Have we normalised corruption?

 

Former education minister Maszlee Malik recently claimed that “millions of ringgit, if not billions” have been misappropriated from funds meant for educating our children.

Most of us instinctively feel that funds are leaking from all ministries, not just education, and therefore won’t be shocked by his claims.

However, we expect law enforcement agencies such as the police and the Malaysian Anti- Corruption Commission to begin investigations, and not dismiss it as a “general” claim or wait for the issue to blow over.

Maszlee, who served as education minister from May 2018 to January 2020 in the former Pakatan Harapan federal government, was quoted by FMT as saying that many reports of misappropriation had been filed while he was education minister.

“Actually, there are many more cases of leakages in the education ministry that involve millions and even billions which caused allocations that should have been used on quality education for our children to be misappropriated,” he said in a recent posting on dilapidated schools and corruption.

And that’s the tragedy of Malaysia. There’s so much abuse of funds due to graft and greed, and leakages of allocations due to incompetency in funds management.

Politics is so entangled in corruption that it is difficult not to suspect every minister or politician. You want to move up in politics, say from branch leader to division leader, you have to spend hundreds of thousands of ringgit, if not a million or two. If you want to find a spot on the supreme or central councils of most political parties, especially those which have been in power for decades, you need millions of ringgit.

Money, of course, does not fall from the sky.

That explains the clamour for positions in government or government-linked companies. That also helps explain the rise in corrupt practices.

Once in a while, a major case comes up – like the 1MDB scandal – to remind us of the rot in the system.

In education, the latest case to hit us in the face involves Rosmah Mansor, the wife of former prime minister Najib Razak.

On Sept 1, the High Court sentenced Rosmah to 10 years in jail and a fine of RM970 million, in default 10 years jail, after finding her guilty on three counts of corruption in connection with a RM1.25 billion Sarawak rural schools’ solar energy project.

The court found her guilty of soliciting RM187.5 million from former Jepak Holdings Sdn Bhd managing director Saidi Abang Samsudin through her former aide, Rizal Mansor, as an inducement to help the company secure the RM1.25 billion Sarawak rural schools’ solar energy project.

She was also found guilty of receiving a bribe amounting to RM5 million from Saidi, through Rizal, at Seri Perdana in Putrajaya on Dec 20, 2016; and receiving another RM1.5 million from Saidi at Jalan Langgak Duta on Sept 7, 2017.

In the course of the trial, one witness alleged that former education minister Mahdzir Khalid had sought RM60 million from Jepak Holdings to approve the RM1.25 billion solar hybrid project for 369 rural schools in Sarawak. Mahdzir has denied the allegation.

The court granted Rosmah’s request to suspend the jail sentence and fine pending her appeal to the Court of Appeal.

I wonder how many such cases there are that have not been successfully investigated and prosecuted. And what about the civil servants who handle money? How many of them have been investigated or jailed?

If anything, this case proves, yet again, that corruption goes all the way to the top. It has become systemic.

Most money is made via procurements and contracts. A former education official told me there were many, many avenues for making money in the education service, especially so if you were higher up the power scheme.

It’s normal to be offered a 10% to 20% cut in the purchase of books and supplies, even in the purchase of sports cups and medals.

At the ministry level, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions to be made via procurement or project contracts.

Over the decades, we have heard of corruption in almost all areas of the education system – from the ministry right down to the school administration.

We’ve heard of education officials and school heads giving contracts to family members, and we’ve heard of cliques within the education ministry and how some of these cliques support each other’s nefarious activities; we’ve heard of how superior officers turn a blind eye to maintain popularity.

We’ve also heard of cases where students bribe their classmates to be appointed class monitor or gain support for some position or other, and of undergraduates bribing lecturers to get good marks.

Even the integrity units in the ministry, we’ve heard, are largely ineffective and that reports just pile up at the top level with little action being taken.

I remember reading a letter to the editor where a former education ministry official, lamenting the level of corruption in the ministry, claimed that sometimes these reports were used by staff of education ministers to identify who could be used to approve projects for cronies. If true, this is terrible.

What’s worrying is that the education ministry almost always gets the biggest slice of the budget. Under Budget 2022, for instance, the ministry received an allocation of RM52.6 billion, equivalent to 16% of the total government expenditure.

And every year, the auditor-general’s report is full of misuse or abuse of funds by various ministries and agencies. They even have problems reporting losses, not to say anything about resolving the problem of funds leakage.

The Auditor-General’s 2019 Report, for instance, said the education ministry took up to 1,922 days to lodge a preliminary report of losses in 75 instances and that in some cases, the reports had yet to be prepared. For several cases, it added, more than 11 years were needed for the submission of a final report to the treasury.

The auditor-general found a total of 133 cases of missing public funds or movable assets totalling RM1.67 million in 2018 and 2019 at the education ministry. The amazing thing is that, according to the report, no action was taken in some of these cases.

Despite the efforts of the auditor-general year in year out, there hardly seems to be any improvement. And we seldom hear of anyone being sacked or jailed for abuses.

The continuing corruption calls into question the effectiveness of integrity units and internal systems to check abuse; it also calls into question the effectiveness of courses run by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission for civil servants and its own approaches to fighting corruption.

While corruption is bad no matter where it is committed, it becomes more alarming if it happens in education.

Isn’t education the one area where young people are taught values, apart from life skills and professional or occupational trades? And aren’t integrity and incorruptibility among the noblest of values?

If young people see corruption rife in schools and the education system, won’t it affect their perspective on life, not to mention their attitude towards work and corruption itself?

I’m afraid we may have normalised corruption in the minds of students and young people. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.