Tuesday, July 10, 2007

The new elegance of 'Dunno'

Once again, in malaysiakini, we learnt from the tireless Lim Kit Siang how our PM hasn’t been quite on his expensively-shoed toes.

The Opposition Grand Olde Man rapped Mr Elegant Silence for not even knowing who is the minister named in a NGO’s report (inclusive of evidence) about a high level corruption case, already submitted to the PM.

I guess that would now change his elegant title to Mr Elegant Dunno.

malaysiakini also informs us that
‘Last month, Movement for Democracy and Anti-Corruption (Gerak) submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office a 632-page report containing allegations of criminal breach of trust and misappropriation involving a senior cabinet minister.’

‘Ayoyo’, as Humpty Dumpty would probably exclaim (if he dares). And may KTemoc add on behalf of those very quiet MCA blokes: ‘Karn neen nay’.

Gerak chairperson Ezam Mohd Noor (he formerly of the de facto party) had stated that the voluminous report included documentary evidence made up of statements from the Companies Commission of Malaysia, receipts and invoices amounting to millions of ringgit, and best of all, police reports lodged by a listed company against the minister in the 1980s - guess the police & ACA have been sleeping, or perhaps they're still working 'diligently' on the 1980's case.

Well, though Ezam didn’t name the minister, he did reveal that the minister is an UMNO member. The naughty bloke apparently used RM 30 million of public company funds to clear personal debts.

Wouldn’t that be considered as CBT rather than corruption? Or, hopefully both!

Strangely, for a senior UMNO cabinet minister, why would he even need to relieve the company of a mere sarp sarp suoi (chicken feed) RM 30 mil? I wonder whether it had been a case of arrogant belief that, no doubt it’s just loose change, it was there for his convenient use, to dip his grubby hands into the petty cash box whenever he liked, without fear of discovery or even being questioned. Hmmm, I wonder what sort of ‘personal debt’ would that have been?

Anyway, back on track - What had embarrassingly occurred has been AAB telling reporters a couple of days ago he didn’t know who this naughty minister is. Mind you, he did say he was informed of the report and would ‘study it’ ;-)

That sent poor conscientious Lim up the wall. He bemoaned the sad fact that AAB, with the evidence in his manicured hands, doesn’t even know the identity of the accused minister

Doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know, or worse, can't let you all know?

Lim asked caustically: "If Abdullah takes 10 days to state publicly that he is aware ... how long more would he need to announce what he proposes to do about it?"

"Or will he just pass the buck and kick the football elsewhere, starting a merry-go-round which will drag out the issue in an inconclusive manner for the next few years?"

"Is it credible that a prime minister who is serious about his pledge [about the National Integrity Plan] and commitment to make anti-corruption his top priority can allow 10 days to pass without bothering to find out who was the (allegedly corrupt) Umno cabinet minister."


Hmmm, somewhile ago, AAB has claimed that he was still in control of the nation and he’d rid the country of corruption - ah, in his own way and own time, of course. He reminded us that things couldn’t be changed overnight.

OK, even taking his explanations at face value, that things would take time to change, let’s ask a few questions that I and millions of other Malaysians have not been satisfied with, namely the lack of resolutions (and probably unlikely resolution) in very simple cases of dodginess. These are issues that I can immediately recall without too much probing:

(1) What has happened to the case of Cyclops in the Monkey House? I am talking about the 'close one eye' sin and not his disgusting 'leaking' grubbiness.

PAC chairman Shahrir Samad claimed somewhile back he was waiting for the police investigation to complete before the PAC can assess the Cyclops case. Well?

Then, the police investigation is into criminality whilst the PAC should be looking at parliamentary propriety, or propriety of the MPs

But we need to bear in mind that poor Shahrir had been 'punished' for daring to take a decent bilateral stand (initially anyway) against Cyclop's shameful close-one-eye mentality. He has been whipped back into line (Shahrir, that is - did you for even one moment think it was Cyclops?)

(2) Police issues such as:

(a) A Japanese student being extorted by policeman of RM500
(b) Chinese wives being abused at police station by policemen, & hubbies extorted

and

(c) the mother of them all, a very recent allegation that our police has dodgy links to the underworld. Most staggering of all, Raja Petra Kamarudin of Malaysia-Today alerted us to the link between the Police, IGP’s son and BK Tan, the alleged Kingpin of the organised crime syndicate, through a company called Web Power Sdn Bhd.

(3) Rela members sent to city, to beat up imported Indian workers who had the nerve to question management, right in front of Indian Hi-Comm - question: why and who sent those thugs?

(4) Libra-ECM-Avenue case – how could AAB as Finance Minister be not aware of the merger?

(5) Menteri Besar rorting the tsunami funds, meant for the needy.

There’s more but the above should suffice for this posting.

11 comments:

  1. Hi KT,
    There are people close to the PM who acts as his "filters". They decide what the PM sees, and doesn't.
    They even initiate projects in the PM's name - and it gets implemented because to the rest of the government machinery, it all looks like the PM's directive.

