The Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was not surprising then when the long undeclared war between the Malaysian government and the Communist Party of Malaya also ended with the Hatyai Peace Accord in the same year. However, 21 years later, the Royal Malaysian Police still operates as if the nation is still at war.

The departure of Tan Sri Musa Hassan and the transition to Tan Sri Ismail Omar will not change anything unless the police revisits its original raison d’état and starts afresh with the new missions suggested by the Dzaiddin Royal Commission in 2005, namely, to fight crime, to uphold integrity, and to comply with human rights principles.

The Royal Malaysian Police’s role in curtailing the communists during the Cold War is internationally recognised, and continues to be cited among security experts in the United States in their discussion on Iraq and Afghanistan as an example of a successful multi-pronged anti-insurgency campaign.

The Malayan Emergency, from 1948 to 1960, was effectively an intensive civil war, especially in the first five years, but not declared as such by the British government to prevent insurance companies in London from inflating prices, which would inevitably jeopardise the profitability of British planters and other interests in Malaya.

Co-ordinated civilian leadership, intelligence and psychological warfare were central to the campaign as the British administration decided at the onset that the war was political in nature and not merely a military operation.

The police was tasked to be the lead agency with a single command chain nationwide and a force expanded many folds while the Malayan national military was only formally set up in 1956 in anticipation of independence.

The Royal Malaysian Police that we know today is the product of such a historical situation. It is a unique institution vis-à-vis police bodies around the world. Many developing countries have strong armed forces with a single national command chain while the police are often miniature by comparison, and on some occasion, part of the military establishment. For instance, the police was only separated from the Indonesian military just a decade ago. In some other countries, such as Australia or the United States, the police are localised forces governed by state or even county authorities.

Not only does the Royal Malaysian Police have a single national command chain, it was a larger force than the Armed Forces until the 1980s, which made it unusually powerful vis-à-vis its counterparts elsewhere. The General Operations Force (previously known as Field Force), the paramilitary unit of the Royal Malaysian Police, was at the forefront of combating the communists, with the military playing the supporting role.

As intelligence and psychological warfare were identified as the core success factors in the war, the Special Branch was arguably the nucleus of the police, and until the late 1970s employed more personnel than the Criminal Investigation Department.

Today, the police’s budget for 2010 is RM4.5 billion and a budgeted personnel strength of 122,655 for 2010. The actual strength is 107,455 as of December 31, 2009, according to a reply by the Home Minister to my question in Parliament.

Malaysia’s crime index exceeded the 100,000 cases in 1997 and 200,000 cases in 2007. While economic crisis causes the spike of crime initially, police inertia exacerbated a sense of impunity. During his tenure as IGP, whenever responding to media uproar about crime, Tan Sri Musa Hassan and, to a lesser extent, the government, has rehashed the oft-repeated mantra about the need for another 60,000 police personnel to fight crime.

But it is really not about having more policemen. The Interpol sets the optimal police-population ratio at 1:250. If every single Malaysian policeman is deployed to fight crime, the ratio is 1:270, which is not far off from Interpol’s optimal ratio.

It is a question of priority.

The General Operations Force comprises 12,746 while the Special Branch has 7,643 officers and personnel. By comparison, the Criminal Investigation Department, with the insurmountable challenge of solving escalating crime, has a strength of 8,449 officers and personnel.

It was interesting to note that both CID and Special Branch had around 6,000 officers each in 2005. The increase of number of police personnel without changing the philosophy and objectives will only see the distribution of new recruits continue as before.

Another 36,669 personnel are in the management department while 10,788 in the logistics department. The Dzaiddin Royal Commission identified in 2005 that 30 per cent of the force were desk bound and their positions can be easily filled by civilians, thus allowing the police to redeploy at least 30,000 trained police onto the streets. This was only taken up this year by the government in a piece-meal fashion where 6,751 desk job bound officers were redeployed onto the streets with 3,557 civilians filling the gap.

