The art of finger-pointing

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Two weeks ago the people along the Rajang River of Sarawak witnessed a phenomenon which has been variously described as “unprecedented and beyond imagination” (Public Health Minister Datuk Seri Wong Soon Koh), “an ecological disaster” (Minister of Land Development Dato Seri Dr James Jemut Masing).

I am talking about the 50km long of logs, driftwood and debris which jammed the biggest river of Malaysia, stopping river traffic, killing fish and damaging properties. The incident itself elicited shock, horror and bewilderment from most of us, and as the good Minister said, “was unprecedented”, but what followed was certainly not “unprecedented”.

First, there was the usual, and justified, strident calls for investigation and to bring the culprits to book; then the promise that the matter will be looked into and a report made.

The latter usually takes some time and in the meantime the game of finger-pointing began. An activity that is not at all unprecedented in our neck of the woods

In case I appear to be unduly harsh on our own people, let me say that by “our neck of the woods” I don’t just mean Malaysia. Some of our neighbours are equally afflicted by this syndrome. Last week I was in Manila and got to read many of their newspapers. There, pages and pages were devoted to the recent tragic hostage taking incident that resulted in eight tourists being shot dead. (In that tragic episode sacked senior police inspector, Rolando Mendoza, took hostage of a busload of tourists to demand for the re-instatement to his former job). It was the same story there — finger-pointing and passing the buck galore.

The police said they were not at fault; the crisis management committee insisted neither were they; the Mayor, who was accused of being nonchalant during the crisis, said that it was not within his purview; the Ombudsman, whose bureaucratic stubbornness, stymied the negotiation said that he was just applying the letter of the law; the SWAT team, whose bungling during the assault was witnessed by the whole world, pleaded lack of train and proper equipment (which won them the mocking moniker of “Sorry We Are not Trained”).

I suppose it is an instinctive response for man to deflect blame coming his way, some sort primordial self preservation reaction. Kids when being reprimand for fights would go through the routine of “He started it first”, “No, he started it first”, and so on and so forth. It is all so juvenile. So, the art of finger-pointing is learned at an early age.

Thus, it is not a wonder that we have developed this finger-pointing thing into an art form.

The depressing thing is that over the years we were getting more and more demonstrations of this dubious art. I suppose there is much truth in the saying, “Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional”.

So it seems that the expression “the buck stops here” is alien to many of us. The term is said to be the motto of US president Harry S. Truman who had a sign with this inscription on his desk.

This was meant to indicate that responsibility would not pass on beyond that point. He designated himself as the ultimate fall guy.

When I mentioned to a friend that I am writing about this very human propensity of finger-pointing, he sent an old newspaper clipping. It was dated sometime in early 2007. At that time for some reasons or other, a number of major government buildings, including a brand new courthouse and the parliament building, suffered some mishaps — roof fell in, wall collapsed, water pipes burst, etc. costing the nation millions of ringgits. It was very public and very embarrassing. Naturally, all the agencies and authorities that could in anyway be responsible were putting up their protective shields. Yes, it was an orgy finger-pointing. It got to a point that the then Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, had to publicly chastise all the parties and urge them to accept their responsibilities.

Appropriately, Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi was then speaking in Japan, a country noted for taking responsibility to the extreme. A 12th century code of ethics called the Bushido code (literally means the code of the warriors) is still the guiding principle in the country. Among the 15 precepts are honour (a good name and reputation, self respect) and righteousness (sense of obligation and duty). In the past it is said a righteous person would take the ultimate step of committing hara-kiri as a gesture of accepting responsibility of a wrong done.

Of course, we are not expecting our people to do something like that. And we are not even expecting anybody to resign like what the French army chief of staff, Gen Bruno Cuche, did some years ago.

The general resigned two days after a soldier injured 17 people at a military show. The soldier used real bullets instead of blanks at the public demonstration at a barracks in south-western France. It was a genuine mistake, a careless hitch in the safety protocol.

The point is that the soldier who made the mistake was many levels removed from the good general. However, he felt that as the head of the army he should accept the responsibility for the lapse in the system.

The logjam in the Rajang River was caused by more than a slight hitch in the system. The task is to find out what or who caused the hitch. However, habits die hard. Already the indication is that the buck is being push around. The ground is being prepared to take shift the focus away from the obvious cause — logging. As one person in authority said, “First of all, the situation was not logjam but driftwood.”

A few days ago the State Forestry Department director declared that the logging activities in upper reaches of Rajang River are not to blame for the logjam. Apparently, the studies in the last week or so showed that it contributed minimally to the massive debris that clogged the Rajang.

Instead, he pointed to changing rain patterns as the main culprit. He explained that rain patterns had changed for the past two or three years.

The more cynical among would say that is taking finger-pointing to the extreme, in that it is pushing the buck to Mother Nature, the one entity that cannot pass the buck on or answer back.

Hmm, I wonder how true that statement is. We do notice that weather pattern has been rather strange of late with unseasonal heavy rain or dry spell. There are disastrous floods in one part of the world and famine inducing droughts in another. Could it be that’s the way Mother Nature is reacting to all the bucks that we heap at her door step?

The writer can be contacted at [email protected]