Actually, Restless Native and I are in complete agreement with each other on the point that we are both deeply concerned about, in his words, "the utter and complete lack of transparency and associated accountability of the BN government machinery." No arguments there at all. We are on the same side.

My contribution to this forum is the assertion that some of the comparisons with Singapore, Singapore Airlines and Lee Kuan Yew are inaccurate and unhelpful. All of us admire Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew for what they have done. I actually live in Singapore and contribute to their economy although I grew up in Kuala Lumpur. But in discussing the painful reality of what Malaysia and our government have become, we need a stronger grasp of the facts accurately so that we can construct what is best for our country.

For example, I wished that Restless Native took my point at face value (as a regular traveler who clocks almost 100,000 miles every year and have letters from them admitting to terrible failures in service levels even to a first-class passenger) that Singapore Airlines is not as good as they would like you to believe. Since Restless Native insists on being more objective than that, he may wish to note that Singapore Airlines has been sliding in the rankings in the past two years.

In the most objective of rankings, the Skytrax awards, which is an audit company and not a magazine that can be skewered by advertising spend by the airlines, Singapore slid further from fifth to seventh place last October. Restless Native may even wish to visit the Skytrax website to read what customers say. As for magazine-based awards, Singapore Airlines tends to do well in the US-based magazines awards (and even then lost its long-standing status in Conde Nast ) while Cathay and even Malaysia Airlines have been generally doing well in European ones.

This is just one of a number of erroneous perceptions that stand in the way of the main argument. Singapore and Malaysia have been changing in incremental steps over the years that some of the perceptions that we hold from our historical links with Singapore are dangerously not valid anymore.

I am also against errors on the other side of the argument. Letters to malaysiakini suggesting that Lee Kuan Yew and his wife had an entire Boeing 747 to themselves when she was ill was obviously wrong, and so was the perception that Singapore Airlines crew is pro-white man and anti-Asian.

Using Restless Native's own narration of his friend's experience in trying to get a charter airline business off the ground in Malaysia, he is again wrong if he is suggesting that things would be better for him in a Malaysia that is run Singapore-style.

I am acquainted with some of the people who originally thought about the idea of a budget airline here in Singapore sometime in 1999, way before AirAsia. Although they were well-connected, the Singapore government essentially said a flat no to them because it simply does not tolerate any local competition with its state-owned businesses.

I know that Restless Native and other readers to your newspaper may not subscribe to my idea of patronage, but honestly, a system of patronage operates in every single country in the world. Some of the wealthiest and the most stable countries in the world, including Japan, Switzerland and the eastern corridors of the United States, have some of the most opaque, conservative and insidiously corrupt systems of patronage that we would not want for an emerging country like Malaysia.

The two Singapore-based budget airlines today, Jetstar and Tiger Airways, were invented only in response to Air Asia, and both are owned directly and indirectly by Temasek Holdings, the state-owned investment company. That is how tightly held things are here.

More recently, I met a Singaporean mortician who told me he couldn't secure a licence to operate a new funeral parlour because the government here is planning to enter the same business through NTUC, the state-sponsored labour union in a year or so. Singapore does not operate by being original and entrepreneurial. Yes, they have a great government, but if Restless Native's

pilot friends lived in Singapore, they will be accusing the government of being arrogant and high-handed, which they can be.

We have such a different reality in Malaysia. Anything is "boleh" where we have seen many more large entrepreneurial initiatives, including that of AirAsia, YTL, Maxis and others who have built very good businesses yes despite the existence of another list of cronies who failed.

The recent biography of Lim Goh Tong, and how he got permission to build Genting Highland outlines for Restless Native's friends the process by which a successful entrepreneur works the patronage system.

We have to come to terms with the fact that for all our faults, we remain one of the freest "can-do" countries in the world and we should not lose that. In fact, right now, the discussion in education circles in Singapore is how to create a private school system that can match the kind that has evolved in Malaysia. Because of the utter failure of our public education system, we have inadvertently created a very robust and all-encompassing private education system.

If I can influence the discussion in malaysiakini away from "let's be like Singapore" (be careful what you wish for!), I will also be the first to admit that we do have serious problems. For every AirAsia, YTL, Maxis and other great Malaysian-born businesses, our country is strewn with many other failed projects worth billions of ringgit that make our cities look ugly and our workforce exploited and going nowhere.

If only our leaders subscribed to integrity as a core tenant of our nationhood, we have the ingredients to be a very successful country. Being at the heart of the problem, it is so difficult to think about how we can extricate ourselves from this malice.

But weak government is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the other arms of the economy are in tact. We saw this in inner-cities in the US after the 1980s where many of them were very corrupt and in financial and moral ruin. Somehow a new generation reacting to the sins of their fathers, was determined to rise out of it, and we have the energy that we find in cities like Chicago, Manhattan and Atlanta.

But even as I hope that the process will work its course, the real danger is that a corrupt government in today's world is not just ineffective, but a conduit for terrorism and other manipulative forces that can insidiously tear our country apart. At this very moment, we are in very grave danger indeed.

Lee Kuan Yew was a man for his time. I don't see him inspiring today's young generation with his temper and patronising style. We have to develop our own mental picture of what our own leader should look like. Our previous leader did not prepare us for the future and so we are all left guessing.