Professionalism missing in Malaysia's Sir Humphrey?

There is yet another excellent article in Malaysiakini by Dr Bridget Welsh, an associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University. She is travelling around Malaysia to provide her GE13 analyses exclusively to Malaysiakini.

Her latest article is titled People or party? Wooing civil servants in which she wrote:

In caretaker Premier Najib Abdul Razak’s political targeting, one group has received special attention - civil servants. Why would those in the heart of government garner such special focus for an election? The reality is that in Malaysia’s close electoral races, civil servants can be decisive in shaping the final tallies. This is one of the groups that I will be highlighting as decisive in this campaign.

Over the past few years Najib’s administration has worked to stem the erosion of support from his traditional base of government employees with mixed results.

Civil servants make up 1.4 million voters, or 10.5 percent of the electorate. The civil service is made up of senior appointments, the police, army personnel, teachers, and a variety of industrial and manual (IMG) groups. There are also an estimated 657,000 government pensioners.

Sir Humphrey Appleby

There is an incorrect tendency to label all civil servants as pro UMNO, though it's true many are.

In fact, as mentioned by RPK, some civil servants provided (maybe still provide) him with information unfavourable to the BN government which they wanted exposed, indicating those civil servants were not supportive of BN.

My uncle who (postal) voted in 1969 as an army officer told me how a couple of army administrative officers (popularly known by the British Raj term of Admin-wallahs because our military was nurtured by the colonial British military), who administered the military postal voting process in May 1969, were urging the Malay soldiers to vote PAS and the non-Malays (in the non-RMR services) to vote DAP and Gerakan, wakakaka.

And as we have witnessed recently, PKR and PAS have a few senior (retired) military officers of flag rank (admiral, generals) in their membership. So not all civil servants or military members would automatically be pro UMNO. But to reiterate, the majority would be.

But yes, it can be said that most of the middle ranking and senior civil servants have favoured the conservative BN, in particular UMNO.

This is not be so strange as in most countries like Australia, Britain and USA, there is similar political proclivity, where their military stationed overseas would be expected to (postal) vote conservative (eg. Coalition in Australia, Conservative in Britain and Republican in USA), thus like their civilian counterparts, the military middle ranking and senior officers would be in general (but not completely) pro conservative (in Malaysia's case, UMNO).

Western Civil Services (except possibly in the USA)
are known to be professionally impartial

But I want to talk about a couple of things regarding our very much bloated civil service, probably the biggest civil service per population in the world. The last statistic for the Malaysia Civil Service (MCS) that I know is 1.3 million, equating that to approximately 1 civil servant for every 23 Malaysian citizens.

On that basis we should be well served, but I doubt you'd agree to this.

above was Malaysia's 2005 stats
Malaysia's population today is approx. 30 million
Its civil service is said to number at 1.3 million

Then, when you consider the police as part of the civil service and our disgraceful crime rates - in recent days we have had a mother, Irene Ong, stabbed to death in front of her daughter while they were out jogging, and just then we heard of the deputy DG of Custom, Shaharuddin Ibrahim, being assassinated in broad daylight in Putrajaya - you wonder WTF is going on with the Malaysian police?

It's little wonder Dr Welsh stated: The police force in particular remains the least trusted institution in the country, which is of concern given the persistence of high crime and the critical role this organisation is supposed to play in security ...

... and not just that, the police leadership show they are incompetent and not up to the task of public safety and security.

There is an Asian saying that fish rots from its head. I believe the only way to clean up the police force is to purge, just as a start, its top 3 layers of officers, namely, (i) IGP and DIGP, (ii) all Commissioners and (iii) all Deputy Commissioners.

And as a reminder, that's only the start. It annoys me considerably because Malaya-Malaysia ONCE had the best police force in Asia, bar none. The rot started about thirty years ago (or slightly earlier) and one can only lament at how fast the deterioration in standards has set in, not only in the police force but the civil service in general.

Mind you, there still are some damn good civil service, police and military officers but their population is fast shrinking. Professionalism has given way to pariah-ism driven by corruption, incompetence and crony-ism.

Dr Mahathir's Operasi Isi Penuh in 1980 was, IMHO, a bad decision though he had embarked on that massive recruitment for the civil service in order to deal with unemployment during a period of economic depression. But in fixing a tactical problem he endowed us with a strategic headache.

My uncles told me that Operasi Isi Penuh was seen to be profligate in its implementation, where they recall department heads being urged and even pressured to 'top up' their staffing a.s.a.p.

I wonder whether such profligacy, as in our numerous cases of profligacy over the past 35 years, was an outcome from the curse of our considerable oil and gas assets. Would we have a far better though poorer Malaysia if we haven't have oil and gas, depending only on our rubber, tin, palm oil, cocoa and light industry as in the days of Tunku?

The end result of Operasi Isi Penuh only saw the humongous bloating of the civil service with its inevitable jatuh standard and, worse, an increasing (unmentioned but nonetheless official) trend towards ethnocentric recruitment, which was not just confined to the Malaysian Civil Service (including the Police) but the military as well.

