I opine that it is time for the government to stop paying lip service to its anti-graft pledge. All talk and no action amounts to achieving nothing. The more we talk, the more we slide down Transparency International's 2004 Corruption Perception Index - and at an alarming rate too.

Corruption is so rampant now that if I tell my clients that I do not pay money to oil the government machinery, they would just give me dirty and disbelieving looks and say, "Aiyah how can we abolish corruption? It is already part of the system and everyone is in the system."

It is indeed an extremely mammoth task to eradicate graft. However, I feel that if we have achieved the far more mammoth task of independence, then fighting graft should not be a problem. It is the lack of political will that is the mother of all the problems in eradicating graft.

I want to stress that in order to eradicate graft, we must also eradicate unreasonable red tape. Red tape was 'created' or 'allowed to exist' by civil servants in order to earn extra pocket money.