LETTER | I refer to TK Chua’s letter “What is Gerak Independent up to?” to the editor on Feb 18 and would like to respond. Allow me to simply speak for myself and explain my reasons since TK Chua fails to understand the “what and why of Gerak Independent (GI) candidates”. I served 33 years in the public …
LETTER | From two of us, GI candidates – a response to TK Chua Read More »
My last column developed a hypothesis about who should be responsible and accountable for public works, in particular, public service programme failures, of either the enforcement of rules or simply ensuring compliance with existing rules. The alternative is our currently operative “close one eye” culture. While I did compare Malaysian stories to ones from the …
Two independent and separate events in England and Chicago were very telling; even for Malaysians a world away. Both involved the process of judicial review which found public officials guilty of criminal negligence through a specific demand for accountability by citizens. The first was the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, and the other was the Chicago …
am genuinely angry and tired of much \”false religiosity\” which is found in many cultures and belief systems in Malaysia. I call all such unexamined cultural beliefs, worldviews; whether one is consciously aware of the existence of such implicit beliefs, or assumptions, or lack thereof. Recently two examples of false religiosity were made evident in …
Dear inspector-general of police (IGP), I am in a WhatsApp group with 11 members; all of whom are credible Malaysians and most are Royal Military College-trained professionals of various colours and shades. A few are NGO professionals, but all of them are Christians. To date, none of them believe you or police updates about Pastor …
In the early 1980s, we at the National Institute for Public Administration (INTAN) hosted Professor Milton J Esman, one of two American professors who came to Malaysia as consultants to the government of Tun Abdul Razak, after the challenges of May 13th 1969, and introduced the concept of “development administration” to Malaysia. Their views, and …
In his book ‘Organisational Theory for Public Administration’, professor of public administration Mike Harmon quotes a real-life story wherein a young five-year-old boy in the US is battered to death by his stepfather. Although most, if not all, of their neighbours had heard of and knew about the wrongdoings, no one spoke up until it …
To me, the word ‘idiocrat’ is my coinage for writing columns in Malaysiakini since about a decade ago. It describes those with power but falsely assume that “such authority alone” can resolve issues within any modern civil society setting; when others are equally smart, ie, we are all more aware as a community. The coinage …
As children we, the Merdeka Generation, all learned the Humpty Dumpty Poem. It was an egg-shaped figure that sat on the wall and one day had a great fall and the refrain is: “all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again!” Why so? The question why, is …
Time headlined a story for their April 3 issue entitled, ‘Is Truth Dead?’ Please see the picture below. This column will focus on ‘The Death of Common Sense’, a book by a former Harvard Law School dean, and reflect on today’s consequences of such a death of both the idea of objective truth and therefore also, …
