The recent arrest and
indictment on corruption charges of a senior opposition leader in Malaysia,
highlights the potent role of graft and corruption both as a condition and a
weapon in Southeast Asian politics.
The move
on Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng comes as Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak
seeks to divert attention and battle the political fallout from a financial
scandal involving the diversion of close to a billion dollars of public funds
into his personal bank account, a fact he denies involves any financial
wrongdoing.
Whatever
the legal determination of either the price Lim Guan Eng paid for a bungalow,
or the source of the millions of dollars in Najib’s personal accounts, it is
clear that Malaysian political fortunes rise and fall on allegations of graft
rather than the performance of its politicians in government. Democracy is the
poorer for it, society feels cheated, and a country’s reputation is tarnished.
With
rising demands for transparency and equality in Southeast Asia’s more educated,
prosperous societies, the question is how much longer prevailing high levels of
corruption, among the highest in the world according to international watchdog Transparency
International, will be tolerated, and what remedial efforts will
work to change the situation.
Corruption
is an everyday reality in almost all the ten countries of Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asian countries regularly figure high up global tables measuring
corruption and a lack of transparency. The standout exception is Singapore
where decades of determined policy and institutional attention has all but
eradicated the problem. But Indonesia, Malaysia as well as Cambodia and Thailand
have scored highly on indices of corruption. In 2015 Cambodia ranked 150th out of 168 countries
in Transparency International’s corruption index. Thailand sat at 76, Indonesia
at 88.
In the
Philippines, incoming President Rody Durtete, ‘listening to the murmurings of
the people’, made transparency in government the very first order of his
presidency; his predecessor Benigno Aquino had made battling corruption the
central plank of his presidency.
The scale
of the problem goes beyond the wastage of resources, the stealing of people’s
hard earned incomes, and the basic perpetuation of criminal activity.
Corruption is the currency of political patronage protecting selfish
oligarchies and elites and underpinning the region’s alarming inequality of
income and opportunity.
Corruption
has also been weaponised through the undue influence that powerful political
forces can bring to bear on supposedly blind processes of justice, and is
wielded to fell political foes without giving them a fair chance to defend
themselves. Corruption in all these forms and through all these uses is a
major obstacle to democratic progress in Southeast Asia.
The roots
of corruption lie in the weakness of institutions: police that turn a blind eye
to crime for money; regulatory authorities that take bribes to turn a blind eye
to rules; administrators and government officials who demand extra payment to
carry out their duties. Government at a basic level is poorly financed in
Southeast Asia, so it’s no surprise that those doing the governing demand extra
payment to do their jobs. In Indonesia, for example, average low ranking
civil servant monthly salaries barely rise above $300.
The
social pathology of the region also plays a role. Economic and political
power is concentrated in the hands of the few and corruption is a deeply
entrenched mechanism of elite survival. Bribery is basically a social
separator. Those who can afford to pay the bribe, secure the best access to
services or resources. Doing away with bribery and corruption brings about a
levelling of society, which would undermine and erode existing social and
political hierarchies and mean that scarce resources need to be shared more
widely. Moreover, paying extra for services ensures that the rules serve
those who can pay.
A cushion
of graft therefore sustains the selfishness of elite behaviour. In this
way, as the Thai columnist Kong Rithdee aptly
describes, parents bribe to get their little kids into top schools;
the rich bribe to doctor ledgers to avoid paying tax; and government officials
bribe to have their wives and children appointed to government positions. ‘The
system allows officials to pocket differences and shape our thinking that
anything can be fixed if you know the right person’.
As well
as sustaining high levels of wealth for the elite, corruption is a handy
political tool for those who wish to control the elite. Authoritarian
leaders such as Suharto of Indonesia used massive levels of corruption to fuel
the patronage system that sustained his three decades in power. Loyalty
was secured and sustained by granting licenses for businesses or monopolies on
the import or export of goods.
Similarly
in Malaysia, the ruling UMNO party harnessed corporate activity to raise funds
for the party. As in Suharto’s Indonesia, many of these UMNO-linked
companies amounted to monopolies, especially in the area of corporate finance.
The proceeds of these deals and revenues earned were used quite simply to
underwrite elections.
In
addition to enriching UMNO barons and ensuring their loyalty, the money was
needed in areas where the opposition was strong. Financial inducement was
used both to sway voters through vote buying and fund local economic
initiatives to lend the impression that government cared for them.
