COMMENT Khairy Jamaluddin is extremely generous to take the time to respond to our articles and engage in a debate regarding the water industry in Selangor. Let me do my best to humbly extend the same courtesy.

A quick recap. Khairy’s first article basically argued: Selangor is enduring a water crisis primarily because the Selangor government refused to let Syabas increase water tariffs.

My first reply to that article basically argued: only the corrupt would let the rakyat pay good money to a company as astoundingly wasteful as Syabas. Who pours water into leaking buckets?

Khairy’s second article seems to argue that: corruption is insignificant, see my first article.

At this juncture, I think it will be helpful to examine in great detail and verbatim (sorry for the lengthy quotes) the pivots on which these arguments are made. We’ll walk through them as systematically as possible.

Put no more into Syabas’ leaking bucket

So, the simple question that Khairy would have us answer: should the Selangor government have allowed Syabas to increase water tariffs?

(For the record, since Khairy never mentions these things: in the contract Selangor, while under the BN, signed with Syabas, the scheduled water tariff increases were: 37 percent in 2009, 25 percent in 2012 and 15 percent in 2015).

Since the debate is about whether Syabas should be paid more money, I pointed out a number of facts with regards to how Syabas spends its money.

Firstly, we noted that Syabas’ CEO Rozali Ismail is paid RM 425,000 a month, or RM 5.1 million a year, before bonuses. This despite the fact that Syabas is in financial shambles.

I also gave a few specific examples of corruption within Syabas:

“Rozali ( left ) is a former Umno Selangor treasurer, who spent hundreds of millions in Syabas funds to buy pipes from Indonesia (already a breach of contract, which states that all such equipment must be sourced locally) from a company that Rozali himself owns.

“Renovation works on Syabas office buildings budgeted at RM23.2 million suddenly balloon up to RM51.2 million; causing some of us to ask whether this one of the 72 percent of Syabas contracts that are awarded via direct negotiation instead of open tender, worth RM600 million in total?”

These, I’m sure, are the tip of the iceberg. I summarised the crux of my overall argument with an analogy:

“Imagine if a contractor you engaged to renovate your house does not do the job according to specifications, wilfully does exactly what he promised not to do, is in the midst of turning your house into what looks like a nightmare, and then still has the gall to demand that he be paid more. Only a lunatic would give in to such a contractor.”

I note with great care and interest Khairy’s sole response to the facts above:

“Dropping a few anecdotes about high salaries or office building capex may raise eyebrows - and we know Pakatan is good at smokescreening when the numbers don't add up - but on the fundamental question of NRW reduction, I again ask them to do the maths and tell us where this RM540 million is going to come from?”

If the shoe fits

Later in his article, Khairy also writes: “the standard line of ‘BN corrupt’ just doesn't cut it anymore”. If uncontested charges of massive wastage and corruption within Syabas elicit no response from a full minister in the BN federal government, beyond raised eyebrows, then I daresay the (tellingly) standard line does indeed still cut it.

We are not talking about a few ringgit here and there. We are talking about documented, unchallenged facts of Syabas misusing hundreds of millions of ringgit. No misuse, no hundreds of millions of ringgit lost.

This, to me, suggests a blindingly obvious answer to the question Khairy poses: where is this RM540 million (to bring NRW levels down) going to come from?

Khairy astutely points out that the numbers don’t add up. However, to him, the subtractions from the leakage are not important, only the addition of more numbers by charging the rakyat more - the latter solution explicitly singled out as the only possible viable one.

I hope Khairy will forgive us for thinking that ignoring massive leakages while calling for higher tariffs is something typical of BN. When Khairy sees smoke, he screams “Pakatan smokescreen!” When the rest of us see smoke, we say: “Eh, something is burning, we better do something about it.”

I won’t pretend that governments and corporations working hand-in-glove to profiteer excessively from normal citizens is something unique to Malaysia.

It is a tale as old as time, a profession younger than only one or two, and a practice common in even the most developed countries in the world. That does not, however, make it right.

The game is a simple one. The government awards a contract at an extremely inflated price to a corporation, and the people who own the corporation give a sizeable kickback of these profits back to the people who run the government.

