Queueing strikes at corruption

Ooi Kee Beng The Straits Times Asia News Network Singapore

Abdullah Badawi's government starts off its second year with quick measures to rectify stalled government projects, handle corruption within Umno and in society at large, repatriate illegal immigrants and control traffic offences.

The apparent lack of confidence that the public has immediately shown towards most of these measures is largely due to their ad hoc nature.

The types of issues being dealt with are revealing in themselves and are a reality check, providing some understanding of why a new prime minister in a country like Malaysia has to put so much emphasis on raising educational levels and changing mindsets.

It is characteristic of national advancement today that the various arms of government function in accordance with clear rules and regulations that are flexible enough for the handling of new problems. This structure provides all parties, especially the common citizen, with a sense of security and legal predictability.

However, it is most vulnerable to corruption at the executive end. Unreliable enforcement turns the strongest political will into wishful thinking. That is why bureaucratic and police corruption is a more serious matter at the street level than political immorality is. In fact, an efficient executive arm would also work against political corruption.

In this respect, one may differentiate between a queueing society and a crowding society.

So-called advanced nations tend to be legalistic in character, and daily life is highly ordered and routinised. Their peoples are good at queueing, because queueing does get them to where they want to go while crowding does not.

Less standardised nations, on the other hand, tend to be marked by unmediated negotiations and the individual seizing and making of opportunities. There, crowding -- jumping the queue -- is culture, and effective.

This is best observed in traffic. On the road, risk-taking no doubt reaches irrational levels, but that is largely an extension of a general social condition where queueing will not get you far, and where crowding -- jumping the queue and being upfront where chances may be found -- is to be preferred, and is in fact in most other daily contexts rational.

One can approach the question of corruption either as a moral question or as a pragmatic matter. In the former case, one must assume that corruption is sufficiently distinguishable from honest governance, in which case all corruption, no matter how it is defined, is wrong.

In the latter case, corruption is wrong because it undermines the workings and the wealth of the state and of society, in which case it is best defined through its economic and political effects.

Electoral contributions are therefore generally not considered wrong if there is enough consent, silent or otherwise, among voters that they are necessary and that they will not overly influence political policies after the elections.

Such contributions reach astronomical sums in advanced democracies. Sophisticated and established channels for supporting candidates financially will therefore facilitate acceptance of electoral contributions, while unsophisticated and ad hoc methods are more easily classified as corruption.

The datuk epidemic that has reached painful levels in Malaysia, with both shiny and shady characters contending to deserve or buy a datukship, is another expression of this beat- the-system syndrome.

The entrenchment goes far beyond the failing mechanisms of government to infect the social culture itself, encouraging a mindset that understands crowding to be more rational than queuing.

National development is also about exclusion.

Illegal immigrants crowd national queues that are already threateningly vague and unstable. As with domestic maids, we need these people but we do not want to include them in our exclusive queues.

This ambiguity makes control extremely difficult, where labour is sold without basic rights being guaranteed. Mistreatment of the disenfranchised cannot but harden the country's socio- economic environment and must lead to an increase in violent and desperate crimes.

For standing in line to be something that people find worthwhile doing, the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms handling queues must be effective, transparent and responsible.

Queues are boring things, admittedly, but they are the surest symbol and guarantee of fairness and transparency modern societies have.

The possibility of jumping the queue is the genesis of corruption. Therefore, in a historical sense, governments can best quell the mob by queueing the crowd.

Having said this, we must also ponder the question whether a queuing society is what we want, and if not, how we can attain a society that is honest yet not regimented.

The writer is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.