Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim today attributed the government’s significant achievements during his two years in office to the implementation of transparent governance that is free from major scandals.
He said Malaysia is a country governed by the rule of law and all decisions are made based on good governance, in line with the principles of Madani Malaysia which emphasises noble values.
“This country upholds the rule of law, and principles of good governance must guide our decisions… Madani places a strong emphasis on values, so let us not be distracted by other matters,” he said.
As such, he called on civil servants to remain resolute in their mission to enhance the country’s economy and performance, as well as demonstrate their efficiency and dedication.
The prime minister said this at the Prime Minister’s Department’s monthly assembly in Putrajaya today. Also present were Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and Chief Secretary to the Government Shamsul Azri Abu Bakar.
Anwar also called on the public service to think of a comprehensive reform approach to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to the people.
“Do we need to gather, discuss together, evaluate each other’s performance, recognise achievements, and generate fresh ideas? Let us think about this together,” he said.
Anwar, whilst praising unspecified ‘significant achievements’ by his government towards the ‘implementation of transparent governance’, has asked for more good ideas on this topic.
Admittedly, he seems to be directing his request to his own public servants to come up with suggestions for “comprehensive reform” rather than any Tom, Dick or Harry.
However, it is from a wide body of professional and civil society groups and ordinary citizens in Malaysia that valuable and sensible suggestions for reform have been arriving in recent years and it was on the platform of those ideas that he ran for office. Yet those suggestions remain unimplemented.
It is hard to claim transparent governance, for example, when there is no mandatory public register of political donations and where the once open register of public contracts (a reform implemented under Ahmad Badawi) has now been rendered effectively impossible for all but those connected to those contracts to access – a deliberate retrograde step.
Good governance likewise suffers when prosecutors are not independent of the executive – a reform that has long been called for in Malaysia. Indeed, just last week the prime minister alleged that prosecutions under his own previous PH government had been politically motivated and ‘vindictive’.
Yet, now in the top job he has kept the arrangement whereby the Attorney General appointed at his behest is in charge of prosecutions. Notably, although the whiff of vendetta has hardly been entirely absent, the concerns on his watch have centred more on the dropping of charges for what appear to be compelling political reasons as opposed to objective legal reasons based on fact.
Indeed, it is extremely hard for reformers to celebrate ‘transparency’ and ‘good governance’ in the wake of the appointment as Governor of Sabah a man against whom 46 charges for money laundering and timber kickbacks were dropped on the excuse that millions of ringgit found smuggled through customs and tens of millions of dollars identified in his Swiss personal accounts were unspecified ‘political donations”.
Musa Aman has never been required to demonstrate who provided those donations or where they ended up. However, he does have a raft of powerful UMNO relatives and allies …. and clearly still a heck of a lot of cash in those personal accounts, which in the end were never frozen thanks to lack of cooperation from the Malaysian authorities.
Meanwhile, the Deputy Prime Minister who sat through these remarks by the Prime Minister this week presumably kept his eyes well trained upon the ground, because everyone in Malaysia knows about the string of charges that had to be dropped against him in order to form the required government majority. That was AFTER the courts had been satisfied the prosecution had sufficiently made its case on all 47 charges of criminal breach of trust.
Readers of Malaysian news over past months have continued to learn of various ‘open tender’ contracts that have been inexplicably awarded to the well connected or even to those who are constitutionally barred from benefitting from such public contracts.
Several healthy reforms are therefore still clearly waiting to be implemented in this area of governance, particularly in the murky area of defence contracts and mineral and timber licences.
Voters may therefore share the prime minister’s aspirations, but most believe that aspirations is what they still remain. Achievement, to the contrary, seems further away than ever.