Malaysians have experienced decades of this piracy. Worse, we have more or less internalised it as normal; so much so that the notion of it might cause the more cynical of us to react no more than, say, a raised eyebrow or two. Par for the course in Malaysian politics, one might argue.

If demonstrated corruption elicits little more than a changed facial expression, even (especially?) in cabinet ministers, are Malaysians who are cynical about the integrity of the people who have run this country for decades being unfair?

Leaking buckets and Alam Flora

Khairy is right to say that Syabas does not have enough money to run Selangor’s water industry properly. He is mistaken as to why this is so, and how we should remedy this situation.

Indulge me a little more in my childish love of analogies:

Khairy and the Selangor government agree that the bucket is not full enough. Khairy is saying: “just pour more water in, lah”. The Selangor government is asking: “who in their right mind pours more water into a leaking bucket?”

Politically intelligent, Khairy knows all the right songs to sing, unashamedly including the phrase ‘it is true that we cannot keep throwing government money at problems’, in an article that suggests we do exactly that.

Selangor Menteri Besar Abdul Khalid Ibrahim, on the other hand, is the kind of man who would choke blood before pouring water into a bucket with as many holes in it as Syabas. It is clear as daylight that the water that leaks out of that bucket leaks into the (considerably less leaky) buckets of Rozali and his ilk.

This is a good time to re-examine the case of Alam Flora. Middleman in the rubbish business (and, as it happens, rubbish in the middleman business), they took the Selangor government and the people of Selangor for a ride for years.

In 2012, Khalid told Alam Flora that it was charging too much, and that it had to reduce the prices. Alam Flora told him to go fly a kite. Khalid said in that case, thank you very much, the door is that way.

When Khalid instructed local councils to cut out the middleman and take over rubbish collection, reports of sabotage came pouring in, and public outroar erupted for a while.

Khalid persevered, and within a few weeks or months, the problems with rubbish pickups disappeared (and remain disappeared). At the end of it, minus one rubbish middleman, the people of Selangor are as rubbish free as they were before, and RM100 million a year richer.

On the other hand, when such companies come to BN for more money, they like to say “Okay lah, Okay lah”. Goodness knows how much poorer the rakyat is for it. There is precious little in BN’s history to suggest that their response to any situation involving crony company meltdown is anything but threefold: bailout, bailout and bailout.

Khairy also cutely suggests that the federal government is bailing out the Selangor government instead of Syabas. An odd suggestion, given that it is not Selangor that is leaking money (quite the opposite), but Syabas; and it is not Selangor that is receiving RM6.6 billion from the federal government, but Syabas.

I was once told that Khalid’s comment on this situation was that if Syabas had no money, then it should not be in business. Malaysians already have too many companies that are being propped up in a manner that is completely commercially unviable.

At the heart of it, Khalid is confident that he can provide better service for less money via better management. Given his track record with Alam Flora, as well as in business and government as a whole, I am fully inclined to believe his assessment over Khairy’s assessment that the only solution lies in charging the rakyat up to 75 percent more for water.

    

Privatising profits, socialising losses

Khairy posits himself as an expert on climate change and corporate finance, but nowhere does he address the problems of massive corporate mismanagement and corruption. (Perhaps nowhere is a bit strong - we must remember that he did raise his eyebrows. Credit where it is due). I find most of the following an exercise in misdirection, but will address them nonetheless.

Khairy proudly shows off Syabas’ ‘achievement’ in taking seven whole years to reduce NRW by a grand total of 4.7 percent.. One E and nine Fs are better exam results than 10 Fs, but not one I’d be so quick to trumpet.

He says “there are times the government needs to spend to avoid a total collapse of an industry”. Perhaps he shares the view that vampire companies like the huge American investment banks involved in the subprime financial crisis are too big to fail, and that it’s all right to privatise profits and socialise losses. But I take a different view.

Khairy talks of Selangor’s ‘failure’ to acquire the water concessionaires on a willing buyer-willing seller basis as if Selangor’s offer was ‘below fair value’. Confident in his valuation, Khalid offered the water concessionaires the most objective solution possible from day one - neutral international arbitration as a means to settle the question of price.

