Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Azizan - A Clueless CM

Dato’ Seri Azizan Razak, Chief Minister of Kedah is known by rakyat of Kedah as a laidback person, humorous and transparent. For those who do not think far, the three attitudes are enough to win their votes. They somehow fail to realize that administering a state requires more quality then just those three attitudes. However, the Audit Report which was presented recently should really be an eye opener for rakyat Kedah due to their mistake in giving trust to the wrong person. The report clearly showed that Kedah is now in a tough spot only because its Chief Minister do not have any control nor knowledge over things that are happening in his state. This is a very big problem, not as small as how PAS tried to portray to rakyat Kedah. His weakness has cost Kedah such huge loss, which should not have happened if he were to take preventive measures since beginning. The audit found that Kedah CM has failed to identify high risk projects such as the farming project in Papua New Guinea. From nowhere, such big project continued with loan worth USD44 million from a foreign country without any signature from the Board of Directors. The loan was also signed without proper complete documentation. The same thing goes to 99 East Langkawi project which suffers damages only because it does not follow the agreement requirements, without any valid excuse. And I do not have to repeat on the appointment of unregistered contractors like what was revealed by the media. From there, it was then revealed the practice of cronyism as well as corruption in the administration level. This 'Ulama' CM also failed to ensure that religious matters are taken care of. The proof, Audit report found that halal certificates for Kedah in 2011 were awarded without any notice to the committee because the committee has never held any meetings. Instead, all of the halal certification process were done by YDP personally with the reason of the industry's interest, when he was questioned whether corruption was involved. All of these are simply shocking because it surpasses normal weaknesses in the history of state audit. Kedah is not a big state, it is slightly bigger than Perlis. In terms of industries, Kedah is still less developed to be compared to Penang, Selangor or Johor. With only a few projects annually, the state's financial activity is definitely not that active. In other words, a CM should not have missed any of these issues in the state. Thus, there should be no excuse for Azizan to deny his weaknesses. Azizan also can no longer blame the previous government considering that all of these projects which suffers 'bizzare issues' began as he took over. Not just that the projects which were 'approved' were simply irrelevant, the damages which occurs after it were also irrelevant. At the same time, Azizan could not even find any relevant projects which Kedah and its rakyat really need. For example, restoring tourism sites. Up until now, the only tourism site which can be considered as a pride for people of Kedah is Langkawi, even that was made possible by Tun Mahathir who PAS really hate. We are still yet to consider other issues such as KUIN or KCS where complaints made by staffs are left there without any actions taken from Azizan. Now, after everything is finally revealed in the audit, we cannot tell whether Azizan purposely ignore all of those issues or he really never knew about any of it. He did not even give any guarantee whether he would fix each of those issues which were reported in the audit. But, what he knows now is only to blame others and act as if he does not know anything.

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