A precarious calm at Tenang

Yet another by-election is in the coming with the death of MP Datuk Sulaiman Taha in the constitution of Tenang in Johor and scheduled on 30 January 2011. While speculations are fueling that the general election might be held either in the first quarter or second quarter of 2011, this latest by-election in Tenang may be the deciding factor for Najib to gauge his standing on the outcome of his popularity.

The significant of this by election including its result hold certain prospect to the ruling government.

Should this be a BN victory, which is their stronghold, this will catapult Najib to pursue an earlier general election in the immediate months to ride on this success and what with the recent survey by Merdeka review of his popular ratings still holding forte at 69%.

On the other hand, if a PKR victory emerged, it will make no different to any outcome in parliament neither does it do any major overhaul to the political landscape that it is now. What PKR will get is only a feel good factor knowing they are gaining some slight grounds over BN in terms of popularity, and that is about all we will get.

Even with an additional seat in parliament, the recent suspension of four PKR MP’s including Anwar himself for six months, even with a win in Tenang, will do little or nothing at all to balance any quota in parliament.

Should BN lose the Tenang by-election, he may just delay the general election further until such a time when he is much much more confident of its results favouring BN.

Should we let this be a lost and gain a bigger win later?

Winners ignored, 5th placers lauded?

by Ooi Chin Wah
Letters
Malaysiakini

The World Robot Olympiad (WRO) is an event for science, technology and education, that brings together youths from all over the world in order to develop their creativity and problem solving skills through challenging and educational robot competitions.

Participating teams need to create, design and build a robot model that looks or behaves like human.

This year the task of organising the competition was given to the Philippines. The Ministry of Education and many private companies in the Philippines jointly sponsored the event.

The steering committee consists of well-known academicians from China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Singapore. 250 teams from 22 countries participated.

There are six gold medals on offer as there are two categories in the competition; the Open category and regular category. Each category is further divided into Elementary (primary school), Junior High (Forms 1 to 3) and Senior High (Forms 4 and 5) categories.

Malaysia won two gold medals, one by the Chung Ling High School (Kampung Baru, Penang Island) for Open Category, Senior High school level, the other by SMK Bintulu for Regular Category, Junior High School level.

This piece of news was reported under the title “Champs once again” in the Nov 14 edition of Star.

But the report is about the team that won the fifth place in the Open Category, Elementary Level. Here is an excerpt from the report:

‘Year Five pupil Muhd Syamil Khairi from SK Wan Ibrahim, Kuala Lipis, Pahang, said he and his two teammates Mohd Ezzameer Fitri and Muhammad Hazimuddin Halif took three months to build their robot which performs an orang asli dance known as the “sewang” with the supervision of their robotic club teacher Mahmud Salleh.’

There is no mention that the team highlighted in the report was awarded the fifth place in the Open Category, Elementary Level.

I can’t help but feeling that the author was trying to give the casual reader an impression that the above said team is the team that will put Malaysia at the top of the world. Was the Chung Ling High School mentioned at all? No.

The SMJK Chung Ling mentioned at the end of the report is in Butterworth. Even SMK Bintulu who won the gold medal was mentioned merely as a participating team. Here is an excerpt from the report”

‘The other teams which represented Malaysia at the olympiad were SMK Bintulu in Bintulu; SMJK Chung Ling, Butterworth; SJKC Chi Man, Kuala Lumpur; SJKC Taman Connaught, Kuala Lumpur; MRSM Kubang Pasu, Alor Setar; SMK Sultanah Hajjah Kalsom, Kuantan; SMJK Jit Sin, Ayer Itam; and Sekolah Sultan Alam Shah, Putrajaya.’

New Zealand boleh!

Although I had a very short stint in New Zealand a couple of years back, my exposure there was sufficient to allowed me a perceived accurate view of the environment and atmosphere of the culture embedded into the citizen from a tender age. Values are taught about corruptions from pre-school onwards. These very same values, thru educations and interactive classes, are emphasized in their entire schooling days.

Enforcement alone and probably the last bastion of fulfilment, cannot eradicate this short fall to tackle and overcome corruption completely. It has to start from young. And to succeed, it have to be instilled into the minds of every citizen the day they start to expose themselves into society, and generations will take root and embrace this concept as they move on in life. NZ did not achieve this overnight.

