IN these difficult times, I find it rather incongruous to hear of vast amounts of money being sloshed around purportedly as reward and inducement to gratify those in power.
It makes me shudder when the figures run into hundreds of thousands, millions and even billions.
At a time when relatively poor people find it hard to make ends meet with soaring prices of daily essentials and having to search high and low for chicken, cooking oil, vegetables and other edibles, or that some were just relieved for the meagre one-time government payment of RM100 to tide them over, it's hard to stomach it when some in our so-called "upper echelons of society" had allegedly been implicated in giving and receiving "tainted money".
Surprisingly, these are personalities we often find in the news!
I'm rather intrigued by revelations in the courts of how easily some of these lucky few can come into contact with large sums of money by virtue of their positions or perceived political or corporate power.
I recall, in 2016, someone who was always looking for mind-boggling deals, had asked me if I knew anyone who might hold the keys to a profitable venture — processing overseas visas to enter Malaysia.
I quickly said I didn't, for two reasons. I really didn't know anyone with that kind of influence, and the idea of outsourcing such an important procedure to a private company is rather abhorrent. Such matters should be left to the Immigration Department!
I'm pretty sure we can find the right civil service personnel (if we really wanted to) to handle the foreign language skills involved in the vetting procedure.
At least, Immigration officers posted abroad could have had a good exposure and return with better perspectives and improved skills.
Instead, what do we have? Torrid tales of money allegedly paid to politicians and their hangers-on in the hundreds of thousands, and even millions of ringgit, as rewards by those involved in the lucrative business!
If only we didn't toy around with the mouth-watering idea of privatisation. The privatisation of visa processing for instance, has gone absurdly wrong. After all, it's the government's job to approve visas to ensure the nation's security and sovereignty.
In the mid-1980s, privatisation was much bandied about by advocates because it was said to bring about greater efficiency and lower operational costs.
Its proponents and patrons were also egging for its implementation by claiming that it would be easier to tackle the questions of hiring and firing.
Really? I believe these employment issues would boil down to the same process even if the question of tackling laggards in the civil service were to surface. We just need to be fair and firm.
After some feeble debate, privatisation eventually became the choice menu.
Many government-run functions were farmed out like the building of interstate roads and highways, waterworks, electricity generation, telecommunications, vehicle inspection and, at one time, vehicle parking enforcement in Kuala Lumpur!
Did things become efficient? Let's take a cursory look.
First, is it so difficult for the government to raise funds and build interstate highways?
After many years of paying tolls, do we still have good experiences travelling on the private sector-run tolled highways compared with the upgraded no-toll roads built by the government? And, have automated toll gates provided us with smoother transactions?
In hindsight, did we not already have in-house expertise within the government's public works outfit before privatisation set in?
As for waterworks, can you remember the number of times we've been subjected to supply disruptions in recent times?
Didn't we already have skilled people within the government who could handle such matters instead of doling out massive amounts of money to private entities to run the same operations?
The astronomical amounts of salaries and allowances paid to these so-called "high-calibred" directors, managers and executives of privatised entities can be regarded as obscene.
Wouldn't it be better to reward government servants entrusted with such tasks with higher salaries and pensions? We might even have a more enlightened and motivated civil service.
In these tough times, when corrupt practices have become somewhat omnipresent, I was tickled by what former United States president Theodore Roosevelt once said: "A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car. But if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad!"
The writer is a former Bernama chief executive officer and editor-in-chief
