HE wasn’t joking really, my expatriate colleague, when he shot me an email suggesting that this week’s column takes “a look at the way Jackie (my long-suffering wife) comes home with baked beans costing four times the price on the tin and manages to pay RM8 for her roti canai.”
Indeed, I’m sure it would have been rather difficult for even expatriates to read the news on Malaysia this week and joke.
But, wait a minute, I stand corrected.
There was, indeed, a bit of a joke going around this week. The joke came about after a promised mammoth gathering in some stadium in Selangor ended up with a crowd slightly bigger than the crowd of Perkasa warriors who turned up to thwart the Bersih marchers on July 9.
But the small turnout, while funny in a tragic sense, wasn’t really the joke.
The real joke that went around was that the organisers reflect the failure of our Math syllabus. This was after they promised that there would be a million attending when the capacity of the stadium is only 70,000!
But, to get back to my ever-so-serious expatriate colleague, he was alluding to an event that, like Deepavali, Hari Raya, Chinese New Year and Christmas, comes around every year.
However, for as long as I can remember, unlike these joyous days, the event he was referring to has never been a happy one for me and many other tax-paying Malaysians.
The event, of course, is the yearly report of the Auditor-General, a report that looks at where our taxes went to, the year before. Or, rather, how the taxes that have been collected from us have been spent by the ‘caretaker’ of that money, the government of the day.
The Auditor-General’s report essentially is an accounting of the spending of the federal government, via its ministries and other agencies and also the spending of state governments.
Of all our civil servants – and even political leaders – the Auditor-General is, for many, the one person in Malaysia whom we totally respect.
Indeed, mention Auditor-General and many of us will remember the late, incorruptible Tan Sri Ahmad Noordin Zakaria, who led the investigation into the 1983 RM2 billion Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) scandal.
It was a scandal that saw the murder of BMF assistant general manager Jalil Ibrahim, who had been sent to Hong Kong to investigate alleged irregularities.
Ahmad Noordin and his team, despite not being a Royal Commission due to the objection of Dr Mahathir, painstakingly unearthed one malfeasance after another.
And so it has been with this year’s Auditor-General’s report as well; a truly tragic and shameful account of one misspending adventure after another.
First, there was the failure of the National Feedlot Centre (NFC), an RM73.64 million project described as ‘a mess’ by the Auditor-General’s report. Indeed, the report found that “the project meant to meet the demand for beef in the country is more than 4,000 cows short of its obligations”.
That the ownership of the project has now been linked to some people high up in government has made it even more unpalatable for many.
The comment made by the deputy minister involved in the project that the project failed because “the local operators who handled the project lack knowledge in the field”, not only raises more questions than it answers but, also, surely must rank as one of the most flippant and irresponsible comments made by a politician.
I will not go into the criticisms of the Tourism Ministry in the report because I would sound like a broken record, repeating what has already been said often enough in the public domain but, unfortunately, has always been sidestepped or virtually ignored by the minister in charge.
Nor do I wish to elaborate on the Johor ‘Black Hole’ that swallowed a cool couple of a million ringgit of our money. As one report put it: “The Johor government parted with millions of ringgit to set up an e-portal to check the marital status of Muslim individuals, but the portal has not gone live almost four years after the scheduled deadline.”
The report goes on to say that the portal – ‘e Nikah Cerai Rujuk’ (e-NCR) – was supposed to go live in Jan 2008, but data migration has yet to be completed. This is despite the Johor Science Technology and ICT Unit (Ustict) having paid RM1.78 million for this purpose.”
And while we are in Johor, I am sure you read that typical Malaysia Boleh story? Yes, the one about the JB City Council paying RM284,000 in light fittings for the sixth floor of a building which only has four floors.
And if that didn’t make you weep, I’m sure the mother of all tales of creative spending in the Auditor-General’s 2010 Report will make you shed a tear or two.
We are talking about the government’s purchase of 257 armoured personnel carriers (APCs) from the Turks via a local company, of course. And, truth be told, the opposition politicians got it all wrong.
The APCs cost a mere RM7.55 billion and not RM7.8 billion as claimed by the opposition. Which works out to about RM30 million per vehicle. Such great news.
However, in these days of Google, others have now gathered data to indicate that the Portuguese Army paid RM 4.4 million for a similar APC. And that a Swiss company charges RM3.9 million for each of theirs. About RM25 million less each than ours, give or take a million.
Which leaves us taxpayers – who will never see that amount of money even in a dozen lifetimes – feeling rather dazed and confused, if not a trifle peeved at all this spending that, whichever way you spin it, does seem rather excessive and unaccounted for.
The cynical response I’ve heard to all this has been, “So what’s new?” Indeed, what’s evident is that, as in previous years, the official reactions have vacillated between passing the buck and making unbelievable excuses.
But I think the point of the Auditor-General’s report and its revelations is that it reveals more malpractices than simple human error.
The next move essentially is yours and mine.