The concessionaires scoffed, preferring bullying tactics to try and get a sweet deal, Malaysian style, while a few geniuses within Pakatan Rakyat even suggested that international arbitration would make the price too high. If Khairy truly felt the concessionaires should be offered more, he should have taken time to support the infamous Kajang Move.

Tony Pua has already pointed out that Langat 2 would not be ready yet today, even if work had started in 2009. In this case, the analogy of filling a leaking bucket with more water becomes even more literal.

Khalid reasoned quite correctly that the leaking pipes of Syabas needed to be fixed first (at the proper rates, by a properly managed company), before spending more public money on pumping more water into the system.

However gracefully Khairy and others dance around topics and nitpick on ‘facts’ that the general public would have great difficulty ascertaining for themselves, surely they are not ignorant of why the public is against increased tariffs, GST, subsidy ‘rationalisation’ and so on.

The fact remains that every single year, the Auditor-General’s Report uncovers massive corruption, wastage and leakage (think RM3,000 wall clocks and so on). This culture permeates the government, as it permeates companies like Syabas.

We don’t mind paying taxes for good service; but we do mind when our tax monies are being used to fatten the coffers of those with the right connections.

The equation is simple: Stop the leakages, completely and not piecemeal, and then we can talk about increasing tariffs and taxes.

Sound and fury

Now that we are done with the details, I beg the good minister to indulge me just a little further along a train of thought.

Let’s not avoid the truth of why we do what we do. Khairy and I are not likely to convince each other, and we obviously write these things for a public audience.

As a quick aside, my audience is limited to paying Malaysiakini subscribers (and, it turns out, many of my friends are not, given the number of requests I get to send them my articles).

Malaysiakini gladly published Khairy’s response to my article, and if he could advocate for The Star (Malaysia’s widely read English newspaper) to publish in entirety any of our responses to his, I’m sure this will be a glowing endorsement of our government’s commitment to freedom of the press and the right to reply.

Failing which, I suppose, we shall when to contend ourselves with the lopsided discussion.

Coming back to what we are doing here: there are precious few ways to accurately gauge public sentiment, and our ability to impact it. For me, gaining eight times as many seats as any other incumbent state government in GE 13 is endorsement enough for the Selangor government and its policies.

I almost doubt that Khairy himself believes the people will be persuaded that Syabas is the good guy here, has clean hands and truly deserves more public money. Perhaps, however, he is content to sow seeds of reasonable doubt, especially in a scenario where he holds the loudest microphone.

On the whole though, it seems like we are engaged in an exercise of sound and fury, for vanity’s sake.

People like Khairy and I pander to the crowds, often telling them what they want to hear, and creating drama that calls attention to ourselves. People like Khalid (and maybe even Energy, Green Technology and Water Minister Maximus Ongkili, right )), work on in silence to make federal-state cooperation a reality, while the rest of us (the prime minister included) continue to stir up the blame game.

I know it is unlikely that Khairy will see me as sincere, but with whatever sincerity I can muster, I have to ask Khairy: why do you pick these battles?

I know that Khairy, like the likes of Nazri Aziz, has no fear wading into unfriendly waters, and being a lone contrarian. I respect and admire that, as I do his obvious intelligence.

It is just that I am genuinely perplexed as to why, of all the many, many better battles to fight out there, Khairy would pick up on cases of such obvious corporate cronyism and corruption (such as Syabas and NFC ) to defend?

I hope it is not some attempt to be a blindly loyal soldier, following whatever direction his ‘fearless’ leader leads.

Why not pick battles where we normal Malaysians will be happy to support you? If I can see obvious faults in Pakatan that would benefit much more from constructive criticism from people like yourself, surely you, too,  can.

I suspect in his heart of hearts, Khairy recognises that Khalid is a more honest a politician than most, in either BN or Pakatan. I can only hope that as he chooses his future targets, Khairy will take a longer view, be less reactionary, and be truer to his conscience.

Our final, shared goal should be encouraging what is good in local politics and deriding what is bad - an axiom that should be applied to both sides of the aisle. 

NATHANIEL TAN will send this article to The Star . If it isn’t too badly written, hopefully someone or other there will be bold enough to get it published. He tweets @NatAsasi .