Something that Singapore is now doing can after all prove instructive for Malaysia, as well.

Recently, the city-state's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, revised codes of conduct for ministers and members of Parliament, so as to keep the public better informed on the levels of accountability its lawmakers must do to uphold integrity in a system.

It is not that the city-state has never had such a code. It is the very timing of the announcement.

Though it could not have been more opportune - than to emit in the immediate afterglow of Mohd Isa Samad's recent implication over money politics it probably is due to the driving need to reassure its public that dishonesty of any form has no place in squeaky clean Singapore.

The spirit of the announcement, notwithstanding, is also a signal to all concerned that Singapore is not a 'free-for-all' city, regardless of whatever the passage of time.

Like the lodestar in the heavens, honesty in public dealings is a constant that never changes. And the premium it holds in Singapore, remains just the way it's been and will always.

Greater scrutiny

For a start, there will now be greater scrutiny of corporate governance and specifically, over how boards are constituted.

Significantly, what that translates into is a greater measure of confidence in the government; the minute corporate malfeasance grows either in Singapore or abroad.

By so doing, it aims to prevent the kind of scandals along the Enron-like ones in America, or the Pewrwaja-types in Malaysia.

And by so doing, it puts on notice to all and sundry that the only benefit coming out of the move is to guard against those who use their public or political post to feather their nests'.

Even so, it is meant to tell ministers that any move to promote Singapore overseas should remain that and only purely that: i.e. the state and nothing else. Self-promotion or aggrandisement is banished, forever.

Wither corruption?

Known to just about everybody, corruption is the chimera that can never find a place in the republic.

Coupled with the large-scale public opprobrium, the control of corruption is through a system-wide culture and ancillary support initiatives that weakens and annihilates its practice.

Added to that, are specific measures to combat it effectively.

One such body is the Corrupt Practices Investigations Bureau (CPIB), whose constitutional powers even allows it to investigate the prime minister for any malpractice.

'Even the prime minister could be investigated' is what Lee said in Parliament in March 2003, as the then deputy premier.

Whilst the move gets top marks for the nobility of its cause, the fact that it is not law requires that everybody take the prime minister's word that everything is fine in the republic.

And because it is the prime minister's word against everybody else, it may rightly or wrongly, cause the kind of murmuring that the very transparency for which it was meant for; will for the record remain opaque to the viewing public.

Two factors

Though urging MPs, ministers and civil servants to make a yearly declaration is indeed a good idea - like in the way Forbes magazine annually names the world's richest men and women - it is not something that could be tried in Singapore because of two factors.

Firstly, because the strict controls of the past have worked, they should not be tampered with.

And because of the first, the second option cannot be tenable as it may lead to suspicions that something had gone so wrong, that laws have to be enacted for the sake of protection.

So as the republic makes its peace with a new code of conduct for its government; what it does for its people, is something that is rarely seen anywhere in the world. With only the best interests of its people at heart, it could presumably do better if the republic had made those ministerial declarations public.

But one thing that can boost confidence from the new code of conduct is that the move by the prime minister tightens one more screw into corruption's coffin, such that much of what remains of a strongly detested practice are only its withered and wilted shell.

JAYA PRAKASH lectures in journalism at Beacon School of Technology in Singapore.