Corruption and The Anti Corruption Law

Tun Mahathir in his recent blog which was carried by the Malaysian Insider made a very pointed observation on the Anti Corruption Law in this country when he said “If the government itself is corrupt then corruption cannot be stopped. In fact corruption will spread in every direction and would become a way of life. And at this stage nothing can really be done”.

Previously he made a public apology at a political rally for his past mistakes. This time his observation on corruption is again an admission of sort that his previous administration had been plagued by corruption, in short a corrupt government.

Who could refute the fact that corruption in this country began seriously and became rampant during his administration that lasted for twenty two years?

Who can deny that corruption has permeated into almost all segments of the Malaysian society including our national institutions like the civil service, the Police and the Judiciary?

And who would disagree that to day corruption has become to large extent a way of life in this country ?

There is a famous Chinese saying:
“when a fish rots, it starts form the head and from there it spread to the rest of the body”.
This saying truly described how corruption began and developed in this country during the past two decades.

The pertinent question - is there no one who should take the full responsibility for this social disease that had inflicted the Malaysian society for that long?

Our neighbor Indonesia that went through the same experience, and even longer, is more decisive in dealing with corruption The Rakyat there were so determined to fight corruption from the lowest to the highest level of their societal hierarchy.

They even went to the extent of bringing their late President Suharto and his family members to the courts to face the law and to make them return back what rightly belonged to the Rakyat.

The rakyat knew where it all began and ended!

We should take the Tun’s observations seriously because these must have come from his inner feelings following the various financial scandals that had hit the country during his premiership in the 80’s and 90’s like the BMF, Mamimco, the Bank Negara Forex losses, the CCB, Perwaja that cost the nation billions of ringgit, not to mention the amount of wastage and excesses incurred in development projects implemented through the “direct negotiations” instead of open tender.

Just imagine if these wastage and losses did not take place we could have utilised the money for the development of our people and we could have achieved a developed nation status by now!!

All these must have begun to prick his conscience after seeing how much damage corruption had inflicted on the economy and changed people’s behaviour and values.

And yet, the effects of past corruption have by no means ended as more episodes keep on surfacing all the time even after he left the government. The Maltrade building fiasco, the Port Klang Free Zone debacle , and most recentl the Middle Ring Road scandal to name a few, went back to his time when decisions on these projects were made. And no one can deny that the root cause of all these billion ringgit of mishaps and scandals had been CORRUPTION.

We should support his proposal to amend the laws to protect whistle blowers to fight corruption.

Who knows one day the Rakyat will discover who the Father of Corruption is and be written into our history.