The Royal Malaysian Police must get its priority right. But to answer the question of priority, it must bid farewell to its Cold War mentality. For instance, it was even stated in the 2010 Budget that one of the seven key activities of the police is “to safeguard the security of the nation by gathering intelligence through secret and open means on communist, subversive and extremist elements and (shielding the nation) from intelligence and spying of local and foreign threats.”

Two decades after the Hatyai Accord, it is comical to target the communists, even more so in view of Umno’s recent exchange partnership with the Chinese Communist Party.

A change of IGP will not change the police in any way unless the police relinquish its political roles from the time of the Cold War and focus only on fighting crime to make Malaysia safe.

MalaysianInsider

It was said that “the 19th century was a century of empires; the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.” Economic growth is increasingly driven less by capital and more by the density and availability of talents. Cities that possess the right physical, cultural, economic and social conditions would become a magnet for talent.

Are our cities ready for such eminence? Probably not. There is a need to re-examine our ideas about central-local relations and the urban-rural divide to work out a new set of priorities for the future of our cities.

Before independence, due to the decentralised nature of the governing structure involving the supposedly independent Malay states, Malaya was effectively a multi-city model in which Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Ipoh and Johor Bharu were of relatively equal strengths. Indeed, Kota Bharu, with its 50,000 inhabitants in 1900, was just marginally smaller than Kuala Lumpur in terms of population size.

Merdeka brought forth a powerful central government with deep pockets. Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, went on a building spree to define the nation in Kuala Lumpur. Icons and monuments built during this period include Merdeka Stadium, National Stadium, Subang Airport, National Mosque, National Monument, Parliament House, National Museum and the University of Malaya.

The government’s revenue increased further in the 1970s and 1980s with the expansion of the oil and gas sector and a more diversified economy. Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s fourth Prime Minister, went on not only to vastly improve the country’s infrastructure but also replace Tunku’s monuments in Kuala Lumpur by building a new capital in Putrajaya in the 1990s. Today, the federal government pays Putrajaya Holdings RM1 billion annually as rental for the offices in Putrajaya. RM1 billion is 0.5% of the nearly RM200 billion-federal budget, not to mention other municipal and maintenance costs. Grass-cutting alone costs the country RM18 million a year.

Other cities lost their lustre as state and local governments have little resources at their disposal as Malaysia continues to centralise. The combined state budgets were around 25% of the federal budget in 1990 but it dropped to merely 9% in 2009. Transportation — public transport, ports, airports and highways — arguably the most important enabler of any city, is very much a federal matter. Essential services like sewerage, public cleansing and solid waste, as well as water, are being centralised one way or the other in recent years.

Further, outside Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, the ethos is to devote resources to develop the rural sector. The New Economic Model (NEM), prepared by the National Economic Advisory Council, proposes to replace the current approach of “dispersing economic activities across states to spread the benefits of development” to one that builds clusters and corridors to create “concentration of economic activities for economies of scale and better provision of supporting services.”

However, many are still of the view that Malaysia is a rural nation, or at least most Malays are living in the kampung. Utusan Malaysia on Aug 30 carried an article by a Zainal Kling reiterating that cities are mostly inhabited by the Chinese and called on the government to help the Malays and bumiputera whom he considered are still rural and agricultural based.

Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin recently announced that the government will introduce a Kampong New Economic Model, which I suspect in some ways will champion measures that contradict NEM’s key idea of urban agglomeration and density.

In the 2010 budget, RM4.6 billion is allocated for the Agriculture and Agro-based Industry Ministry while RM7.2 billion is for the Rural and Regional Development Ministry. Despite identifying “urban well-being” as a new concern for the government that is added to the portfolio of Federal Territories Ministry, the amount allocated is meagre, not even 0.5% of the combined sum to the two rural ministries.

Today, the fact is that Malaysia is a highly urbanised nation. Sixty-five percent of the population lives in urban areas. For the peninsula, the figure is higher at 70%. The overall figure was just 35% in 1980. The draft Second National Physical Plan anticipates that the national urbanisation rate will reach 75% in 2020. Malay urban population is estimated at slightly less than 60%. The ethnic Malay population exceeded that of ethnic Chinese in Kuala Lumpur in 2000, a good 10 years ago.

