During Deputy Premier Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's recent state visit to Kedah, he warned the people not to vote for any other party except Barisan Nasional for the simple reasons that the others are not good administrators and cannot be depended upon to manage states under their control.

They are unlike BN, it seems, who are excellent managers and administrators. Let me highlight some of the result of the so-called world class financial management and administrative decisions.

  1. We seem to have the most number of mobile phone operators

  2. We also have the distinction of having so many transport systems in a city (KL) that do not integrate with each other

  3. When we wanted to break the world record of having the tallest building, we built not one, but two towers!

  4. We built an orchid plantation and tropical fish farm — purportedly for the export market — in Kelantan and Terengganu which is far away from KLIA. By the time they reach the airport, the fish would be dead and the orchids would have wilted. There is now an investigation as to where all the money has gone. And the projects were supposed to help the hardcore poor!

  5. Tabung Haji's financial management and internal controls are so bad that 'ordinary people' could withdraw millions of ringgit without any questions asked. Only thing was that the money was not theirs in the first place. When Tabung Haji decided to invest their funds, they chose the money market, and to circumvent the law, they chose another party to do it for them.

  6. Employee Provident Fund also lost money. Its subsidiary which was supposed to only provide housing loans — a secure and highly profitable venture — chose to be a developer in an already crowded field and in the process, lost more than RM700 million of depositors' money. Can you then blame MTUC for acting the way they did?

  7. A utility company for household waste water was passed from one crony to another and finally back to the government after everyone has made their pile selling the shares of the company. Its services still stink (pardon the pun).

  8. When the market value for the crippling national airline was worth just RM3.50 per share, our savvy world class financial administrators decided RM8 per share was a fair deal.

All these follies only add up to a tip of the iceberg or rather mountain of evidences to show how badly we have managed our country. If not for our oil revenue, we would have gone the way of many other countries long ago. The oil wealth has been used to hide a multitude of our sins and faults all these years.

Financial and administrative management skills? We may be better than many corrupt third world countries, but this chest-beating to boast that other countries 'can learn from our success' embarrasses me very much when I meet foreigners.