COMMENT Just this week, the BN government withdrew a bill to increase the pay for retired and serving MPs, using a flimsy excuse that opposition MPs had attacked the government for worsening the taxpayers' burden.

azlan I am a retired MP, and I would have received an increase in my allowance if the bill had been carried, so I cannot pretend I have no vested interest at heart when I make this criticism.

But my disclosure of interest does not alter the fact that MPs and retired MPs are poorly paid in Malaysia, in comparison to many other countries in the world.

My personal retirement payment as a former MP is insufficient to support my lifestyle in Kuala Lumpur, and I have been compelled to take up part-time employment even in my golden years, just to make ends meet.

As a retired MP, I am paid less than RM4000 per month by Parliament.

As politicians, in the course of our work, we do not think much about such things as retirement when we plunge headlong into our involvement in public service. It's only after retirement, that the reality of living a life sets in.

Putting paid to corruption

I took a cursory glance at the pay scale of the retired prime ministers and ministers all over the world. I was shocked to discover that the highest pay for retired politicians is in Singapore.

The salary of the prime minister of Singapore is three times the pay of the president of the United States.

azlan It is said that the Singapore PM earns S$1,900,000 a year, while the US President takes home a relatively meagre US$400,000.

There is a good reason for paying your top-ranking politicians well. This would discourage them from taking bribes, which is a ubiquitous curse of all the developing nations, including Malaysia.

Malaysia and Singapore are close neighbours, and we share the same legacy of the British colonial experience. But we all know the success story of Singapore, which has become the envy of newly independent nations all over the world.

My question is, if Singapore can do it, why can't Malaysia?

The critical difference is that Singapore is a squeaky clean nation run by relatively professional and enlightened politicians. The standard of their public service is legendary, though I have personal misgivings regarding the Singaporean brand of democracy.

The per capita income of Singaporeans is said to be the fifth highest worldwide, and the envy of most developed nations, while Malaysia is still struggling with our eternal problems of poverty and under-development. We have been left far behind by the Singaporeans in socio-economic development.

Corruption our Achilles heel

When push comes to shove, in Malaysia, our Achilles heel is our entrenched network of corruption in public life.

bribery 010304 As long as we are burdened by our massive corruption, all attempts to upgrade the standard of politics in Malaysia must suffer from a debilitating lack of support from the general public.

What we have here is a national lack of confidence in public morality, that permeates every fibre of our national existence.

Therefore, in Malaysia, we are still awaiting the arrival of a movement for self-renewal, involving every facet of Malaysian society.

We truly need reform of our deformed politics. This reform must come first from a change of government for us to begin our process of rebirth.

This first step can then lead to reform of our crippled institutions of Parliament, the judiciary, the mainstream media, the civil service and law enforcement agencies. But unfortunately, I do not see this as being likely to happen in the immediate future.

The MPs in any parliamentary democracy are supposed to be the pick of the crop, among all the citizenry.

From personal experience, I can tell you that it is one of the hardest jobs in the world. It was certainly one of the most difficult things that I have done personally - and I have lived a hard life.

Few outsiders will understand the unrelenting pressure, the yoke sitting heavily on the shoulders of responsible MPs.

In Malaysia, with the financial rewards being so insignificant for honest MPs, you would be right to wonder why so many career politicians would want to be a full-time MP.

Most people of talent and ability stay away from a full-time career in politics, leaving the field open to the opportunistic and the corrupt.

My advice is: do not pay only peanuts to your MPs, or else you will only get monkeys to serve you.

 

SIM KWANG YANG was member of parliament for Bandar Kuching, Sarawak from 1982 to 1995. He can be reached at sky8hornbill@gmail.com. All comments are welcomed.