In fact, urban Malays, whose existence has yet to register on the minds of many Malay leaders and whose livelihoods and welfare are still not well taken care of, is the most potent political force in the future political contestation.

Why are such social realities eluding our government leaders? It is possible that the governing mode in this country means that doing more of the same is the safest option for politicians and bureaucrats. But it is worth mentioning that while 65% of the population lives in urban areas; 65% of parliamentary seats are rural. It is also interesting to note that contracts for road construction and other rural infrastructure is the key source of political largesse even in the US.

Great liveable and sustainable cities hold the key for Malaysia to leapfrog into the next phase in the rapidly changing world economies. But the various conditions of our cities such as transport connectivity, public safety, housing affordability, water quality and flood mitigation, are not at their best and need much improvement.

To move forward, we must first address the two glaring dichotomies, namely central-local relations and the urban-rural divide, that have held our cities back thus far.

The Edge Financial Daily

The Prime Minister’s Department’s allocation for 2010 is a whopping RM12 billion, not RM4 billion as some people may have perceived it to be. That’s a lot of money for one single department.

In a parliamentary reply by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz to Taiping MP, Nga Kor Ming, it was revealed that RM3.9 billion was allocated to the PMD for its “operations” in 2010. The minister was telling the truth; PMD’s “operating budget” was indeed the said amount.

But he seemed to be withholding another piece of information already in the public domain. Under a separate category of “development”, the PMD received RM 8.238 billion. Thus, the total budgetary outlay for the PMD in 2010 is RM12.1 billion, as revealed by the Federal Budget Estimates.

The PMD’s budget wasn’t so huge not too long ago. In the entire Eighth Malaysia Plan period (2001-2005), the development budget of the PMD was RM7.2 billion, or 4.3 per cent of the Plan’s total allocations. This means the development allocation for 2010 alone (RM 8.2 billion) surpassed the sum allocated for the first five years of the 21st century.

The PMD, which was already relatively strong and powerful compared to other Commonwealth countries, has grown beyond recognition, especially over the course of the last decade.

Its development budget underwent a four-fold increase in the 9th Malaysia Plan , driving its allocation up to RM 29.6 billion, or 13.5 per cent of the Plan’s total.

The huge increases in the PMD’s budget in 2009 and 2010 have never been seen before. The combined operating and development expenditure for 2009 was RM14 billion; nearly double the RM7.1 billion allocated for 2008. The total for 2005 was a mere RM4.1 billion in comparison.

A different way of looking at it is that the development budget for 2009 (RM10 billion) was five times that of 2005 (RM2 billion) while in 2010 (RM8.2 billion), is four times that of the base year.

What does this mean?

The development allocation for PMD is discretional expenditure that allows the prime minister to approve it literally at the stroke of a pen, whereas other ministerial expenditures or treasury payments must pass through more rigorous checks.

The “big push” in the increase of the development budget occurred in the Ninth Malaysia Plan and in 2009. In both instances, the increase occurred during the time when former prime minister Tun Abdullah Badawi’s position was threatened by internal revolts in Umno and other political challenges.

The big push of Budget 2009 was presented to Parliament in August 2008, amidst talk of defection of Barisan Nasional MPs, especially those from Sabah and Sarawak. Immediately, RM1 billion of the RM6.9 billion increase was allocated to Sabah and Sarawak. The other RM5 billion was for the development of the five corridors, which included Sabah Development Corridor and Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (Score).

Perhaps it can be said that such a big push managed to fend off the Sept 16 challenge, allegedly when those BN MPs were supposed to join the Pakatan Rakyat.

Besides the surge of monetary allocations, the staff size of the PMD and the speed of its growth (or over-growth) are completely mind-boggling. In 1981, when Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad assumed power, there were 4,414 staff in the PMD. In 2001, there were 9,673; 21,045 in 2003. In 2009, the PMD hired 25,332.

In the same reply, Nazri told Parliament that the PMD has employed 43,544 people in 2010.

