The buck stops with me!

With all the wastages and leakages, Vision 2020 is fast becoming an illusion, unless the nation's leaders have the guts to set things right.

COMMENT

Has Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s GTP (Government Transformation Programme) gone to pot? This is the question one must ask when one reads the 2010 Auditor-General’s Report where it is obviously clear that the bad old ways are still continuing.

Prices of goods purchased are marked up tremendously and this outrageous practice shows no sign of stopping.

Year in, year out the Auditor-General’s Report only reports the malpractice but the report is a toothless tiger. All it does is report and make recommendations on how to stem the wastages and leakages but it has no power to enforce its recommendations.

For too long the system has enabled the malpractice to flourish. From the purchase of marine binoculars worth not more than RM1,940 but purchased at the price of RM56,350 to the purchase of horses and OPVs (Offshore Patrol Vehicles), the leakages just seem to abound.

Among the government departments and ministries which have been highlighted by the Auditor-General are the Education Ministry, Health Ministry, the Customs Department and the Inland Revenue Board (the last two departments come under the Finance Ministry and the finance minister is none other than the prime minister himself).

The GTP has so far failed in its role to transform the running, administration and procurement process in the government departments highlighted in the Auditor-General’s Report.

It makes one wonder whether there exists such a thing as standard operating procedure or a manual outlining the ministry’s procedures that must be adhered to. Is the GTP just a beautiful slogan with no substance?

The gargantuan purchase prices only serve to indicate that at least someone, if not the whole department, is sleeping on the job, to say the least.

Surely at least three open, transparent and competitive tenders must be called for before goods are purchased.

Who decides on which supplier to buy the goods from? Who approves the decision? Who approves the payment? There must be several levels of administration process to go through before the payment is approved and the goods are purchased.

And the fact that those department heads caught out by the Auditor-General have the audacity to say it is a “disciplinary problem” is certainly ridiculous. And to top it off, no names have been provided by the department heads. Is this a crime without criminals? This is a lame excuse by the culprits to be let off the hook as the crime could not be pinned on anyone.

MACC continues to open files

As the prime minister, Najib Tun Razak, must certainly be answerable but, sad to say, no one from the government side has given a satisfactory reply when Pakatan Rakyat MPs bring up the matter in Parliament.

Why is this so? Perhaps that is the reason why the Auditor-General’s Report has been delayed – so that the public will forget about it and so that the opposition will not have time to ask questions that will put the government in a spot.

If this uncontrolled and rampant wastage were to go on, the nation will one day come to a grinding halt as the national debt increases.

Therefore it is not surprising that the nation has been projected to go bankrupt by 2020 when the national debt increases to RM1 trillion. That is just a little more than eight years from now. A frightening thought indeed, especially for the younger generation.

And yet no action is taken by the relevant authorities to curb this malaise.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) is supposed to nail these culprits but they too seem to be another toothless tiger.

In previous years we have had screwdrivers worth RM32 purchased at RM224 and a car jack worth RM50 bought at RM5,700 but these incidents of inflated price purchases continue to go unpunished as the culprits have not been brought to book.

Thus it is with a pinch of salt that one reads of the news that the MACC will open 36 new files on the malpractices highlighted in the 2010 Auditor-General’s Report. And what about the RM250 million scandal involving the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC)?

Financial implosion

If you are expecting any action on that by the MACC, you can wait till the cows come home.

Members of the public have failed to understand why the sorry state of affairs have been allowed to continue. If this were to happen in a company, the company would have gone bankrupt ages ago or if not, then the whole department would be sacked.

This situation cannot be allowed to go on as it will be detrimental to the nation’s financial health. Sooner or later, something is going to give way or a financial implosion may occur.

What is the government doing to arrest this deteriorating situation? Apparently nothing, as the national debt continues to spiral out of control. This will have an impact on the inflation rate and the cost of living as the price of basic necessities hits the roof while the wages of the low-income group continue to stagnate.

The situation will be complicated further by the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which will further cause more hardship for the poor as the income gap widens wherein Malaysia will then have an elite group of nouveau rich and another group of hardcore poor.

Certainly then, the dream of Vision 2020 will only be an illusion if no one, especially the nation’s leaders, have the courage to say: the buck stops with me!

Selena Tay wants firm answers from the government. She is a FMT columnist.