This letter specifically responds to the letter National Integrity Plan: Showtime again?

Firstly, the writer's metaphorical analogy of corruption as cancer should not be so selectively argued and should have equally included the fundamental point that there is neither at present conclusive treatment for cancer nor conclusive reasons for its development.

In his cynical critique of the PM's National Integrity Plan (NIP), he outlines a few conventional arguments on what form anti-corruption instruments should take, a few of which I disagree with.

Before outlining my disagreements, I would contend that an explicit focus by the PM in fighting corruption and the provision of specific institutional backing for this policy is a meaningful and adequately broad starting point.

Corruption is a social issue inasmuch as it is a political or an economic one and hence, any measures formulated to deal with it have to be contextual and developed from an incremental understanding of the underlying causes of corruption.

The biennial public feedback mechanism built into the operations of the Malaysian Integrity Institute (MII) provides a way of building this incremental understanding.

Equal emphasis has to be given to fighting corruption as to fighting the causes of corruption. The recent high-profile corruption-related arrests and the launch of the NIP directly address corruption.

Also pertinent is the fact that conventional attitudes in fighting corruption might not solve Malaysia's corruption problems. For example, the reasons for widespread corruption among the French ruling elite was endemic to France at that time.

In this regard, a number of Kim Quek's prescriptions for reducing corruption in Malaysia certainly take a misjudged universalist view of corruption, for example, the assertion that a freer press will explicitly reduce corruption.

In a 2003 survey, Transparency International compiled a 'Corruption Perception Index'; in that list Malaysia was ranked 37th , Singapore 5th and Thailand 70th, i.e. countries with lower perceptions of corruption were given higher rankings.

Also in 2003, Reporters without Borders published their 2nd World Press Freedom Ranking where Malaysia ranked 104th , Singapore 144th and Thailand 82nd, i.e. countries with less press freedom were given lower rankings.

I have used countries within the region as comparative examples to reduce, albeit within limits, the influence of variance amongst external factors in drawing conclusions. From the inverse relationship exhibited between press freedom and corruption drawn from these international independent statistics, the assertion that a freer national press decreases national corruption is tenuous at best.

In this context, while I would argue that the press should have more objective reporting scope in Malaysia, I would equally argue that a self-regulating press simply shifts the dominance over the press from elected government to unelected invisible vested private interests.

Secondly, I would dispute the contention that an Anti-Corruption Agency that is invested with powers of prosecution will make this agency a 'genuine graft buster'. All over the democratic world, including the liberal western one, there exist many instances of separation between publicly constituted bodies with the power to initiate investigations and bodies with the power to prosecute.

Not least due to the fact that a separation of roles increases efficiency from the point of view of specialisation, but also due to the fact that internally investing an entire public process from start to finish within one particular agency reduces checks and balances within that public process.

Furthermore, unsuccessful prosecution due to insufficient evidence et al runs the risk of allowing potential guilty parties to get off the hook as well as permanently tainting the image of potentially innocent persons.

On the open question on why the PM should take up opposition leader Lim Kit Siang's suggestion that the assets of all elected representatives be made public knowledge, the answer perhaps is twofold.

Firstly, from the time the PM took office last year, he has consistently taken the initiative away from the opposition with respect to introducing substantive modernising reforms. Kit Siang's public posturing on the need for elected representatives to publicly declare all assets after the PM's earlier stance on compulsory asset declaration is an attempt, meek though it is, to perhaps regain the initiative.

Secondly, given the range of financial innovations available privately for making assets 'invisible' both abroad and domestically, perhaps it is necessary to dually realise both the implicit but actual limitations of asset declaration on the one hand and the explicit 'public message' benefits of asset declaration on the other.

What further end could a public declaration serve apart from encouraging further inconclusive speculation on the private lives of public servants?

Corruption like many other reforms requires a 'nuance-ed' and in-depth understanding of the issues at hand within localised contexts. It is my view that the NIP and its instrument, the MII will, so long as they adhere to their founding principles, be able to formulate long-term strategies towards reducing the pervasiveness of corruption and instilling integrity within the public and private sectors in Malaysia.