The
legacy is a corporate landscape in which politics and business are so closely
associated they cannot be distinguished. This situation set the stage for
one of Southeast Asia’s most spectacular corruption scandals of recent years,
one that has transfixed Malaysians and set new standards in terms of the
amounts of money involved and the trail of greed and destruction left in its
wake.
In the
course of 2015 a little known UK based blog named Sarawak Report started
revealing details of massive transfers of money from the 1MDB investment fund
chaired by the Prime Minister totalling almost US$ 700 million via Gulf Arab
investment funds, Swiss banks and offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands that
somehow ended up in Najib’s Malaysian bank account. Najib denied any wrong
doing, claimed the money was a ‘donation’ from a member of the Saudi Royal
family to help win the 2013 general election, and that the bulk of the money
was later returned. 1MDB insists that it never paid any money to Najib
personally.
What made
these allegations even more sensitive were moves by the authorities in Malaysia
to investigate at the highest levels. Before Najib removed him, Attorney
General Abdul Gani Pattail had allegedly drawn up charges against the Prime
Minister, though this was vigorously denied by his successor.
Meanwhile,
the scope of the scandal grew as investigative authorities in Switzerland,
Singapore and the United States began looking into the trail of alleged
financial malfeasance spawned by 1MDB. Several senior foreign bankers in
the region either lost their jobs or resigned. At least one Swiss Bank
and a prominent US investment bank were named as the possible targets of
investigation.
Yet in
Malaysia, the response was to protect 1MDB and sack instead those politicians
and officials who had been critical of the government’s handling of the
case. Heads rolled, including two ministers and a deputy prime minister
who was also deputy president of the party. If there were voices within
UMNO uncomfortable with all this they remained for the most part silent.
Most observers assumed that time-honoured methods of patronage involving hefty
cash payments were enough to keep the party rank and file quiet.
Beneath
the surface, however, Malaysians of all stripes, especially in urban areas,
were seething with anger, dismayed at the inability of any legal or political
institution to check and address what seemed to the ordinary punter a clear
case of outright corruption. When hundreds of thousands took to the streets of
Kuala Lumpur to protest in mid-2015, the authorities threatened people with
arrest using a newly re-furbished sedition act that makes virtually anything
said against the government liable to prosecution.
Faced
with serious charges of corruption it has failed to explain, the government has
resorted to generating fear in the Malay community that the opposition
threatens Malay privileges and the status of Islam.
In turn,
the Malay majority appears susceptible to manipulation. ‘We Malays tend to
believe our leaders deserve to do well, which breeds a complacency about
corruption,’ says Marina Mahathir, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad’s articulate activist daughter.
This
blind acceptance of what the leadership says and does results in an uncritical
receptivity to fears about the threat to Islam that in turn reinforces
divisions in Malaysian society — to the point where calls for Muslims to be
provided with separate shopping trolleys in supermarkets to avoid being tainted
by non-halal food simply drowns out concerns about corruption in high places.
In a sign
of how far Najib, once hailed as a force for liberal reform, was prepared to go
to defend himself against his accusers, the government department responsible
for scripting the Friday prayer sermons across all mosques in Malaysia wrote
one in March 2016 that insisted: ‘the decree to be loyal to the country’s
leaders does not come from the leaders themselves, but from God. Therefore, if
the citizens are disloyal towards the leaders, that means they have been
disloyal to God.’
No such
protection is being afforded to Lim Guan Eng, the popular chief minister of
Penang, which is controlled by the opposition Democratic Action Party. At his
first appearance in court after being arrested on two charges of corruption –
one for allegedly purchasing a bungalow for private use at a price below market
value – the case was referred to the high court where the government appointed
attorney general will manage the prosecution.
Neither
Najib nor Lim Guan Eng are being judged by the quality of their leadership, or
what public good they deliver as elected representatives. Rather their fortunes
are rising and falling on the back of alleged cases of corruption processed in
a way that seems incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong unless
directed to do so by political fiat. Worse still, the public sentiment whipped
up by these cases is seriously destabilising Malaysia’s fragile racial and
religious equilibrium.
The week
before Guan Eng was brought to court, a state mufti in Pahang, Najib’s home
state, declared that members of the Chinese dominated Democratic Action Party
could be considered eligible for being put to death because they questioned the
implementation of Islamic hudud criminal laws in Malaysia.
Meanwhile,
fearful of racial and religious tension, Malaysians have been distracted from
the central question of how close to a billion dollars of their money ended up
in their Prime Minister’s personal bank account.
Michael
Vatikiotis is Asia Regional Director for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.
No comments:
Post a Comment