According to Nazri, the increase in operating allocations and staff were due to the “creation of new agencies” within the department as well as the addition of posts in a few existing agencies.

The powers concentrated in the Prime Minister’s Department in Malaysia certainly have other Commonwealth prime ministers’ envy. Besides the personal offices of the prime minister and his deputy, there are five full ministers, five deputy ministers, a number of ministerial-ranked advisors (which I am still unable to confirm), and 45 agencies under the watch of the Prime Minister’s Department.

Some of these agencies, such as the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Agency, Auditor-General’s Office, Election Commission, Human Rights Commission, Public Complaints Bureau, and Public Service Commission should have been placed under parliamentary oversight.

The Parliament should govern its own affairs, independent from the PMD; likewise for the judiciary and national palace.

It is disturbing that the Prime Minister’s Department is like a messy bazaar with all sorts of agencies under its watch that do not make any practical or coherent sense.

For instance, the dissolution of entrepreneur development ministry did not return the governance of public transport to the transport ministry but instead a new land public transport commission was formed within the PMD. One can only suspect that the licensing power of public transport is too great to let go.

The other agency that is gathering huge staff strength is the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, which is our version of the coast guard. Why should it be housed under the PMD? The right thing to do is to place it under either defence or home ministry, and at the same time merge Marine Police with MMEA. At it is, Malaysia has the navy, MMEA, Marine Police, Fisheries Department and a whole hosts of agencies guarding our waters, yet our borders don’t seem to be less porous.

Something is very wrong with Malaysia’s public finance and governance, especially in these last few years. And the people have to bear the brunt of the current subsidy cuts, allegedly to help the government saves RM750 million this year.

Malaysian Insider
masterwordsmith-unplugged

Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times
By Barry Wain.
Palgrave Macmillan; 368 pages;
Review by Liew Chin Tong
Liew Chin Tong is Member of Parliament for Bukit Bendera, and author of Speaking for the Reformasi Generation.

Sixty odd years after Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad first deliberated on politics as a student and almost three decades after he assumed the office of the Prime Minister of Malaysia in July 1981, the nation is still largely defined by his world views and actions. Barry Wain’s Malaysian Maverick will, for a long time to come, be the best companion for a painful national soul-searching for Malaysia.

This is because it brings together an impressive amount of seldom disputed facts. Faced with them now, seven years after Dr Mahathir retired, most Malaysians will find it hard to ignore their significance: the present is the consequence of the past.

Born into a family whose forebears emigrated from India, the young Mahathir was more or less an outcast where the highly hierarchical British/Malay colonial and feudal society was concerned. Even after becoming a Member of Parliament in 1964, he was an outsider who could not even exert enough authority to have trees planted in the city of Kuala Lumpur. As Deputy Prime Minister in 1976, he had to stand by and watch as close associates were arrested under the Internal Security Act.

But once he became Prime Minister, he left no stone unturned in getting what he wanted. From tampering with the tempo of the national anthem to changing the skyline of KL, and eventually abandoning the old city for Putrajaya, built according to his liking, the changes Dr Mahathir brought to Malaysia were permanent in effect, despite the usual haste in initial implementation and the many controversies surrounding them.

A Singaporean friend of mine once recalled having to attend school before the sun had risen, and I had to tell her it was Dr Mahathir who arbitrarily created a “permanent daylight saving” measure by adjusting the clock faster by an hour for Peninsular Malaysia, which Singapore had to follow for practical reasons. More than just tweaking the clock, the accomplished small-town medical doctor who was never wrong (or, at least so he thought) prescribed so much medication over the years for Malaysia that the nation is still reeling from a multiple overdose.

The nation’s population doubled during his tenure, in no small part because of his peculiar policy to have a “70 million population (by 2100)” to facilitate the economy of scale needed to sustain his beloved heavy industry ventures centred around the production of passenger vehicles. In a similar streak, probably thinking of himself as towards modernisation, but of course in his own special way.