There is a deliberate contrived myth, yes a myth, that the Chinese shun the Civil Service (including the police force) and the military because they prefer the lucrativeness of business rather than the staid salary of the public service, and that the civil service is an alien concept of employment to Chinese culture.

The latter, the civil service being an alien concept to Chinese culture, is 101% pure grade bullshit because the Chinese have in their several thousands of years of civilisation enjoyed (or suffered) from the Chinese civil service. In fact the Chinese invented the civil service.

sitting Imperial Exams to enter Imperial Civil Service - Sui Dynasty

This is what Wikipedia has to say:

The origin of the modern meritocratic civil service can be traced back to Imperial examinations founded in Imperial China. The Imperial exam based on merit was designed to select the best administrative officials for the state's bureaucracy. This system had a huge influence on both society and culture in Imperial China and was directly responsible for the creation of a class of scholar-bureacrats irrespective of their family pedigree.

Note the mention of 'meritocratic civil service' and the selection of 'the best administrative officials for the state's bureaucracy'!

From the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) until the implementation of the imperial examination system, most appointments in the imperial bureaucracy were based on recommendations from prominent aristocrats and local officials whilst recommended individuals were predominantly of aristocratic rank. Emperor Wu of Han started an early form of the imperial examinations, transitioning from inheritance and patronage to merit, in which local officials would select candidates to take part in an examination of the Confucian classics. The system reached its apogee during the Song dynasty.

The Chinese civil-service system gave the Chinese empire stability for more than 2,000 years and provided one of the major outlets for social mobility in Chinese society.

The modern examination system for selecting civil service staff also indirectly evolved from the imperial one. This system was admired and then borrowed by European countries from the 16th century onward, and is now the model for most countries around the world.

So the myth about Chinese viewing the civil service as alien to their culture or career path is what it is, a myth that has been repetitively used by some people to explain why there are too few Chinese Malaysians in the Malaysian Civil Service, when of course the real reason is they were obstructed from joining or just not welcomed.

In March I have also posted Chinese policemen to show (a) firstly, Pak Kadir Jasin, a pro UMNO blogger, that he was wrong in his sly insult to Chinese on their purported 'reluctance' to join the police and military services to the nation, and (b) secondly, the blatant but perennial lie of this myth.

In that post I listed several Chinese policemen who gave their lives in the course of their service. Please read my post to know how many Seri Pahlawan Gagah Perkasa (SP) and Pingat Gagah Berani (PGB) were won by Chinese service personnel.

I also modified my post into a letter to Malaysiakini for wider readership as it's important to debunk the naughty but cheap racial insinuations.

Additionally, in February 2010, well known writer AB Sulaiman wrote in a Malaysiakini article titled Malay-dominated civil service no good to no one that:

Shagul Hamid Abdullah, director-general of the National Civics Bureau, wrote a sobering article in the Star (Jan 30) about the Malaysian civil service.

He claimed that in our history non-Malays had shown little interest in working in this sector due to two factors: the relatively low pay, and the perception of them having discriminatory career prospects.

I happen to have some direct and personal experience in government employment being a clerk in the Ministry of Finance in the mid-60s, and some three years later a civil servant in another government ministry. Based on this I feel qualified to dispute his twin contentions.

At the Treasury, I remember that the office staff had a good ethnic mix. Looking back, I'd venture the racial composition to be at about 30 percent Malay, another 30 percent Indian-Malaysian, 30 percent Chinese-Malaysian and the remaining 10 percent of other races.

Yes, ‘1Malaysia' had been with us before.

Many ethnic Indians were the descendants of the early indentured labourers from the estates. Government employment was their first stepping-stone of escape from the relative poverty of rubber estates.

In the case of the Chinese-Malaysians, they were also the children of struggling tin-mine labourers and yes, estate workers. Their parents or grandparents came into this country with hardly anything at all beyond a bundle of clothing.

The fact of the matter is that before Independence, most if not all of our parents and grandparents - the early Malaysians - were living in relative poverty.

In other words, everybody came from poor families. There was hardly any middle class then. The salary level might not be comparable to the private sector but was ‘adequate' and there is the coveted pension at the end of the day.

In any case, beyond the tin mines and estates, the private sector was limited in size and offering limited employment opportunities. Getting a government job was a highly favoured dream for all ethnic segments for it provided stable and secure employment.

The contention that non-Malays shunned government employment is not quite apt.

AB Sulaiman then said: Career advancement has been a problem for the non-Malays since the 70s and early 80s, ie the period of the NEP ...

... and if I may say, Operasi Isi Penuh.

I'd say that this period saw the birth of the ‘Malaysation' programme of the political leadership, later known by the label ‘Ketuanan Melayu.' This era saw the marginalising of non-Malays in government employment.

This self-proclaimed label has turned out to be the premise for the government's lower recruitment of non-Malays to government employment and sidelining those already in its employment.

Consider the following: 100 percent of vice-chancellors of public universities are Malays. 90 percent of University of Technology student enrolment is Malay. 90 percent of nurse and teacher intakes are Malay.

