IF THE MAYOR HAS been defamed in a book, he should have taken the author to court. Instead, the police showed they could do as they liked, decided that defamining the mayor was a threat to national security, began investigating two senior City Hall officials and the author, and jailed them for about a week - like common criminals. They should have done so after the mayor has won his action in court, if he dared take it. Even then, the police acting, as they have done, is illegal. They were illegal in arresting the former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, and the criminal case against him, for which he spent time in jail, is illegal. The then Inspector General of Police, no less, have apologised for beating him up and so have several people. Unless of course the government tells us clearly, and passes the required legislation, that it is an offence to defame either politicians or civil servants. That law would create problems on the ground, where it would be resisted, rightly. But because of the government in full control, with no opposition in sight, it do as it liked. The mayor is attacked because although he is a favoured civil servant, he should not have been appointed. The government is trying to cut dissent in the Civil Service, and uses the police to stop it. The book, in Malay, which upset the government writes of the newly appointed mayor's sexual affairs. He has not denied the allegations. Nor has he filed a defamation suit against the author of the book. So, who authorised the police to act as it did? Pak Lah must act against these man who lodged the police report, and the police for having harassed the author and the two senior City Hall officers. Since he is responsible for what happens in the government, he must take responsibility. He cannot act as his predecessor, Tun Mahathir, by repeating the allegations after he refuses to prove the allegations in the Anwar Ibrahim trials. He is now facing a defamation action by Dato' Seri Anwar for repeating the sodomy allegation after he has been cleared by the courts. But has he been investigated by the police? Why not? Is he lower in rank than the mayor of City Hall? Pak Lah cannot act as he pleases. He should have had the police investigate the former prime minister. What has not the police treated him as he treated the author and the senior City Hall officials?

HISTORY IS REWRITTEN EVERY day in Malaysia. Books and articles are written every day to perpetuate the myth, but the parties in the National Front was not formed for Malaysian independence. It has changed over the years as they have not now. After 50 years in power, it begins to rot, particularly in the head. It has now become an avenue for political advancement or business contracts, its aims, as it describes them, forgotten, and the people get frustrated. Today, any one offering a new political agenda that will allow the National Front in power is in danger of being turfed out of the coalition. It allows no new blood in except those acceptable to the leaders. The National Front exists for the benefit of its leaders, not the people its parties nominally represents. It, and its predecessor, the Alliance, has turned the country into two groups, the rulers and the ruled. The rulers know it, and show its concern by action that means nothing. The National Front believes it is in power and control, and the civil servants are their lackeys. The civil servants do not accept this division as the people, but neither can do anything about it yet. Today civil advice is given to the National Front minister on the basis that if it cannot do its work, it can at least do what the National Front does. So the corruption which the National Front leader, UMNO, initiated in Malay and Malaysia has spread to the Civil Service. It is now every man for himself in the civil and government service. There is no question of debate or discussion before a civil servant is appointed to what used to be an elective post, for instance the Mayor of Kuala Lumpur. Other civil and government servants are there to pull him down. The fallout from the sacking and jailing of the deputy prime minister opened the floodgate, as it were. From then on, those holding office, whether politician or public servant. had to be 'clean' in his personal life as well. The books written about the new Mayor of City Hall and the Mentri Besar of Selangor is a case in point. There is endless discussion, in the press, parliament, and elsewhere, about the official being harassed by his colleagues or by writers who write about their misdeeds, but we are not given the official's rebuttal of the allegations against him. Otherwise, he would have sued his detractors. It does not matter whether he is politician or public servant. The political system in this country has become moribund as the UMNO-led National Front rewrites history. What happened to the original parties in the Alliance, the predecessor of the National Front, affects Malaysia to this day.

The IGP's son is arrested. He is released on bail. The IGP must resign. It does not matter if the son is eventually acquitted. The son is arrested for asking RM11,000 for a RM250 licence. The Malay Mail reports yesterday that RM39,000 has been demanded from one potential hawker. The system is rife with corruption. The IGP's son is doing what everyone with authority does: being the middleman in the exchange of cash from those lower down with the peole that matter in City Hall (Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur). City Hall does not allow direct applications from hawkers for the sale, only through middle men. On is an electician who makes RM2.4 million and justifies it by saying that he has to give most of it to people in City Hall. This will inevitably continue when the aim is not the licence but the money behind it. The newspapers report the superficial news, and the arrest of the IGP's son is, and leave out the main issue of it. Why are we being asked to change the identity cards? Because there is money behind it. I am asked to change my identity card once again, and will be asked to change soon enough to another system. Besides the money that changes hands in the Civil Service, it costs one many several days daily wages to change the identity card. Why cannot police stations be the centre for changing identify cards?

We see this lack of moral scruples everywhere. Putra Jaya is built to ensure the vanity of one man, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, The major government departments are now situated in Putra Jaya, and to get there costs money which the people going there often do not have. The civil servants and politicians in UMNO have got used to Putra Jaya, but not the people in whose name they govern. People who used to go the government departments in Kuala Lumpur often now have to go to Putra Jaya, costing money just to get there. A taxi driver told me he charged RM30 for the trip to Putra Jaya. The government departments are far apart and it is almost impossible to walk. In the past, it would be a loss of a day's wages; today it is that plus about RM100 to deal with a government department. The emphasis on money, the corruption in the Civil Service, police, almost every government servant is what has characterised it. Today laws are passed so that corruption can flourish. The petrol price would be raised any day. Explanations are given how the government is losing revenue by raising prices. But the impact of it is the people will pay higher petrol prices. No one in government is serious about resolving the problem of the people, for that would cut into what they collect for themselves. It is puasa month now, and you saw the traffic police unusually active. You see them everywhere, and they collect from you where in the past they collected later. The official reason that would be given to this is that all this is not true. But the government is run for those in government, and they have to protect themselves, do they not?