Below is a caption from the NZ's SFO (Serious Fraud Office) aka Anti Corruption Agency website

New Zealand Anti-Corruption Agencies

New Zealand does not have any one single agency tasked with fighting corruption. Unlike many other countries it has not seen the need to create an Independent Commission Against Corruption. Rather it has a number of agencies that focus on the different elements in the fight against corruption. Some of these agencies have their focus on the more positive task of reinforcing values to ensure that New Zealand maintains a corruption free environment; others focus on the enforcement of the laws and the rules. The two main law enforcement agencies responsible for anti-corruption investigations and prosecutions are the New Zealand Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the New Zealand Police.

The New Zealand Serious Fraud Office

Established in 1990, the SFO focuses on serious or complex fraud. The legislation governing the SFO does not attempt to define serious or complex fraud beyond saying that it includes a series of connected incidents of fraud which, if taken together, amount to serious or complex fraud. Rather the Act provides guidance to the Director as to the facts that the Director should have regard to in determining which cases to investigate.

Those factors are:

the suspected nature and consequences of the fraud;

the suspected scale of the fraud;

the legal, factual, and evidential complexity of any matter;

any relevant public interest considerations.

Most instances of bribery, corruption and secret commissions would fall within this descriptive section. The SFO is particularly well placed to conduct or assist with any investigation which requires an analysis of financial transactions. Instances of bribery or corruption will often only be established after a careful analysis of financial transactions and money flows.

All investigations undertaken by the SFO are conducted by a multi disciplinary team comprising an experienced investigator, a forensic accountant and a prosecutor. That team is supervised by a very experienced senior investigator or forensic accountant.

Economic crime or corruption is always clandestine and usually extremely well planned. The people involved are often well-educated and may occupy relatively senior positions in the community. The only evidence may be a complex set of arrangements understood only by those involved in the scheme. It was against that background that the New Zealand Parliament legislated special powers for the SFO.

The powers of the Director of the SFO go beyond those of the Police in New Zealand. The Director is able to issue a Notice requiring the production of any information or documents that the Director feels may assist the investigation. Furthermore, the Director, by Notice, is able to require any person to appear before the Director to answer questions. At such a compulsory interview the person must answer all questions irrespective of whether those answers will incriminate that person. However, under the legislation, the Director is not able to use any such incriminating answers in evidence against that person unless the person gives evidence inconsistent with their responses in any subsequent prosecution. All duties of confidentiality with the exception of legal professional privilege are set aside by the SFO Act 1990.

Equal no more

Singapore Seen Overtaking Malaysia 45 Years After Lee’s Tears

Bloomberg

Nov 11, 2010

By Shamim Adam

Forty-five years after Singapore’s expulsion from a union with Malaysia left Lee Kuan Yew in tears on national television, the economy of the city-state he led to independence is poised to overtake its neighbor. Singapore’s gross domestic product will cap its fastest annual growth this year since independence, rising as much as 15 percent to about $210 billion, while the economy of Malaysia, a country 478 times its size, will expand 7 percent to $205 billion, government forecasts show. The nations are scheduled to release their 2010 data by February.

The island that former economic adviser Albert Winsemius once said was considered a “poor little market in a dark corner of Asia” is now ranked by the World Bank as the easiest place to do business, has the world’s second-busiest container port, and boasts the highest proportion of millionaire households, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

“Singapore kept on moving to the next level as the world economy evolved and adjusted to market demands and investors’ interests,” said Lee Hock Guan, senior fellow at the Singapore- based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. “Malaysia was struck by the curse of resource-rich countries: It didn’t optimize its human capital.”

From a low-cost manufacturing center for companies such as Texas Instruments Inc. in the 1960s, Singapore has become the world’s fourth-largest foreign-exchange center with a S$1.2 trillion ($932 billion) asset-management industry.

Rising Wealth

Smaller than New York City and the only Southeast Asian nation without natural resources, Singapore has grown 189-fold since independence in 1965, helping boost GDP per capita to $36,537 last year from $512. Malaysia’s economy expanded at one- third the pace during the same period and had a GDP per capita of $6,975 in 2009, up from $335 in 1965.

Malaysia’s growth fell to an average 4.7 percent a year in the past decade, from 7.2 percent in the 1990s, when former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad wooed overseas manufacturers, built highways and erected the world’s tallest twin towers.

“Development is like a marathon and all policies geared toward it must be sustainable and continuous,” said Thomas Lam, chief economist at OSK-DMG, a venture between Malaysian securities firm OSK Holdings Bhd. and Deutsche Bank AG. “Malaysia runs the marathon like a 100 meter event, so you see the initial spurt but not continuous progress in the race.”

Lam, 35, is one of 386,000 Malaysians who have become permanent residents or citizens of Singapore, a list that includes Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. Chairman Cheong Choong Kong.

