the UMNO youth is far smarter than UMNO. Its secretary-general and acting deputy president hijacked the supreme council and decided the two top posts should not be contested. No decision was taken. But does that matter in this wonderful land of Bolehland? That Dato' Seri Najib is an interested party and he should not be a party in this is of course cheerly ignored. All it need was to land UMNO in a deep mess. Pak Lah needs the victory more than Dato' Seri Najib, is the weaker of the two in the estimation of the UMNO ground. He had laid his hopes on the March general elections, but the allegations and accusations of cheating, including by the Election Commission, made a mockery of what would have been an astonishing and astounding electoral victory. The advantage he expected, from that victory has dissipated.

Since this is Bolehland, he ought to know of his BN colleagues: the UMNO president, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, three weeks ago; the MCA president, Dato' Seri Ling Liong Sik earlier in the year; the SNAP leader, Dato' Amar James Wong; and to come: the Gerakan president, Dato' Seri Lim Kheng Yaik; the Sarawak BN leader, Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud; several BN mentris besar and cabinet ministers. In fact, only a handful of BN leaders ever leave on their own; all others were forced out in indignity. When the people move, nothing but nothing can stop them.

HOW DO YOU KNOW, IN BLESSED Bolehland, how effective is a chief executive officer of a company listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange? He can be an inspired corporate leader more interested in turning out a steady profit while charting into unchartered waters with such care and thought that widows could exchange their paltry savings for its shares, and be assured of a regular income. But that is not the Malaysian way. There are such companies - the Kuok group of companies to name one - whose CEOs would never make the list of the highest paid but whose shareholders are only too happy to invest in their companies. Indeed, they would be offended if they were.

That are in one way unfair questions: in Bolehland, the project managers are glorified office boys who co-ordinate the work of the architect, civil engineer, electrical engineer and JKR, for which they get between 4 and 6 per cent. It is a neat way for favoured cronies to be given a handout. It is not required of them to be competent. A Treasury official formed a project management company called Ummiross, and promptly given the contract to build 200 schools, which she promptly handed over to contractors for a four per cent fee. Here project management is one more layer of payments to be made. If the project fails, and it is big or important enough to make it to the newspapers, another round of handwringing begins with no intent to address the root cause. The National Front (BN) faces an uphill task to retain power in Kedah at the next general elections and one of the numerous reasons is that the cronies shortchanged their mentors in the internationalisation of Pulau Langkawi. All those buildings and institutions they built can only be sustained at annual cost of hundreds of millions of ringgit.

EVER SO OFTEN, MEN (AND WOMEN) OF substance and politics bemoan why Malaysians do not read. One would have to scour the length and breadth of Bolehland to find a decent bookshop. Those who run it soon give up the ghost, as only a handful would not, you could soon get anything but books. The books are of course there, but it has nothing to do with the reading that these illiterate worthies bemoan. You could find books that teach you how to be a management guru, on flower arrangements, how to cook like Escoffier in ten easy lessons, hagiographies hastily put together in anticipation of an award or other similar rubbish.

This is the UMNO and Malaysia Pak Lah inherits. He sits atop a constantly shaken greasy pole, and the supports he has to keep him there are, in the Bolehland pattern, of substandard material. What Dr Mahathir should have done is to have said, clearly and unequivocally, that Pak Lah is in charge from the end of the general assembly, that he would only be a guide, philosopher and friend, there if he is needed, but otherwise clearly staying out of the way. But, if the rumours are correct, He plans a cabinet reshuffle, perhaps as early as Wednesday. Two names are mentioned. Both deny it. But both are clearly Mahathir men. One hopes it is not true. But Dr Mahathir has stayed in office as long as he has for his unquestioned ability to be several steps ahead of his enemies and detractors.

