Eleven days have passed and the Petaling Jaya City Council (MBPJ) has yet to attend to a complaint, despite an immediate email response promising that an investigation would be carried out soon.

Even though I had mentioned that I had personally fallen into the drainage hole myself (at the junction of Jalan BU3/1 and Lebuh Bandar Utama) and nearly sprained my ankle, nothing has caught the attention of the officers at MBPJ yet.

I guess the dust has to be kicked up before anyone moves. I suspect that, even if I had sued the city council, the staff at MBPJ would not even blink their eyes. After all, if MBPJ did at all lose the case, the money would have to come out from the people’s coffers.

Understandably, the city mayor’s position is currently still vacant, but even efforts made to directly contact the council staff have not yielded any positive results. MBPJ is now a city council, yet their quality of service is far from turning Petaling Jaya into a world-class city.

For the past 20 years, as a part-time journalist, I have been doing similar follow-up jobs with various city halls and local councils. Sadly, the one thing that has never changed all these years is the lackadaisical attitude of the civil servants working in these councils.

One of the worst city councils that I have seen is the Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL). Over the years, it has become a fattened calf.

What I also see, is that the wrong people have been promoted. In my opinion, the very person who had failed in every aspect of public relations is still serving in the same local council, except over the years, he has been promoted to be the corporate communications director.

Based on feedback from local councillors at the Selayang Municipal Council (MPS), this gentleman had been found napping when the full council meeting was in session.

It is no wonder that even after complaints were made about a blinking traffic light at Desa Aman Puri - lodged on Jan 12 - it has yet to be fixed some 12 days later. All that the corporate communications department was good at doing, had been to respond to any correspondence using some standard answers like, “Your complaint is being investigated.”

Furious, I went to check other areas and found that another complaint - which I had lodged two years ago - has yet to be attended to by the MPS staff. The monsoon drain behind the Shell Station at Desa Aman Puri is at least four or five feet deep, and the manholes are still not properly covered to this day.

At the same time - besides heaps of rubbish being dumped by petty traders in front of the Paya Jeras Service Station - there are also banners being removed from MPS billboards and strewn all over. Is this the job of the public or the MPS enforcement? The council president should answer to all these questions.

When I contacted the council president’s office directly last Friday, a young officer by the name of Redzuan attended to the call. What infuriated me more was that he chuckled, as I described the manhole and how an elderly person or child might just fall right into it, especially on a rainy night when it is particularly dark due to poor streetlighting. I ended up giving him a piece of my mind.

Work is not done, and council president Mohd Azizi Mohd Zain is not even responding to the complaints raised, despite leaving my personal number with Redzuan.

With the “can’t care less” attitude of both the senior and junior staff at our local councils, one can only wonder what’s the use of churning out slogans such as, “MPS is ready to offer you the best service!”

New initiatives, old mindsets

It is no wonder that, when an NGO - the Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) - launched its ‘MyCleanCity’ app for MBPJ, the Sun columnist R Nadeswaran could not help but sound sceptical.

He is right in saying that there needs to be a mindset change at the leadership level if councils and the public are to embrace applications designed to highlight local government issues.

“Unless there is mindset change, nothing is going to happen,” he was quoted as saying, when invited as one of the speakers at the forum titled ‘Terrain-ing transparency and advancing accountability in local government’ in Petaling Jaya recently.

Before we can even revamp the local councils, we have to first turn the heat on the Public Services Department (PSD) and remove the deadwood in our local councils and other government agencies.

The PSD is helmed by chief secretary Ali Hamsa, who was recently caught in another major controversy over the royal commission of inquiry (RCI) report into migrant issues in Sabah.

Over the past 58 years since Independence, our civil service has accumulated too much deadwood. With nearly 5 percent of our country’s population wearing the badge as a civil servant, you can expect many who are merely holding sinecure jobs.

This is because the ultimate key to revamp in the civil service is in the hands of the federal government. Despite nearly eight years of the Government Transformation Plan (GTP), we are still seeing a wall of silence erected between the public and those in public service.

At the same time, the urban wellbeing, housing and local government minister should be a true administrator, rather than a politician whose effectiveness in handling ‘Little Napoleons’ is questionable.

Local government elections is probably a good way to move forward, but unless the laws can be amended, we will not be able to see the fulfilment of the Pakatan election manifesto during the current term.

We have seen how the Penang state government had attempted to push for local government elections, but it was blocked by the federal government.

Meanwhile, if PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang (left) has his own way, local government elections would never be able to take place. Unless Hadi is removed, PAS will become a thorn in the flesh for Pakatan, and we will not be able to move forward to improve the quality of our civil service, hence, the standard of our living conditions.

I cannot help but to ask whether Hadi could be suffering from dementia, since we all know that May 13 happened in 1969 due to an internal power struggle within Umno, whereas the local government elections were only scrapped much later. Where is the link then?

It is this kind of old mindset that will turn cities like Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya into ‘modern slums’, because the standard of our living conditions will remain one of the lowest amongst other industrialised nations. If Singapore or Taiwan can be ahead of us, why not Malaysia?

Part 1: Strata title still an issue for many apartments

Part 2: KL developing into a modern ‘slum’ city


STEPHEN NG is an ordinary citizen with an avid interest in following political developments in the country since 2008.