While maintaining an image of being a forward-looking man, he still showed how deeply his early experiences had affected him. He was decidedly anti-West and anticolonial. The Twin Towers and other monumental projects were “good

for the ego” of a developing country. “To be noticed when you are small, sometimes you have to stand on a box,” Dr Mahathir said. With all that going on, foreign relations, especially with the West, were rarely diplomatic. On the other hand, Dr Mahathir’s zeal did put Malaysia on the world map; he won admiration from the Third World, and pragmatic policies made him acceptable to many in the West. While the end, even if questionable, was generally admirable, the means were not. Yet, all too often, the means ended up justifying the end.

Malaysia under Dr Mahathir was a get-rich-quick scheme, as Wain calls it, which has now gone awry. The author provides details of all the known major scandals and concludes that, “based on incomplete public information, rm15 billion was a conservative estimate of Perwaja’s losses. Similarly, Bank Bumiputra dropped at least rm10 billion. Bank Negara’s foreign exchange forays drained perhaps rm23 billion from Malaysia’s reserves. The cost of trying to push up the price of tin seemed paltry by comparison, maybe rm1 billion. The total, rm50 billion or so, could have easily doubled if a professional accounting has been made, factoring in all the

invisibles, from unrecorded writeoffs to blatant embezzlement and opportunity costs.”

Malaysia Boleh, along with Dr Mahathir’s time in power, was like a dream that for a while was uplifting. On hindsight, many would readily say it was a nightmare.

Barry Wain spent two-and-a-half years painstakingly putting together this revealing book. Using smooth journalistic language, he presents a wide range of materials, including interviews with the subject and his immediate family. For those who want a peek into the rollercoaster years under Dr Mahathir and at the same time search for a different future for Malaysia, this is an indispensable guide.

A de facto two-party system emerged from the polling boxes on March 8 two years ago. The one-party state, however, refused to make way. Thus, Malaysia missed the opportunity to evolve into a real, normal democracy.

Malaysians defied threats and overcame fear to vote for the opposition in Election 2008. About 51 per cent of voters in Peninsula voted for change, while nationally the opposition received 49 per cent of the votes.

At the press conference held in the wee hours of March 9, the then-prime minister, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, acknowledged the electoral results, thus putting to rest the fear of unrest.

It was a real opportunity for Malaysia to transform itself from a one-party state, which blurs the line between party and government and treats legitimate political dissent and opponents as enemies of the state, to a genuine two-party system, which provides for level playing fields for both sides of the divide based on rule of law. Read the rest of this entry »

Deputy Human Resources Minister Datuk Maznah Mazlan said on Sunday in Rompin that some 36,000 Malaysians, or 3.6 percent of the working age population, were unemployed between October 2008 and December last year.

On first glance I assumed the Deputy Minister had been misquoted, but an across-the-board referral to this quote in today’s major newspapers have affirmed this statement was made.

According to the Government’s Economic Report 2009/2010, the Malaysian workforce is estimated at 12.06 million people. 3.6 percent of 12.06 million is 434,196. This is 12 times the figure quoted by the Deputy Minister.

It is difficult to see how Datuk Maznah could have so grossly misrepresented the unemployment figure. Perhaps she may have been confusing layoff and unemployment rates. In other democracies, unemployment rate matters hugely in politics.

Nevertheless, I hope the Deputy Minister will ensure that correct research into the best ways to deal with our unemployment rate, and take a serious look at other indicators including the issue of under-employment.

Liew Chin Tong

Today is not just an ordinary end to a year. It happens to be the end to a decade — the Noughties.

I have been in search of words to describe the state of our nation during the first decade of the 21st century and felt compelled to borrow the title of Adam Schwarz’s acclaimed book on Indonesia in the 1990s.

Malaysia is a nation in waiting for a profound change, especially since the 1999 general election, when sufficient numbers of Malaysians voted for a corrupt-free government, a democratic political system, and a more equitable distribution of opportunities and resources.

The themes that captured the attention of the electorate during the 1999 general election remained the same for the two subsequent elections, 2004 and 2008, except that in the 2004 elections, it was former Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi who stole the reform platform.

