Crime just keeps on paying

Year after year after year, it’s the same old story. The Auditor-General’s Report reveals a rat’s nest of embezzlement, fraud, corruption and incompetence in the civil services, and BN shrugs the whole thing off.

With silence, mostly, in the sure and certain knowledge that none of the culprits can or will be brought to book, as this system of daylight robbery and jobbery is one of the regime’s strategies for keeping itself in power.

And even when BN big guns do speak out in defence of their rifling of the public purse, their arrogant disregard for truth or any sign of respect for the rakyat is an absolute insult.

Witness the statement by Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi on the loss of firearms and other equipment worth RM1.3 million by police as revealed by the Auditor-General’s Report 2012 that he was “positive that there was no sinister motive linked to the missing weapons.”

“I know the loss was not due to a breach of trust, deviant acts or elements of bribery,” he declared, “it is because of carelessness and mistakes made in the line of duty.”

Further claiming that he has asked the inspector-general of police to instigate a standard operating procedure (SOP) to penalise personnel responsible for such losses and to prevent repetitions in the future, he said that he didn’t want “the image of the police to be scarred by the Auditor-General’s Report.”

“More and more people now trust the police,” he went on, adding that “the force has shown high integrity.” Then, having fired-off this fusillade of falsehoods for publication by the muzzled mainstream media, he took aim at Malaysiakini, demanding that it report his statements precisely and without any “spin” and that it ask no follow-up questions on the matter.

This supremely arrogant outburst closely followed the contemptuous and typically contemptible claim by the inspector-general of police, Khalid Abu Bakar, that the missing police weapons “may have fallen into the sea.”

Speaking of which, various spokespersons seemed to be all at sea in their attempts to “explain” the exorbitant public expense of the BN pre-election Youth Day event featuring a K-pop concert.

Sports Minister at the time of the event, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, continues to stick with his story that the RM1.6 million fee for the K-Pop group came from “sponsors”, while his successor, Khairy Jamaluddin, has admitted otherwise. And meanwhile the cost of the entire Youth Day event has risen from a stated RM55 million as of June to RM67.61 million now.

Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief of this system of legalised larceny keeps squandering squillions of ringgit on jet-setting around the world trying to convince the international community that he’s the personification of probity, sweetness and light.

Recently telling an audience in San Francisco that the fraudulent 1Malaysia over which he presides is “an example for other countries looking to build the institutional capacity to combat corruption.”

And more recently still delivering a lecture in New York in which, according to his tame ‘news’ agency Bernama, he held forth on the proposition that if the governments of more countries used moderation in their actions and policies, then they would have more “just, fair and inclusive societies.”

‘Moderation based on sound values’

Moderation, he explained in his most patronising fashion, is based on “certain principles and sound values like justice, sense of fairness, and choosing dialogue over confrontation and negotiation over conflict.”

He then went on to advocate rejection of “Nazism or militancy and extremist thinking,” presumably confident that his audience was ignorant of the kind of Najibism he practices in Malaysia through his regime’s sponsorship of racial and religious hate groups like Perkasa and ‘newspapers’ like Utusan Malaysia.

Though in reality, of course, Najib is every whit as wise as you or me to the fact that the world at large is perfectly well aware of his hypocrisy and the perfidy of his regime, and that his ‘statesmanlike’ utterances on the global stage impress nobody but the idiots back home.

Just as the annual ‘revelations’ by the Malaysian auditor-general are supposed to convince any still-gullible sectors of the rakyat that the BN regime is committed to acting in the public interest.

When the fact of the matter is that the entire regime and its accomplices and cronies should be committed for trial for their countless crimes against the nation.

Or, better still, committed for two years without trial under their recently-amended Prevention of Crime Act (PCA) that allegedly replaces that perennial favourite regime weapon against its critics and opponents, the hated Internal Security Act.

But of course this won’t happen anytime soon, as back in May BN bought itself five more years of liberty from justice, and thus now sees this as a license to keep pursuing its almost 60-year criminal career.

All of which is so obvious that many of us keep wondering why this grotesque government still bothers to persist with pretending it is well-intentioned, as with the transparently ridiculous call by the so-called Consultative and Prevention of Corruption Committee, a panel under the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), for action on the latest auditor-general’s report.

The chairperson of this august group, Johan Jaafar, has reportedly urged the chief secretary to the government, Ali Hamsa, to form yet another committee “to prevent recurrence of these problems.”

Johan has also urged state governments and government-linked companies to “take immediate action to rectify their weaknesses,” and pledged the support of his panel for “whatever steps are taken to further improve the public service, so as to plug the loopholes to prevent corruption and abuse of power.”

Wow! Sounds impressive, huh? Or at least it would sound impressive if it came from some respectable, independent source. But this panel is anything but. In fact it is part of the same MACC that has been not only spectacularly and chronically impotent in the face of blatant regime corruption, but whose role in the suspicious deaths of Teoh Beng Hock and others in its custody has yet to be properly investigated.

So let’s not get too excited about the possibility of genuine crime-fighting in Malaysia. Crime will keep paying for the BN regime as long as there’s plenty of public money left over to buy enough popular support, or at least silence.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.