‘Greater’ Opportunity

“Singapore seems to offer greater career opportunity and mobility in my field,” said Lam, the second-most-accurate U.S. economic forecaster for 2008 to 2009 in Bloomberg surveys.

After more than 140 years under British rule, Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia in September 1963 as Lee and his colleagues sought a bigger common market to cut unemployment and curb communism. The merger survived less than two years amid ideological differences and worsening relations between the United Malays National Organisation, which dominated the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, and Lee’s People’s Action Party.

“For me, it is a moment of anguish,” Lee said on Aug. 9, 1965, the day Singapore became a sovereign state. “My whole adult life, I believed in Malaysian merger and unity of the two territories.” Lee, 87, was Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990.

‘Loss of Time’

Winsemius, the country’s economic adviser from 1961 to 1984, said he thought the merger was a “loss of time.” Credited with helping formulate Singapore’s industrial strategy, Winsemius, who died in 1996, said the general opinion of Singapore in the early 1960s was a country “going down the drain.”

The government acted by investing in export-based industries. It built new container terminals for Singapore’s port, the genesis of the country’s development; reclaimed land offshore to attract companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group for a S$30 billion oil refining complex; and moved into high-tech industries like electronics and drugs.

“Economic development does not occur naturally,” said Ravi Menon, a senior official at Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry. “This is where free marketers are disenchanted with Singapore. The government has never hesitated from guiding the development process or intervening in markets where it believes such intervention will lead to superior outcomes.”

Biomedical Research

The government invested about S$500 million in its Biopolis biomedical research hub after attracting drugmakers including Pfizer Inc. and Novartis AG. It cut corporate tax rates by nine percentage points since 2000 to 17 percent, compared with 25 percent in Malaysia.

BNP Paribas has a “buy” recommendation on Keppel Corp. and SembCorp Marine Ltd., the world’s biggest builders of oil rigs and two of the companies the government backed to propagate its industrial policy. Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd., Asia’s biggest aircraft-maintenance company, was rated a “buy” by Deutsche Bank AG.

Singapore was kicked out of the union partly because Lee opposed Malaysia’s affirmative-action policy, which provides special rights to the ethnic Malay majority. While Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has pledged to roll back key policies of ethnic favoritism, he told UMNO’s 61st General Assembly last month that the “social contract” that gives benefits to the Malays cannot be repealed.

Najib’s Plan

“Singapore will overtake Malaysia because its focus is just on economic growth,” Mahathir, Malaysia’s prime minister from 1981 to 2003, said in an e-mailed response to questions. “There is no social restructuring goal such as fair distribution of wealth between races as we have in Malaysia.”

Najib is trying to return the Malaysian economy to the levels of growth that boosted stock prices almost fivefold in the decade through 1996. He set a goal of tripling gross national income to 1.7 trillion ringgit ($550 billion) in 2020, from 600 billion ringgit in 2009 and creating 3.3 million jobs.

His government unveiled an economic transformation program in September aimed at attracting investment, including $444 billion of programs this decade ranging from mass rail to nuclear power, led by private and government-linked companies. Najib is also taking steps to bolster the talent base, including plans for a teaching hospital with courses by Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University and a new corporation tasked with luring back skilled Malaysians from overseas.

About 350,000 to 400,000 Malaysian citizens work in Singapore, including 150,000 who commute daily via buses and motorcycles to jobs in the city-state’s factories, kitchens and offices.

Export Model

“Singapore followed the export-led industrialization model to become a base for foreign manufacturers,” said Lee of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. “The main model for Malaysia for a number of years was import-substitution where it protected certain industries. That created inertia.”

Lee, a 52-year-old Malaysian who studied and lived overseas for more than 30 years, said he plans to return to live in Malaysia only when he retires.

Singapore beat 182 economies to take first place in the World Bank’s annual ranking of business conditions, which looks at property rights, taxes, access to credit, labor laws and regulations on customs and licenses. Malaysia climbed two steps to 21st, according to the Nov. 4 report.

Mercer Consulting ranked Singapore as Asia’s most livable city in May, even as it lags behind Hong Kong on measurements of personal freedom and media censorship. The government says restrictions on public assembly and speeches are necessary to maintain social and religious harmony among its 5 million people. The city was wracked by violence between ethnic Malays and Chinese in the 1960s.

The country must keep innovating to stay ahead, said Tomo Kinoshita, deputy head of Asia economics research at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong.

“Singapore must keep searching for new markets,” Kinoshita said. “Less developed Asian countries are all growing quickly and trying to catch up.”