Datin Seri Rafidah will not resign. Nor would Tan Sri Isa Samad. So, the public attention is on the Customs and Excise Director-General, Tan Sri Halil Mutalib. But he would not resign either. He would be allowed to go on retirement as scheduled, early next month. But Tan Sri Halil should never have been in the closed service, the customs and excise department. Not only was he bought into the service from outside, he was also given an extension by former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. He looked the easiest to get rid of, but as the story unravelled, it became a fight between the present Prime Minister, Pak Lah, and the former Prime Minister. Pak Lah cannot force him to resign although he could spread the corruption bit on Tan Sri Halil and damage Tun Mahathir. But it did not work as he planned. His 'boys' had accepted favours from Datin Seri Rafidah, Tan Sri Isa Samad, and Tan Sri Halil Mutalib, and if he did not close their cases quickly he would be hurt. The public perception that he is against corruption is not true. For when he was faced with corruption in his cabinet and his Civil Service, he could not act for that would have moved the UMNO warlords against him, those he would rather not, and so he took the easy way out, and went after Tun Mahathir. But that backfired. For it would have affected his 'boys', and he could not afford that. The mainstream newspapers, all owned by one or other Barisan Nasional newspapers, and all beholden to the Prime Minister, all today its readers that Datin Seri Rafidah should resign, that Tan Sri Isa Samad should resign, that Tan Sri Halil Mutalib should resign. But they are all in office, will not resign, and the newspapers find creative reasons why they should remain in the jobs.

A new culture is in force. When personal computers came to be widely used, programmes were on hand to keep the man-in-the-street ignorant. I attempted for years to get redress, through the Prime Minister's Public Complaints Bureau, a complaint about official highhandedness. In about 1997, ten years after I began my quest, I had to give up in frustration. Every request to the PCB is personal to the officer in charge. So, I found myself going to different offices of the bureau all over Kuala Lumpur as the officer originally in charge moved up the Civil Service ladder. But each visit to find out is an obstacle course, wasting hours in waiting rooms before being told that the officer is not free to attend to me on the date and time he had specified or that he is in a meeting from which he cannot be disturbed. I must have given out at least half a dozen sets of the complaints and letters, as often when an officer attended to me, the files went missing.

I have no doubt that he is all Pak Lah describes him as. He is (or rather, was) an exemplary civil servant until he became indispensable as chief secretary. Otherwise he could not have reached where he is. But once he has this giddy power of control of the Civil Service, invaluable perks that others can only dream of, privy to secrets denied others, the absolute faith reposed on him by the prime minister in whose name he wields untramelled power. All this disappear once he leaves office. So it is in his interest, though not the nation's, to cling to power. He becomes a prisoner to his, and his, wife's desire, to remain amongst the best and the brightest of unalloyed and untramelled Malay power for as long as possible. We shall not discuss how a man indispensable to his predecessor is now to him, or more important, if he is a pawn in the middle as the two protagonists outstare the other?

The government system is rotten to the core. It reflects what happens in every government department. Political control of it has introduced rigor mortis into the system. This is made certain by the four ills inherent in the system: Malay racism, Islamic fanaticism, corruption and incompetence. To complicate it, several groups run riot to implement it to the exclusion of every other. Pak Lah, even if he means what he says, is impotent. He would be destroyed politically if he should be foolish enough to try. He does not, nor do any one else, know the powers ranged against a return to the politics and the Civil Service when both were looked up to. The mess in the TNB happens in every government department, and government-linked company. It now spreads to the private companies, when the politicians move in for the kill there, too. It is helped by political and Civil Service arrogance and naivete.

This lacklustre attitude seeps through the Civil Service, the unformed services, reinforced with no checks and balances. Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib had the systems under their control, but looked the other way. Their gross negligence would compound if they do not now insist upon exemplary punishment for these deserters from duty, every single one of them.

But the more he, and others, justify it, the more the danger to non-Muslim celebrations in the future. He, and they, cannot sustain official policy, which is systematically demolished by an errant minority that holds to ransom the Malaysian Civil Service, the upper ranks of which are wholly of Malays, and who prove their mettle not by competence but by their commitment to Malay racism and Islamic extremism and by how many non-Muslim civil servants they sideline.

Malaysia would be independent for half-a-century in three years, but there is little to suggest we are better off now than in 1957. The rule of law is a pastiche of what it was, the dictates of authority defining it more than the law. The Civil Service has lost its bearings, the once incorruptible now told by the prime minister, no less, not to be corrupt. The police has lost its well regarded place in society, is seen as the goon squad of the government, and corrupt to boot. The armed forces is no position to fight a war, its generals more interested in the perks of office and arms purchases than to defend the country. Parliament and state assemblies are but rubber stamps, with no debate of substance. So moribund is it that it caught all by surprise when BN members of parliament demanded questions of a cabinet minister in a tone that in Malaysian democracy is the opposition's.

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' SERI Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, warns the Civil Service not to be corrupt; the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, requires Malaysian politicians only to sing the government's praises when overseas; the deputy finance minister, Tengku Putera Tengku Awang, admits UMNO-controlled National Front (BN) states have mismanaged their states so badly that they cannot survive without federal help. A Petronas transfer of RM25 billion to the federal coffers, we are told, is proof all is well, but that its reserves have been depleted by the government's use of it as a private bank for the hundreds of billions which Putra Jaya and other official extravagances cost. But the government continues to insist its treasury is so flush with cash that tens of billions are set aside for arms purchases and other pump priming projects for no reason than to assure us all that this country is run well.

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