NO INTEGRITY, NO CREDIBILITY IN BAKUN SAGA

COMMENT: Sime Darby Bhd Chairman, Musa Hitam has been quoted in the media as saying that the board members of the conglomerate are "men of the highest integrity and credibility".

Few will agree that these are two terms that can be unquestioningly uttered in the same breath as the Bakun dam project in Sarawak, along with transparency and public accountability. Certainly, humanity was missing too in this enveloping tsunami of a tragedy.



If Musa deserves the benefit of the doubt for a fleeting moment, it's indeed a miracle that Sime Darby could remain untouched by the very cesspool of human greed and excess that it has been mired in ever since it decided to jump on the Bakun bandwagon.

There are lessons galore here for the other GLCs (government-linked corporations) in the country and elsewhere as well.

This leads us to wonder whether Musa really knows what these two terms mean.

DOING THE RIGHT THING

Integrity, in its every essence, means doing the right thing, even when no one is looking and no one will ever find out if you do finally choose, willingly, to do something wrong. That's the definition in the compulsory moral studies module used at local universities.

By this yardstick, is Musa really prepared to solemnly swear on any number of holy books that his board members are men of the highest integrity?

Integrity is much more than having a federal government-run National Integrity Institute. If you have no integrity, how can you claim any credibility at all on anything?

No need for Musa to go rushing to get a copy of any holy book.

We can definitely put it to Musa, with certainty, that his board members and he have zero integrity and zero credibility on the entire Bakun saga.

This is not a cynical reference to the project cost overruns which have hit the conglomerate in shouldering the Bakun fiasco and other projects elsewhere.

Forensic accounting-probing for criminal intent and wrong-doing-may well reveal that there was more to it than meets the eye on the issue of project cost over-runs. But that's a separate issue.

If no forensic accounting probe is ever conducted on the Bakun project's cost overruns, estimated at RM450 million at the moment, then Musa of course can no longer claim that he believes in transparency and public accountability.

But let's not wait for the outcome of such a probe, if any.

Transparency and public accountability are the other two words Musa tossed around, according to media reports, to shield himself from continuing public criticism and demands that he and his entire board step down immediately or, failing which, be summarily sacked.

In Japan, according to former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, they would have committed hara-kiri by now. But as hara-kiri expert Mahathir himself has pointed out several times with a straight face, "we (he mentioned only Malays) are a people with no sense of shame", although he didn't include himself in the observation.

No one sees a halo around his head either as he continues to accuse some people - no prizes for guessing-of being "even willing to sell the country, but since they can't sell the country, they sell the sand".

Even without the outcome of the forensic accounting probe, we can easily establish that the Sime Darby board of directors have the very opposite of the noble attributes that Musa has bestowed upon them during his diarrhoea of words with the media in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

No one in his right mind will agree that the Bakun dam project is the last word in integrity, credibility, transparency and public accountability. The volumes written on Bakun can testify to this.

The politics of development

If transparency and public accountability are is indeed the case, why is the project sited in Sarawak, the most notorious state in Malaysia for virtually stealing the people's sweat from the Public Treasury? Government projects in Sarawak, as elsewhere in Malaysia where Umno's writ runs, finally end up double (in the good old days), thrice and even up to 10 times what should be the actual tender price.

This is the skim cepat kaya (get-rich-quick scheme) system in Sarawak that Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud defends under the euphemism, "politics of development".

The physical evidence of the system is all around for us to see in the lifestyles of the rich and notorious politicians of Sarawak.

If nothing has come out of all this in the courts of law, it's simply because the MACC (Malaysian Anti Corruption Agency) chooses to play deaf, dumb and blind. How many prosecutions of the so-called big fish can MACC claim in Sarawak? Even prosecution of the ikan bilis (small dried fish) are difficult to come by in Sarawak because the big fish fear the former will spill the beans.

The financial mismanagement of Bakun began when it was awarded to a company that had zero experience in dam building. All this company did was to strip the timber resources in Bakun bare before shamelessly handing back the project to the federal government.

Yet, the authorities chose to do nothing about this back-tracking. No probe was ever conducted. In fact, the company even managed to collect hefty sums from the federal government for some work it had supposedly carried out at the dam site.

It is into this vicious cycle of sheer incompetence that Sime Darby chose to enter, knowingly, with the exit of the first company from the scene.

If the GLC really believes in transparency, as Musa claims from his "moral high ground", why didn't it ever tell all about its involvement in the Bakun saga to the public, shareholders and the media? All of them have been asking searching questions for years on end in cyberspace.

Chased out of ancestral lands

A foreign company which had also been tapped for Bakun, before Sime Darby, had the good sense and decency to back off from the project in time. They were against contracts being given to the politically well-connected with zero experience.

They also realised that 10,000 tribal folk had been chased out of their ancestral lands to make way for the dam project, not because Sarawak needed it to keep its people employed with energy-intensive industries, but because there are people out there who have an insatiable appetite for money and those whose greed knows no bounds.

Sime Darby, likewise, should not have participated at all in the Bakun dam project. It should have kept the example of the foreign company in mind when the federal government commanded it to rescue Bakun.

Instead, it entered the project willingly, knowing fully well that this was one monumental scandal where it, to re-phrase Richard Nixon's words, was about to hit the ceiling fan. Now, it has happened.

The irony is that Sime Darby, and Musa, see nothing wrong in mentioning integrity, credibility, transparency and public accountability in the same breath as Sarawak and Taib Mahmud, besides the Bakun dam.

Men of great integrity and credibility would have noticed the suffering of the Bakun people. They would not have turned a blind eye to this matter.

Unfortunately, this was exactly what happened even as board members were beating their chests in unison and working themselves up into a frenzy over the plight of the Palestinians in faraway Gaza and the West Bank.

These are gluttons for punishment who continue to threaten the security of Israel and invite disaster upon themselves to deny themselves of their own state.

The plight of the Bosnians, who invited an unparalleled tragedy by declaring an Islamic state in the heart of Christendom, similarly caused tears to well up in the collective eyes of Sime Darby board members, including Musa, not so long ago during a public charity drive for the Balkans.

Trail of broken promises

But who sheds tears for the Bakun people, the Penans, or the other Dayaks in Sarawak who are rapidly losing their ancestral lands, dignity, humanity and pride to companies just like Sime Darby from Peninsular Malaysia?

The authorities have left a trail of broken promises in Bakun and all over the Dayak country as their own leaders looked the other way for a paltry share of the spoils.

The sheer hypocrisy of it all!

Yet we are expected to ditch our collective brains in the nearest toilet bowl and lap up anything that comes from Musa's "men of great integrity and credibility, committed to transparency and public accountability", as if they are the gospel truth.

Interestingly, Bakun was one of the reasons why Mahathir fell out in late 1998 with Anwar Ibrahim, his then deputy prime minister and finance minister. Anwar wanted the project scrapped-certainly he was left out from the spoils-and failing in this attempt, got himself sacked for it, with other reasons cited for his departure. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

By : JOE FERNANDEZ (sabahkini)