The national service (NS) programme was a fiasco waiting to happen. The idea was excellent. It was a long time coming. We are not told why we need it in a hurry, but we have a surfeit of rosy official statements of what it hopes to achieve. One cannot flout it.

But beneath it is a veritable can of worms which reveals the corruption, the inefficiency, the dangers of entrusting teenagers to a programme subject to market and primordial forces deliberately ignored and forgotten in this rush to force it down the throats of Malaysians.

The blind and the deaf have taken it upon themselves to teach the sighted, with the real danger that the sighted will be half-blind and half-deaf at the end of it. The government has threatened hellfire and brimstone to those who have refused to take part in it.

But when the inequities became public knowledge, the cabinet stepped in to insist it would be carried out without fail. The 10,000 who did not turn up were first threatened with jail and, when that raised a storm, given a second chance. But the closer you look into it, the more frightening the impact.