MGG Pillai Commentary View

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How official arrogance and BN indifference allows the Ipoh city council to buy 200 parking meters for RM6.8 million

THE IPOH CITY COUNCIL (MBI) has bought 200 imported parking meters for its 4,000 parking bays at RM33,945.90 each for a total cost of RM6,789,180. How would it pay the monthly instalment of RM113,153 for five years? By deducting it from the RM130,000 it collects every month from road users who park in Ipoh. This means that 87 per cent of the parking meter collection will go to pay the monthly instalment. Why did not the local government and housing ministry object to this gross waste of public funds? How could it, when the minister, Dato' Seri Ong Ka Ting, in July 2002, witnessed the agreement - or, in the bureaucrat's lexicon, the memorandum of understanding (MOU) - to buy the meters. If how we maintain our machinery is any guide, when the payments are complete, it would be time for another round of wasting public funds to replace the by then unworkable or stolen meters. The Opposition Democratic Action (DAP) in Ipoh, which highlighted this, says in a flyer that the meters are bought against an official order to buy them locally if it could. Parking meters are made locally and supplied to many local councils, though not to the electronic sophistication of the RM34,000 meters, but it serves its purpose, and well. This new system is so confusing, its instructions gibberish and little understood, that motorists are summoned by the MBI not that they did not pay but that they did to the wrong meter. But no matter how sophisticated the parking meter, the 'jaga kereta' can, and will, find a simple way to shortcircuit the electronics, as they do with relish in Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya. As no doubt in Ipoh in due course.

The National Front (BN) government is now upgrading muncipal councils to city councils, importing a centuries-old tradition from England and Europe, but without an understanding of what it means to be a city. It wants the world to know of the top flight facilities we have, and how better to impress foreigners about this cloning of Western superficiality on to a distinctly Malaysian landscape and character. It would impress many so long as they do not step on to our shores. They would see the breakdown of civic consciousness and civic facilities, both prerequisites for a city at first hand when they land - visit the toilets at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport to know what I mean. A friend calls KLIA the "Pasar Borong Ikan Sepang" - The Sepang Wholesale Fish Market - on account of the large ugly plastic trays in a dozen gaudy colours, as fish is collected at the wholesale fish market at Selayang, outside Kuala Lumpur - to collect the passengers' bags that fall off the guard rails along the dysfunctional conveyor belts, a quick fix to settle a fundamental fault at the 'world class' multibillion ringgit airport. They are not collected after the passengers leave and taken out of sight, but left to lie where they are in an unsightly mess. It is not enough to claim that we are world class if the claims are false. The system, from the top down, and not only at MBI and KLIA, is deliberately gutted from the inside, for no reason than that it opens to the civil servant a new line of additional, albeit, illegal income. But this is ignored when quick fixes are made.

What MBI did in Ipoh is what every government does across the length and breadth of the country. It differs from occasion to occasion, department to department, ministry to ministry only on how creatively and deliberately the system is dismantled. This deterioration of standards and accountability is real. Let us look at how local government councils function in Malaysia. For a start, it is a sinecure for the BN worthies. Local council elections were suspended in the early 1960s, and all but banned after the 13 May racial riots. The Opposition parties often did well at these elections; indeed it often controlled the more important of them. Opposition parties controlled two major local councils: the Socialist Front of the Georgetown City Council in Penang, and the People's Progressive Party in Ipoh. Both survived the BN's predecessor, the Alliance's efforts to unseat them, because they ran it well, established a political base which did not exclude those who lived within the council boundaries. The Georgetown mayor and the Ipoh municipal president were political figures in their own right. Lest one forget, the PPP, founded by the redoubtable Seenivasagam brothers, Dato' S.P. and Mr D.R., controlled half a dozen MPs and a dozen and more state assembly seats in Perak, fell to bad times after Mr D.R.'s death, and unwisely joined the BN coalition in the early 1970s. It lost its political clout and influence, and in a series of faulty and self-serving re-inventions, is now firmly on the road to extinction under a leader desperately searching a role for himself in the BN. In one sense, the PPP's current travails mirrors the BN's own frailties. But I digress. Opposition parties were represented in local councils in almost every state, if not the Socialist Front or the PPP other political parties like Parti Islam Malaysia.

Now, basic services are ignored, the public hung out to dry, as municipal services are privatised to cronies of the Establishment on doubtful premises and promises, and found wanting. The local government and housing ministry does not care. So the state governments who are responsible for local and municipal councils under their purview. What makes it worse is that the BN sinecures dare not object to outrageous actions like the parking meters for they could be dropped if the council chairman spread the word to the local government and housing ministry and the state government that they are 'trouble makers'. Their political leaders do not want trouble makers - it does not matter if they are or not, but if some one thinks so, that is enough - in their midst either, and a promising political future is castrated hardly had it begun. When municipal and local councils are run thus, it is those who live within the boundaries who suffer. When once Georgetown and Ipoh had the best run and most responsive city and muncipal councils, they now have about the worst. Ipoh, as the DAP flyer points out, has the highest assessment rate in the country: 16 percent compared to Georgetown's eight percent and Kuala Lumpur's six percent. Political control laced in political cowardice is no substitute for good governance, so it is pointless for the DAP to ask why the MCA, Gerakan, MIC, PPP and UMNO councillors agreed to buy the meters; they would not even if their lives depended on it.

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, hit the nail on the head, on taking office three months ago, when he railed against corruption. But he did not think through what he said, for while his instincts were right, it did not infuse any confidence amongst the people that matters would be put right. A few people have been arrested and charged with corruption and corrupt practices, but it is the general view that this is window dressing which cannot expect to last. He is, after all, an Establishment figure who was part of the system while it was destroyed from within. He has not made changes to the cabinet he inherited from Tun Mahathir. He excels in the top-down government of BN prime ministers, orders and policies issued often with no consultation or thought, only to eat their words in the quiet, hoping no one would notice. Unfortunately, his task is of Sisyphus of Greek mythology, condemned to roll a huge stone up a hill to its top; as it constantly rolled down just as it reached the summit, his task is everlasting. Pak Lah can get out of this political toil only when he can break out of his not imaginary shackles, and chart a path that would reverse the political arrogance and cowardice that now inflect BN and in particular UMNO. But he probably cannot. The system has rotted from within for too long, especially under the 22-year-governance of his predecessor. The MBI affair is but the tip of the iceberg.

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