A FOOL AND HIS MONEY, THE APHORISM goes, are soon parted. But not, it seems, if the Malaysian ratings agency, RAM, and the Labuan financial offshore authority, LOFSA, has anything to do with it. A Malaysian business man in Melbourne, Dr Adrian Ong, set up a company called Commercial IBT Pty Ltd, operated it from a business service centre there, built up, RAM and LOFSA confirms, shareholders' funds of USD 6.9 billion, successfully kept hidden from Australian financial institutions, its regulatory authorities, its financial press of this financial giant in their midst. Not RAM and LOFSA. Both gave CiBT their seal of approval, and this non-existent Australian bank is now a deposit-taking financial institution in Labuan. Mark you, RAM and LOFSA investigate all applications as stringently and thoroughly as the best of its counterparts elsewhere in the world. So it claims. In Bolehland, that must be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. So it turns out.

And for the life of him, Dato' Kayveas cannot understand why he is not yet a cabinet minister. After all, in his estimation, the PPP is a far more important party in Malaysia than either the MIC or the Gerakan: he claims it is more Indian than the MIC and more multiracial than the Gerakan. He has a point here: it is not how you do or how strong you are that matter; it is how you tell the others about you. Style is more important than substance. He has learned the Bolehland tricks of getting ahead but he has much to learn before he can sit at the feet of the two masters he want destroyed.

There is an immediacy in election petitions. But not in Bolehland. These petitions are head often years after they are filed. When it should be disposed off expeditiously. The BN decided this is not enough and now has an appeals procedure that takes it up the Federal Court. An election petition these days come with huge risks. If an election petition succeeds, the sitting candidate can be forced to pay for the costs of the petition. The aim is to beggar the candidate, especially if he is from the opposition, by making him pay the costs of an election petitition if it succeeds.

Nothing is as straight as it seems in Malaysia. Why did Tan Sri Basir and MAB go through this needless expense? Why should they spend about RM500,000 for a "gas guzzler", as Dr Mahathir describes it? Given the way corporate figures operate in Malaysia, he would not spend his money, even for his beloved Prime Minister; the chances are that MAB paid for it. So, why? When MAB built the Sepang International motor racing circuit, it was for the usual Bolehland consideration: RM260 million or thereabouts in seed money to start construction, one-thousand acres of choice land in the vicinity, and other perks. After it was built, MAB, which cannot be trusted to run an airport, found, naturally, it could not a race track either.

But trifles like these, in which Samy Vellu shortchanges the Indian community at will, are irrelevant and forgotten if there is money to be made and speeches to be given. Twenty four years as MIC president gives him, in his considered opinion, Godly attributes -- what he says is what matters, not what he does. When the Ministry of Education orders AIMST to stop classes because the laboratories are not ready, he spins a story of why. The simple fact is there is no main contractor yet for the AIMST campus in Sungai Patani. The company he appointed did not, in the best Bolehland tradition, know how to construct a hospital; it failed to deliver. After clearing the ground and letting it idle for months, it walked away.

MGG: When YTL Power acquired Wessex Water plc from Enron in May, its leading light and one of Bolehland's brightest and the best, Tan Sri Francis Yeoh, could not but hyperventilate about how British expertise could not match Malaysia's, how Malaysian business is at the cutting edge -- though increasingly it looks like the chopping block -- of innovation and savvy. It is clear from the official statement from Scotland Yard that the Wessex Water plc chairman, Mr Charles Skellet, is arrested for receiving a bribe of one million pounds sterling in the Malaysian takeover of Wessex Water for 1.24 billion pounds sterling. The YTL Group is implicated. The Guardian reports this morning that YTL England is helping Scotland Yard with its inquiries.

On 21 July 2002, the UMNO Overseas Clubs Alumni Organisation (Pertubuhan Alumni Kelab-Kelab UMNO Luar Negeri) had its third annual general meeting at the UMNO-owned Putra World Trade Centre's Dewan Merdeka. The night before, the UMNO president and Malaysian Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, graced its annual dinner. What is this body? The name tells it all. Alumni refers to the former students of an alma mater. That it gets into the name of this UMNO lobby group is yet another creative licence from the spin doctors of Bolehland. Or are UMNO clubs overseas educational institutions? But when you strip it off to its basics, it is nothing more than an UMNO-sponsored pressure and lobby group formed for no reason than to support UMNO to offset the continuing desertion of Malays and its members for PAS and other non-UMNO parties outside the National Front (BN).

