One must realise that a crony's main entry qualification to big business is not necessarily vision, prudence, track record or experience but political patronage. So if a crony's business failed, it is hardly surprising. The cataclysm of the 1997 regional economic crisis merely hastened the inevitable.

Now, cronies are cronies. Their strengths (access to political patronage and easy credit) and weaknesses (greed and lack of business prudence) are the same, whether they are national or transnational cronies as seen in Cronyism earns Malaysia bad reputation abroad, says Jomo .

If, in spite of their advantage of political connections, cronies could fail so spectacularly in their projects on home turf, much more with greater reason, they would flounder in the continents of Africa, South America or China.

This is because in addition to their weaknesses of greed being inversely proportional to their business capability, it is also compounded by a certain unfamiliarity of local conditions and their regulatory environments.

For examples, cronies had tried to build megamalls, mega infrastructure and mixed development projects and holiday resorts in areas where neither the population nor their income could support the demand of their scale.

Some had even ventured to acquire thousands of hectares of bush land in Congo but only to have their tractors and machineries sequestered by warring tribal factions. Even where they did succeed in making a little money, they cannot however now repatriate it back here because (thanks to inspiration from Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad) these countries too — Seychelles and Zimbawe, for example — deem it necessary to impose their own capital controls.

Our investments in South Africa faced not only the Rand's substantial depreciation but also a lackadaisical labour force and an affirmative policy programme.

The reason I don't cite names here is to avert Jomo's predicament — not to implicate malaysiakini or myself in a defamation suit by cronies.

In the first instance, cronies were given an impetus to invest overseas in response to the PM's clarion call to "prosper thy neighbours" — neighbours meaning developing countries of the South-South.

But even there in the developing countries where our cronies took the lead to forage on other third world's resources and economically colonise them under the pretext of 'prosper thy neighbour', they punched above their weight class, and got knocked out instead!

'Malaysia Boleh' became 'Malaysia ta' boleh'! Malaysian reputation for entrepreneurship becomes tarnished, thanks to cronies. I don't know about whether our neighbours prospered, but we certainly end up being impoverished.

For those of us who invested in shares in public listed companies, many lost heftily when they become insolvent PN4 and section 176 companies that might even be delisted from KLSE if no white knight eventually appears. This is because a major portion of their debts were borrowings from local commercial banks for failed overseas projects.

Taxpayers' moneys are also affected in cases where the banks' balance sheet were shored up and prevented from collapsing due to bad loans, a portion of which were frittered away in financing failed transnational projects.

The institution of cronyism is not dead and still very much alive. The failed ones have merely exited. New ones will take their place. With the assistance of political patronage, the latter hope to get the appropriate "haircut" from the banks and with political support take over the carcasses of these failed projects whether here or overseas at rock-bottom prices. The players may be different, but the game is still the same.

However, before we condemn cronyism per se, we should do some soul searching as to how good are Malaysian businessmen in terms of global business competitiveness even had our politicians not intervened to unlevel the playing field.

Had PM not included prominent businessmen in his entourage in overseas trips, would local businessmen have ventured abroad on their own initiative? If they had, would they have succeeded where cronies failed?