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Why does Johore Bahru UMNO want the irrelevant, frightfully costly RM2 bn Southern Gateway?

FEW KNOW HOW MANY MEGA projects there are. I think there are 19, although I can name but ten. A BN MP can think of eight, his Opposition colleague three more. The civil servant you think should know looks the other way when you ask him. It shows how secretive Tun Mahathir Mohamed was when he ordered them built. He wanted to build them to put his mark on Malaysia, but all he did was to bankrupt Malaysia. The only ones to benefit were crony business men, who built them at enormous cost, failed and bailed out with more mega projects. These parasitic capitalists cannot survive without fresh projects, and their tenure ended with Dr Mahathir's. Pak Lah had to be free of them, for these self-inflicted walking financial and commercial disasters could only pull him down. He inherited a bankrupt Treasury, cut, pruned or cancelled several projects; ignored the crony business men's call to be rescued, promised to reverse the Mahathir extravagance and bring civil service and politically accounting into fashion. He is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. So far he manages well. But for how long?

Politics complicates his plans. The Mahathir-baiter in UMNO and its supreme council and the Johore Bahru UMNO division chief, Dato' Shahrir Samad, much to everyone's surprise, supports the costly and irrelevant RM2 billion Southern Gateway. This would replace the 80-year causeway with a new 900 metre bridge, deepen the Tebrau Strait, build a new customs, immigration and quarantine complex, and a new railway station on a 38.6 hectare plot along the Tanjong Puteri coastline. This could not be done if Singapore would not demolish its half of the causeway. So far it has refused. When the Southern Gateway was first mooted, Malaysia said it would go its own way even if Singapore disagreed. But it was a mega project with no thought to economic realities or if it could pay its way.

The Southern Gateway is an afterthought after Malaysia was caught out in the series of calculated political and practical moves Singapore made to limit its CIQs to its borders. The Malayan Railway had its terminus in Tanjong Pagar, where Malaysian customs and immigration checked passengers into Singapore. Singapore moved is CIQ to Woodlands for the railway, but Malaysian insisted on staying put. Subsequently a deal was made over the valuable land on the island through which the railway ran. There is little talk of it now but Malaysia botched the talks and lost the land. The Malaysian who did is the former finance minister, Tun Daim Zainuddin. Malaysia cannot develop the land alone or jointly with Singapore. An agreement of sorts to do so was signed, but it is all but ignored in Kuala Lumpur. Why?

The Gelang Patah-Tuas bridge has opened a new link between the two countries. The Southern Gateway has another unmentioned aim: to allow water to flow through the straits for the first time since 1941, when Australian army sappers blew up the causeway - which until then had a drawbridge to allow free passage of ships through the straits - to deny the invading Japanese troops easy access to the 'impregnable fortress' Britain mistakenly thought Singapore then was. It was not, as later events proved, but that is another story. The Southern Gateway now is an afterthought. Johore feared that if the second link was widely used, Johore Bahru would become a dead town. There was even a suggestion that the Johore capital would be transferred to a Putra Jaya-like capital at the site of the capital of Johore Lama of the 16th century up the Sungei Johore. All that is, it now turns out, the rantings of politicians on the make. And so the Southern Gateway.

So why is Dato' Shahrir flogging a dead horse? He is linked to the former deputy prime minister, Tan Sri Musa Hitam. His political career began when in his twenties he was appointed his political secretary. Dr Mahathir sacked him from the cabinet a decade and a half ago for speaking his mind in the cabinet shortly after Tan Sri Musa resigned in 1987. Today, another protege is Pak Lah, who likewise was sacked from the Cabinet during the UMNO convulsions of the time when Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah stood against Dr Mahathir for the presidency. It led to the courts declaring UMNO illegal, and the removal from the cabinet of all who supported the dissidents. Tan Sri Musa is now aligned to the Pak Lah camp. So Dato' Shahrir.

Dato' Shahrir's support for the Southern Gateway does not make sense unless it is to force Pak Lah to appoint the Johorean and UMNO vice-president, Tan Sri Muhiyuddin Yassin, as deputy prime minister. Dr Mahathir wants Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak and Tan Sri Musa Tan Sri Muhiyuddin. Pak Lah takes his own counsel, and six weeks into office has appointed neither. He has enough problems on his plate to add another. For appointing either could force the other to the sidelines. This puts Pak Lah on the spot. He is all but certain to be challenged for the UMNO presidency. If he appoints either, the other could well desert to the challenger, thought to be Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah. It is now possible he would appoint his deputy after the UMNO elections later this year. But that means he has four cabinet positions: Prime Minister, deputy prime minister, home minister and finance minister. He is weighed down by this, and other political and personal worries. It gets to be too much for him. But he cannot move without his own political standing compromised.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com