Six years ago, serious effort began to build the dam. But the cost rose from RM100 million to RM470 million. When the DAP state assemblywoman questioned this sharp increase, the state government dragged its feet from then on. But the state was more concerned if Koperasi UMNO could be a partner in the consortium building it than the state's needs. When it called for tenders, the then finance minister, Tun Daim Zainuddin, objected to that. He wanted a close tender confined to three companies controlled by cronies. And directed that the contract be given to a company called Roadbuilders. Roadbuilders, like many a Bolehland conglomerate, has no experience in building water dams. It had been given the contract to build the pipeline across Malaysia's Central Mountain range to pipe in water from Pahang to Selangor, but it remains unbuilt. Todate, nothing has been done. Meanwhile, the Perbadanan Air Melaka's (Malacca Water Board) serious concerns of a water shortage were second guessed by the state and federal governments, and the matter left to fester.

But if he was all the New Sunday Times said he was, why did he arrive two days into the conference, spend a day there for his two sessions, visit the site of the World Trade Centre, now renamed Ground Zero, and speed off to Argentina before the sessions ended. Argentina? Yes, Argentina. He has a ranch there, where he spends his holidays. Would not the world's movers and shakers riot like they did in Buenos Aires at being denied of a chance to meet the world's main mover and shaker? We live in Bolehland, remember. What is is not what is but what one insists is. It is not the Prime Minister's sin alone. It is a national disease, fanned and encouraged by those who exist to praise Dr Mahathir to the skies.

As any lawyer will tell you, this notice is not worth the paper it is printed on. It is not a party to the contract between Eco-Transit and the drivers. If it has a problem with Eco-Transit, it shoud resort to the courts or negotiate with it for redress. It cannot threaten those it does not have a contract with. It certainly cannot refuse to supply gas to any one who comes to it for it. Even if Petronas owns the vehicles and the driver is behind in its hire purchase instalments. And Mr Lim cannot advertise as he did for something he does not have. But in Bolehland, might is right; and those with might would break or misuse the law to threaten and establish their right.

When one drives into the car park of a Malaysian skyscraper, one expects to pay more than one should. Park the car for 70 minutes and expect to pay for two hours. And hourly charges rise even more the longer one parks. One has learnt to live with it, this Bolehland official habit of petty thievery. Malaysia allegedly is at the cutting edge of technology, but we do not miss a turn to tell the world we are on its chopping block, not its cutting edge. She cannot sort out minor quirks in the system which enables car park operators and others to squeeze the public even more. The Universiti Sains Malaysia now worries how a Malaysian could be awarded the Nobel Prize, without the underlying climate for serious research into the sciences. We believe that if we talk about it, we would get it.

The public therefore adopts the usual time-honoured Bolehland method of conflict resolution: money changes hands, and the matter resolved without hassle. The government insists this is corruption, the public resort to it for its efficiency. Since the recipients are civil servants, no one talks of it. The government proclaims its high ideals and ignores the corruption, the public view that as low morals in a corrupt government. This inefficiency breeds corruption. which spreads to the PCB, and its companionn body, the Anti-Corruption Agency. It is the public, not the official, view which decides if its does its job. Dato'

The thin line between the professions and the trades disappeared a long time ago when schools "maximised" profits by charging an arm and a leg. The professions came with it an implied public service, difficult to get in but affordable; the trades did not have such restrictions, and allowed any one to enter it, but it is often expensive to get into. That is no more. It costs half a million ringgit and more to earn a professional degree, almost as much if you went into the trades. So, if the tradesman can advertise, why should not the lawyer? In Malaysia, clout counts. In the law as much as in carpentry; though the carpenter would now be seeped in debt for billions of ringgit building a bridge from nowhere to nowhere. Malaysian lawyers are now business men, and insist that they should, like business men, advertise their wares. The Bar Council dragged its feet for year, not really addressing the issue but, as one has come to expect in Bolehland, on the irrelevancies of the argument, and tie themselves in knots.

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