Corruption Main Obstacle To Development Says Tun Mahathir

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 27 (Bernama) -- Corruption is the single most important obstruction to a nation's development, former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said today.
He said corruption was a social disease found all over the world and that no country was absolutely free from the menace and that in some nations, corruption had become institutionalised.
"And corruption is among the most difficult crimes to detect and even more difficult to gain conviction in courts of law. But corruption is the single most important obstruction to a country's development.
"Good decisions cannot be made and even bad decisions would face a lot of delays. In the end most of the investments for the development of the country just could not be made," he said his speech at the Global Competitive Forum at the Four Seasons Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The text of his speech, entitled "Sharing Malaysia's Experiance in Becoming A Competitive World Player", was made available to Bernama here.
The former prime minister pointed out that contractors for government projects were usually the principal victims of corruption and "just about anything which involves approvals by the authorities would be subjected to demands for illegal gratification."
"With corruption, cost must go up. How much it will go up cannot be ascertained. There is no rate for corruption and there is no certainty that after payments are made there will not be others who will demand for gratification.
"There is corruption in Malaysia, though it was still at the first stage during my time, that is, the corrupt officers still hid their acceptance because they feared being apprehended or they did not like doing wrong openly," said Dr Mahathir.
At this stage, he said it may still be possible to reduce corruption but when it reached the second stage, becoming part of the people's culture, and everyone, from the top to the bottom openly expect and accept bribes, little could be done to stop corruption.
However, he said corruption could be reduced although it cannot be prevented altogether.
"In Malaysia we insisted in shortening the process and the time for making decisions. This we did by introducing manuals of procedures for every type of work, by having work flow charts and desk files for every officer.
"If the time taken to approve or disapprove goes beyond that stipulated in the procedures we would be able to quickly know that something was wrong and we would know where the delay had taken place and the culprit involved," he added.
He said the result of this system was dramatic and suddenly the city of Kuala Lumpur grew, investments were approved, factories were built and all the infrastructure projects took off.
"Admittedly there was still some corruption but not to the extent that the development of the country could not take place or be grossly delayed," said Dr Mahathir.

photo courtesy of bro jinggo