In short virtually all government or government-related bureaucracies and agencies were manned and meant for Malays, for their employment levels are in the higher 90 percent level.

Surely this collective situation is the direct result of the preferential treatment given to Malays in government recruitment. These figures are indicatives, but I believe not too far away from the actual, give or take a few percent.

Worse, I read sometime back that the government has made it a habit of even putting application forms from non-Malays into the dustbin.

So in more than one way, I suppose we have Dr Mahathir as the principal personality to thank for the beginning of the rot in our civil service.

Let's examine some lamentable products of the Malaysian Civil Service in recent times.

In June 2010, Malaysiakini’s Guan Eng wants SDO to explain arches fiasco reported Lim questioned the erection of two controversial arches on the way to the Penang Botanical Garden by the federal government.

The Penang state development officer (SDO), was Nik Ali Mat Yunos, a federal civil servant in charge of the project. Lim was so incensed by the arrogant non-accountability of the SDO that he remarked Nik Ali was "openly and blatantly" sabotaging the state government.

Lim stated: "He is like a little Napoleon in the civil service who gets high pay and does nothing for the people, but instead causes losses to them."

MKINI reported: Lim wants Nik Ali to come clean about the RM150,000 plus losses over the planned demolition of the two twin arches recently built for an expansion project under the Tourism Ministry. […]

Lim has taken offence with Nik Ali for refusing to explain who - which department, state or federal government - was responsible for the staggering losses.

Can you f* beat that, a civil servant refusing to account to the CM of a Malaysian State? What hope then do we earthly mortals have in terns of accountability from a Malaysian civil servant?

Would Nik Ali Mt Yunos dare to be biadap towards an UMNO MB like Khir
even if Khir were to present him with a broom for piss-poor performance?

"If he is willing to tell us that, we will not pursue the matter. Every sen counts, because it is a question of public trust," Lim added.

Lim has also seen red over a letter sent by the SDO's office dated Oct 13, 2009 to the Drainage and Irrigation Department, giving a "RM5 million ultimatum" to the state.

The letter states that the state would have to settle "pending issues" on the Botanic Gardens' facade and pavilion development, failing which, federal funding of RM5 million for the project would be withdrawn.

"This is an example of how the SDO's office is trying to rush development projects through without due consultation and feedback," said Lim.

As if that was not bad enough, the SDO responded by calling the Chief Minister 'biadap' - yes, believe it or not, a civil servant abusing a people's fully elected representative with the gross insult of 'biadap'.

Maybe he thought he was the great great great (ditto etc) grandson of Sultan Mansur Shah of Malacca with the powers to f* off Hang Lim GE?

But wait, there were more worse things! Against the very heart of civil service policy, he made his attack against a people’s representative at a gathering organized by UMNO, a political party.

I suppose a biadap, arrogant and politically biased person like him does not understand protocol, civil service etiquette, basic courtesy and the apolitical nature of the Malaysian Civil Service (MCS).

Maybe this bloke has been exactly whom former PM AAB had in mind when he termed some public servants as ‘Little Napoleons’.

Technically he should be chastised if not sacked in ignominy for violating the Civil Service code of conduct (many times over) by the Chief Secretary but as it’s obvious he’s allied to UMNO, it was hardly surprising that Mohd Sidek, the Chief Secretary, defended him instead.

wakakaka, waste of money printing this
those who are professional won't need it
those who aren't won't heed it

Given that this is Malaysia, it was not totally unexpected, but nonetheless the brazen disregard by Mohd Sidek of Nik Ali’s breach of the civil service code of conduct and sheer bad manners in his most unprofessional politically partisan behaviour was still breathtaking.

Tun Ghazali Shafie, one of the luminaries of the MCS would have turned in his grave in shame and despair at that example of gross pathetic and unprofessional standard of his once-proud service.

Also, read MIKINI’s (August 2010) New BN move ruffles feathers in Komtar penned by my Penang laang Susan Loone for more of the sabotaging nonsense, where the Penang state government had to get the approval of ‘coordinators’ when applying for housing and local government allocations.

But when the ‘coordinators’ were (are?) all BN politicians, some of whom were defeated in the 2008 general election, this meant that that f* little Napoleon introduced a procedure where the representatives elected by the rakyat had to go with begging bowl to those rejected by the rakyat.

And that’s the utter lack of professionalism of quite a few officers of the Malaysian Civil Service.

meritocracy has been declared missing for years

Anyway, sometimes when Dr Mahathir grumbled or cried about Melayu mudah lupa and the ingratitude of Malays I do wonder whether he was thinking of his Operasi Isi Penuh and its favouring of Malays, and his consequential anger at those Malays who supported the opposition, wakakaka.

But I have absolutely no sympathy for him when those civil servants crossed over to PAS or PKR, because we have too many of them in UMNO already.

You know, this coming election has been touted as an American style presidential election between Najib and Anwar (instead of a Westminster style between or among parties). If Pakatan does win, perhaps we can capture that American style election by sweeping out the top echelons of the MCS together with their UMNO masters.

Much as I dislike matters American, this may not be entirely an unwelcome process.