MGG Pillai Commentary View

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The Ras Adiba affair becomes curiouser and curiouser

The former TV personality, Ras Adiba Radzi, collected public funds under false pretences, spent it all and more, and is in hiding as questions swirl about her. She needed RM300,000 for a major operation in Sydney to reverse her paralysis. The Prime Minister and others came acalling, and soon RM90,000 more was collected. It took less than a month, and is the first time in Malaysian history that individual sums of RM100,000 were given for a public appeal for medical help. She at first said she got only RM340,000, but after her return from Australia, insists it was only RM240,000. She could not pay her final bill of RM40,000, which the Malaysian consul in Sydney and a student met with their credit cards. When she returned last week, she said she was under orders not to talk about her treatment.

But she cannot be silent. For the more is revealed about her treatment in Sydney, the more it turns out she took Malaysians for an expensive ride. And if she were you and I, she would have been run out of town. For on the face of it, she cannot qualify for public help. She is said to own four apartments, one rented to a Singaporean singer. But she admits to only one: a RM700,000 apartment in Suasana Central, in the KL Sentral complex in Brickfields. although the sales and purchase agreement I saw says it costs RM1.09 million. She admits to owning a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Though she is also said to own a Porsche and a Mercedes Benz. The more she shuts up, the more the questions. Paradoxically, the more she talks, the more the questions. She now insists, though she is reluctant to show the bills, all that money is gone and she is in debt, besides.

The money was collected for major surgery to alleviate her paralysis, but she went to Sydney for a routine surgical checkup and physiotherapy. She went with her aunts and her doctor and her visit was rushed such that the Australian high commission had to send an officer to the airport with the visa. Why? Especially since no orthopaedic surgeon examined her in Malaysia about her condition. She says she cannot reveal the bills for fear of embarrassing some people. How does revealing the bills embarrass anyone? Unless there is more to it than we are told.

Ethical and moral questions arise. The public was asked to contribute direct to her bank acounts. Now she says she would not explain how it was spent, except that it was all spent. Who authorised her to take her aunts and her doctor to Sydney? Is it Pantai Medical Centre, where was when she made that agonising call for help, and the doctor she took along? How did Dr Mahathir and others go along with the scam? Dr Mahathir and his wife, both doctors, would have known of her condition when they visited her. Yet he kept quiet. Why? Was she part of a National Front (BN) plan to show how caring the government is? And what better symbol than this attractive lady in agonising pain. Is it yet another example of good intentions turning bad because it is carried out with thought or plan? Is this concern for the Trengganu twins, separated in a Jeddah hospital, and the publicity given to them, a way to wriggle out of the Ras Adiba mess?

When public donations are asked for, they are usually collected by a newspaper or a neutral body on his or her behalf. But it was not in Ras Adiba's case. The Malay Mail asks why Ras Adiba Radzi did not plan for her hospital bills. The Prime Minister and government leaders are as much implicated in this scam, for that is what it is, as much as Ras Adiba. This caper has made it impossible for needy persons to get public donations for medical treatment. They must go through a bureaucratic hurdle before asking for public donations. What it means in practice, however much it is denied, it would favour the Malay applicant. That is how it works in practice in any activity involving the government, and I cannot see how it could be different in this.

There is more. The government went into privatised medicine for what threatens to bring it down. It was not so the public would benefit so much as ensuring that the cronies, courtiers and siblings of the Establishment got a share of the action. The usual names are there. Tun Daim Zainuddin and his cronies; the bin Mahathirs; the usual assortment of insurance agents, McDonald hamburger franchise operators, lorry drivers, and other assorted characters of Malaysia Inc whom the BN government believes would have the United States and Japan quivering in their boots at this new economic star in Southeast Asia. All it did was to turn Malaysia's excellent medical and public service into an object of stock market speculation, indifferent and expensive medical care, with more unable to afford decent medical care. The other beneficiaries are former MPs and their families, state assembleymen and their familes, civil servants and their families, who can still get the best medical treatment -- and the best is as good as the rest of the world -- for a token. The widow of a civil servant dead 20 years ago went into hospital for treatment, paid less than RM10 for what would have cost you and I several hundred times more.

Because Malaysia had had a good medical and health service, there was no need for private health insurance. Now that many need, it is priced beyond their reach. The private hospitals are there to make a profit as quickly as possible. One hospital charges RM10 for every call for help. In another, a man who went in for a slipped disc underwent a whole series of unwanted and unnecessary tests that raised his hospital stay to several times more than it should have been. But we are told we have the best medical system in Southeast Asia, and proof of that is in the droves of people who fly in for their open heart surgeries and other complicated medical ailments.

However, as the Ras Adiba caper has shown, it shows the government has failed in its primary aim: the health of its people. The caring society it insists it wants is yet another slogan, there for electoral effect and to be ignored after the victory. It is education and public health that determines how well a country fares. It is in these two areas, the government fails horribly. There are special rules for those well connected, and none for those who are not. The Ras Adiba caper only reaffirms that. She would probably be allowed to get away with what she did. But she should not be.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my