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Malaysia insists KLIA is overloaded at maximum efficiency

The transport minister, Dato' Seri Ling Liong Sik, insists Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the most modern when it was commissioned in 1998, is near bursting. Fifty thousand passengers a day fly in and out of KLIA, he told reporters, with 50,000 bags or an average 3,000 men and bags every hour of the 18 hours KLIA stays open. And why the then most modern baggage handling system breaks down so frequently. But there is a quick fix: get 1,800 plastic tubs at RM70 each, and double what it has, put individual bags in individual individual tubs, and a problem which evaded resolution for years is resolved instantly. Of course, more would be bought so "there will be one bag to one tub." Since the total amount for this is only RM126,000, not the billions of ringgit it would cost to build another airport, this would be tendered. The cronies would find the pickings not worth bothering.

There is more. KLIA is built to handle 25 million passengers a year. It now handles, according to Dr Ling, 18 million. So he would no doubt recommend a new spanking airport, at least double the capacity of KLIA, so that Malaysia would continue to be at the centre of Southeast Asia's transport hub. To ferry the 50,000 visitors daily, and assuming each plane carries 300, there would be about 170 planes flying in and out of KLIA, or about nine an hour. Yet, when Dr Ling and his official hypsters come to check on the system, they pick on a day when only 40 flights land and take off. Why? Did these 40 flights land and take off in less than four hours?

The minister and his team lies. There is no other to describe it. I have been in and out of KLIA several times in the past five years. On most times, it resembles the quiet of the graveyard infested with the occasional drug addict or lovers out for a quiet place to smooch, with no more than two or three planes to be seen. Unless he refers to the rats and the ants and others of the animal and insect world, it could not handle 50,000 passengers, 50,000 bags and 170 flights daily. Even the Haj flights to Mecca cannot account for 50,000 passengers a day during the season. KLIA is empty most of the time, life picking up in the evenings and early nights, when most daily flights take off and land. The shops beg for customers. The taxi services are starving for customers that the government finds creative ways to prevent other taxis than the concession holder to pick up passengers. In other words, KLIA is a collosal failure. If the minister is to be believed, KLIA would have carried 50 to 60 million passengers since it was commissioned. Has it? No! The ERL link to KLIA would travel at peak capacity. Yet most ERL trains leave and arrive at KL Sentral near empty.

KLIA is a white elephant. It was not meant to be any other. It was built not for a transport hub or a modern airport but so public funds could be diverted to private pockets. It was known at the time, and one man, I believe his name is Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, is in gaol in Sungei Buloh because he objected to a fellow cabinet minister's minions making off with billions of ringgit over KLIA and the Bakun hydroelectrict project in Sarawak (that was given to a Malaysian business man with no money, no experience, no clue to what a hydroelectric project is, but a friend of the Prime Minister, the usual way contracts are handed out without tender to Bolehland business men.) It was built in stealth, the government insisting the project is better in private hands, and the more inefficient the government. Since all this is done without parliamentary or political checks and balances, it just went out of control. One waits for the day KLIA and MAB is brought back into government hands, as the buses, and the trains and MAS now are.

But the spin continues. Dr Ling goes into gobbledygook. The system-related problems have short and medium term solutions, which with the cooperation between KLIA and MAB's information technology department can easily "rewrite the system and update the software used to run it." He does not even know the terms to bluff his way through. For an airport running smoothly and handling 50,000 passengers a day, there is no reason to panic at the prospect of 62,000 in an odd month, 12,000 more expected for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit later this month. "Malaysian Airlines, MAB and all the staff know that this is an important conference and it is seldom you have leaders from 114 countries coming to Malaysia," says Dr Ling. "Our performance must be tip top so we are coming to grip with all the solutions."

If KLIA is competently and efficiently run, what does it matter if it is 114 leaders or 114 horse-trainers from Argentina or 114 teachers from Sabah? It should be business as usual. But it is not at KLIA. It cannot handle 40 flights, 5000 passengers and 6000 bags a day without systems breaking down. When a few more flights than the 40 a day lands, the system breaks down. But this is ignored. Then when ministers talk, they take us into fairy land: what they say and tell us is the truth, all else, opposition carping. The National Front (BN) shortchanges not the people, how could it when it has the people's interests at heart, but the public purse.

What happens at KLIA is a failure of systems. One sees evidence of that is every government department. We have a dengue epidimic because the anti-malarial departments in city councils and local government authorities have been wound up. We rush into modernity on impulse, not on careful thought. We close down departments because it would not make us look modern, and when that is reflected in the ground, it is swept under the carpet, and the government goes into denial. A deputy minister's wife is in hospital with dengue, about a hundred have died of it, but the government would not admit it for fear of tourists staying away. The judicial system is in tatters. So, the civil service, and every arm of government. Now that reality strikes, the ministers now go into hype, talking of not what is but of what would be if they were as efficient as they claim to.

The KLIA debacle is not new. Go into any government department, and you would more like these. We are told we do so well that nothing can stop us from taking out place amongst the industrialised nations of the world in less than two decades. But this is not the reality. How are we going to pay for all the huge structures we build so inefficiently and for no reason than to make some crony, sibling or courtier rich. So long as this is our raison d'etre, we lurch at speed into the likes of Nigeria and other oil rich nations that thought the oil tap could not ever be shut off. But we have debts our grandchildren cannot repay.

Malaysians have become so used to expect such high faluting statements that no one bothers about it. Reporters who should be asking tougher questions do not bother. Why become an enemy of the minister's handlers by being denied the right to occasionally speak to the minister alone? But we are the laughing stock of the world. It is probably too late for taking stock of the parlous and frightening morass we are in. A nation that forgets the centenary of the birth of its founding Prime Minister is apt to forget other more important events and policies. When we do not have a world view, how could we handle such matters as an efficient international airport? But must the minister tell Malaysians how stupid he and his staff are? But we get the pressd and the politicians we deserve. Dr Ling, by any standard, should have been sacked a long time ago. But he is kept on. And so he makes statements which devalues the cabinet he serves in. But does anyone care?

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