    The PM is complicit in this matter, because he seems to have a very limited ability to process and manage a large variety of information - unfortunately a key requisite to a powerful executive position like the PM. So people like SIL effectively become de-facto PM.

    By the way, in my opinion this lack of competence of the PM is far more dangerous to the future of this country than all the real or imagined faults of a certain Fallen Ex-Deputy Prime Minister.

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  2. If the PM was a little bit more PR savvy he could have just said something like, "I do not want to divulge the name of the minister in question until a full investigation is completed" to cover his ass. I know that's not the point, but he'd be in a lot less trouble nonetheless.

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  3. Hello chaps, haven't you heard?

    The CIA abducted AAB some time back and put a prototype robot in his place. It's very advanced; it looks like him, walks like him, even talks like him, but has insufficient RAM and processing power due to Congress budgetary cuts.

    Because of that, they programmed a standard stonewall response to awkward questions: "Saya tak tahu," in order to prevent a total system crash. Look out for more of these in the coming weeks/months.

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  4. The Truth hurts... Silence is Golden.

    Hence, the Elegant Silence of Not Wanting to Know the Truth.

    Deny anything that hurts.

    Elegant Silence can happen when you are sleeping too.

    Nuff said.

    Regards,
    http://sagaladoola.blogspot.com

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  5. hahahaha good boring but probably true before bed time stories !
    but amazingly it is happening and none can do nothing bout this !
    its a miracle

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  6. quote ... in my opinion this lack of competence of the PM is far more dangerous to the future of this country than all the real or imagined faults of a certain Fallen Ex-Deputy Prime Minister unquote

    kk46 ;-) good try, but perhaps you can enlighten us as to how you arived at your considered opinion?

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  7. Hi KT,
    Firstly, I'm referring to the future of the country, not its past. No doubt the Ex-DPM has a chequered past, but his chances of becoming future PM are very slim indeed.
    The current PM is real and his capacity to do damage to the country's future (by default) is real.
    We often see the PM as a politician, but he is also Chief Executive of the largest organisation in the country - Kerajaan Malaysia. It spends multiple billions of ringgit each year and influences every economic activity in the country. It has over a million employees.
    Dr. Mahathir, for all his faults, was a very capable and no-nonsense manager.
    THIS Chief Executive lacks many of the basic management skills for the job, let alone perform at an excellent level. I could write a long essay on his lack of competence, but Dr. Mahathir has covered a lot of it quite frankly.
    The end result is a government machinery spiraling out of control, often doing its own thing, uncoordinated, frequently exercising power in an arbitrary way. This is how a country starts to fail....

    Countries CAN FAIL you know. Spend a bit of time researching countries around the world which have failed or are in the process of failing..
    Contrary to all the accusations frequently thrown at US or British imperialism, the principal root cause of national failure is often their own misgovernment. That's my opinion anyway.

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  8. OK, you've told us how bad AAB is, but you still haven't explain why your certain Fallen Ex-Deputy Prime Minister would be any better.

    Remember:

    (1) bloke had been a most divisive Education Minister, with his policies draconianly proselytising, and culminating in events leading to Ops Lallang

    (2) bloke stood by while the bench was castrated

    (3) bloke would have taken us down the disastrous IMF path

    (4) bloke condoned and actually acknowledged the UMNO Youth thuggery against the participants of Apcet II

    but most terrifying of all

    (5) bloke showed a gross disloyalty and disrespect to his mentor

    I could never trust such a man with no loyalty when there's even honour among thieves.

    See how his most fervent suppoorters, those who supported him when he was in prison, now leaving him by the droves - such once-devoted people (especially when he was down and out, so you can't claim they are opportunistic) leaving in expressed disgust indicates the manifest example of Abe Lincoln saying of "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time"

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  9. Wow ktemoc. That's real hatred man.

    Keep it up! Don't just go ape on Anwar and Tian chua - so many peeps man, Dr Syed, Dr Sanusi, Wan azizah, Nurul Izzah, William Leong, Nik nazmi, Sivarasa R, Jomo K, etcetc. Wow.

    Shoot 'em all, man. Leave no stone unturned. Like ezam and co's battle-cry "jahanamkan semua!"

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  10. you pkr people like to resort to extreme words like 'hate', don't you ;-) guess it's in most of you

    frankly I don't have the luxury of indulging in such emotions - whatever I say about anwar are already on public records - you guys are just in denial mode

    and in reality i quite like (even admire) tian but am disgusted by what he has done re photo - but there's still time for him to change, to be more careful and scrupulous like the DAP members

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  11. Hi KT,
    You have spent most of your blog giving us a history lesson of the 1980's and 1990's relating to an Ex-Deputy Prime Minister who has very, very slim chances of becoming PM. Of course the probability is not zero (Yeah, I may just win the 1st Prize in the DaMaCai this week), but most of AI's history is of very little relevance to the issues of how we move into the future.

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