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Is the arrest of a cabinet minister to feed the tiger or to stop corruption in its tracks?

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, is caught in a crisis of his own making. A Mahathir crony and a once prominent business man, Tan Sri Eric Chia, is arrested three days ago and charged with corruption committed when he was head of Perwaja Steel in the mid-1990s. This morning (12 February 2004), the land and cooperative development minister, Tan Sri Kasitah Gadam, is charged for what he is alleged to have done in the late 1990s. Arrested with him is the Sabah land development board general manager, Dato' Wasli Mohamed Said. The two Tan Sris are released on bail of RM2 million and RM1 million respectively. Another Tan Sri is widely believed to be arrested soon. The Anti-Corruption Agency investigated one for nine years and the other for four, and produced them with Pak Lah wanted to prove his stated commitment to root out corruption. It raises more questions than answers.

Pak Lah cannot stop now. He must show he means what he says. If it takes the ACA between five and ten years to investigate corruption, how efficient can it be? It has little to show how successful it is in rooting out corruption. Its high profile case to show it can do its work without fear or favour collapsed spectacularly when it recommended the former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, be charged with corruption. This is its next chance to redeem itself. Yet it steps in for a clear political purpose. The investigations began when Tun Mahathir Mohamed was prime minister. It kept quiet. It did not act until his successor needed wants a few scalps to prove he is serious about rooting out corruption.

The first arrest went wrong. Tan Sri Eric, in bravado, fear or his belief that he is forced to take the rap for what others are equally culpable, said he would vigorously defend the charges against him. Whatever his motives. his arrest did not satisfy the growing clamour for proof that Pak Lah means to crack down on corruption. A PAS politician says in the latest issue of Harakah that he lodged a police report on corrupt activities involving the interational trade and industry minister, Datin Paduka Rafidah Aziz, two years ago, and no action has been taken. Hundreds of police reports had been made over the years about corruption in the cabinet and amongst the high and mighty. None had been investigated.

One or two high profile arrests, with a few middling civil servants, is not enough. Any hope Tan Sri Eric's arrest would quell the rising clamour for action more than words is misplaced. So, this morning, he sacrifices a cabinet minister. But Tan Sri Kasitah's arrest redounds on Pak Lah. If investigations into this case began in 1999, why did he not know about it when he appointed him to the Cabinet. AFP paints Tan Sri Kasitah as a Mahathir appointee. He was. He is not now. He is Pak Lah's. He sits in the cabinet not because Dr Mahathir appointed him but that Pak Lah did. His arrest now is not proof Pak Lah is serious about corruption but that he is a poor judge of who he appoints into the cabinet. It does not reflect his anti-corruption instincts, only that he is a poor judge of men. Did not the various agencies of the government do a due diligence check on the cabinet appointees? Obviously not. Why not?

The corruption charges so far reveal nothing new. Investigations into them were completed years ago. Any other explanation would show the ACA and other investigations to be incompetent. If corruption cases take years to investigate, how much can we rely on the ACA to keep corruption in check? This said, he did right in what he did but not how he did it. He tried to score points in his action. That backfired. Was it to divert a more damaging scandal in his own backyard: his son's company's involvement in the Dr A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation ring. Malaysian newspapers do not look at events like this as it should, in context. So readers are left wondering what it all means.

Why is Pak Lah not believed? After all, corruption in on every one's lips. We all fall prey to it at the counter level: the odd dollar to a lowly civil servant to ease one's way through life, and higher up the chain if one's needs can be met higher up the civil service heirarchy. For him to be believable, he has to act with firmness and as if he meant it, and he has to charge those at the top, against whom cases had been filed, and charge them. If the reports are filed in malice or frivously or frippantly, charges should be filed against them for misleading the authorities. Whatever it is, he must act with firmness. There is no sign of it in his moves now against corruption. As it is, it is now seen as the luck of the draw; the fellow who got caught is not guilty, but unlucky. That surely is not what he wants to let Malaysians know.

He does not have time on his side either. He is caught in a trap laid for him, deliberately or not is beside the point, by his predecessor. He faces a sceptical Malay ground unwilling yet to accept UMNO again as its cultural protector. He has to shake off his ingrained belief that UMNO is the leader of the Malay. He is not. The Anwar Ibrahim affair saw to that. His crusade against corruption, at least that is what he says his intention is, is too half-hearted, and too self-serving. Too many do not believe him. That is what is wrong with his plans. To make himself believed, he must first take the people into his confidence. He has yet to. And worse, he is still said to be his predecessor's apron strings. One cannot be sure, from one moment to the next, if he is his own man, or some one else's poodle. Where he is thought to be his own man, the suspicion persists it is to divert attention from a scandal he has, unwittingly or not, to face. That is his dilemma. The sooner he resolves it, the better his political future.

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