The cry for reform was real ever since Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad assumed the premiership nearly 30 years ago. Under his rule, politics and economy in Malaysia in general became a get-rich-quick scheme that had gone awry.

This issue is highlighted in a new book on the former prime minister “Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times” which is still being withheld by either the Customs Department or the Home Ministry’s Quran Publication Control and Text Division.

In the book, author Barry Wain suggests that:

“(B)ased on incomplete public information, RM15 billion was a conservative estimate of Perwaja’s losses. Similarly, Bank Bumiputra dropped at least RM10 billion. Bank Negara’s foreign exchange forays drained perhaps RM23 billion from Malaysia’s reserves.

“The cost of trying to push up the price of tin seemed paltry by comparison, may be RM1 billion. The total, RM50 billion or so, could have easily doubled if a professional accounting has been made, factoring in all the invisibles, from unrecorded write-offs to blatant embezzlement and opportunity costs.”

While the get-rich-quick scheme did go wrong, Malaysia was fortunate enough in the 1980s and 1990s because of the influx of foreign capital into Southeast Asia to finance the productive sectors and income from petroleum was sufficient to support a nascent rent-seeking culture.

But the last 10 years saw our nation hanging in the balance.

The economy did not really pick up after the 1997/1998 crisis. It is stuck in the low skill, low productivity, and low wage unhappy trinity that heavily depends on foreign labour while inevitably fuelled the exodus of the skilled and professional class. A World Bank report recently reported that only 25 per cent of Malaysian jobs are of skilled nature.

While the real sectors did not grow, the civil service as well as the rent-seeking parts of the economy grew like nobody’s business.

The federal government employed fewer than 900,000 people at the turn of the century. Today, almost 1.3 million are on its payroll. The national budget tripled, from RM68 billion in 1998 to RM209 billion in 2009. Only now the government realises that it should reduce a bit, planning to spend RM191 billion for 2010.

Yet, the quality of public service of all kinds, including public safety, roads, transportation, hospitals and healthcare, education, etc has visibly declined due to protectionism, wastage, corruption and collusion, as well as the wrongly done privatisation.

And, because of poor public provision of services, the cost is borne by private citizens in various forms, which eats into their disposable income, unavoidably widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

At the core of all these is politics. The one-party state that has ruled the country since independence refused to recognise the need to change despite suffering heavy blows in the 2008 general election.

Moving into a new decade, it is my fervent hope to see the nation in waiting for more than a decade will rise again to democratise our political system, to free our government from corruption, and to see through the transformation of our society that has social justice and equal opportunity at heart.

Only in such a society that we can restore hope and trust, and bring a new lease of life to our nation that is tired of waiting for change.

The Malaysian Insider

Exactly eleven years after Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s sacking as deputy prime minister sparked the reformasi movement; Malaysia is still in a limbo. But there is an increasingly strong sense that, against all odds, change for the better, is still possible.

The political tsunami on March 8, 2008, while unexpected, was the culmination of a series of substantial changes. It cannot be understood as something that happened overnight. More importantly, since its causes are profound, its effects cannot but prove lasting. Read the rest of this entry »

\”Change we did, what\’s next?\”

Hannah Yeoh, Subang Jaya State assemblywoman, talked about MACC investigating her and also about Teoh Beng Hock, the day before he died. She also touches on BN giving 1-2 million to candidates who have lost in the election to recapture their seats.

Bukit Bendera MP, Liew Chin Tong who was chairperson the the DAP forum that night, summaries the forum “Change we did, What’s next?”

Video by Lim Boo seng, Citizen Journalist

The Majlis Syura Ulama (Consultative Council of Religious Scholars) in PAS was created in 1983 to give substance to newly-adopted policy of kepimpinan ulama (leadership by scholars).

Previously, the Dewan Ulama – established in the early years of PAS along with Dewan Pemuda and Dewan Muslimat (women’s wing) as a sub-unit of the party – was the main avenue for the scholars to influence policies. Read the rest of this entry »