Archive | November, 2007

Now this is an interesting topic…and it comes back to the same old subject again sadly. Malaysia hypocrisy and apathy.

It’s a fairly serious topic, but one that comes up fairly often. It’s somewhat confusing as a foreigner in Malaysia, especially at first, trying to comprehend the Malaysian mind-set.

At first Malaysians seems like patriotic people who are passionate about their country and want to see positive changes in the bureaucracy and governance of the country. But later you realise they just like to talk about it, and aren’t actually willing to do anything on a ground or grass-roots level to make the changes.

My case in point today is corruption.

You’ll often hear someone or other whining about corruption especially with this $27 million cop splashed all over the papers, and even before that they’ll moan about corrupt cops, corrupt politicians and corrupt business practices.

All you have to do is ask them…when you get stopped for a traffic offense do you bribe the police to get away?

95% of the time they’ll say “Yeah of course la, what else to do?”

Which makes them just as bad as the people they are complaining about, it’s their fault corruption still continues and is so blatant. I hold all people that pay police bribes on the street accountable for the corruption in this country.

Me? If I do something wrong, I take the summon and pay it like a good citizen. If I didn’t do anything wrong, I won’t allow the police to harass me into paying them just so I can get away easily.

Stand your ground if you didn’t do anything wrong, don’t pay just to get away faster. You are just making things worse and opening more doors for them to do it in the future.

If you did something wrong, accept the summon and pay it through the proper channels. If you get a discount in the police station that’s fine. But don’t bribe the man on the street.

When the police ask me if I want to settle I offer them RM10 – just to insult them and ask for them to hurry up writing the summons.

In a way you can blame it on the government for paying the police such pitiful salaries, they ‘need’ to collect kopi duit to survive…apparently.

And from what I know corruption on high levels exists in some form in every country in the World, according to the local cultural practices.

Business has opportunity cost as well which even in UK or US might have some kind of ‘gift’ associated with it.

It’s just not so blatant and it doesn’t effect the people.

The problem with the police on the street being corrupt is you have no faith in them solving important crimes or looking after the citizens, their first priority after all is collecting YOUR money – which YOU are allowing them to do.

It effectively removes the whole point of having a police force.

No doubt in UK the government is corrupt at high levels, but the man on the street be it a bobby walking the beat or a traffic cop is 100% corruption free and you can trust that whatever their interest in a given situation it’s not according to money, bribes or sweeteners.

This makes you feel safe.

Stop bribing and the corruption will stop, the police will have to start doing their jobs properly and they will eventually get paid properly.