The Bottomless Pit will always be there for so long as people who implement public delivery are recruited based on race quota than merits, attitude, jaguh kampong, work ethics, without aspiration and inspiration for Excellence. For then all look good on paper but when it comes to implementation, the opposite result. Look good it has always been. We plagiarise/copy current ideas/models from the developed world eg: Tun Dr Mahathir’s Look East (Japan Korea) & then Privatisation (from UK) but if feudal cultural attitudes don’t change, efficiency & delivery never happened and it soon led, as Prof Jomo said in 2003, to “20 years of privatizing profits and profitable public assets and socializing losses and liabilities”.. And when money and more money needed to be raised, next PM Tun Badawi came up with Private Financing Initiative (PFI) to get the private sector involved in funding government infrastructure projects based on deferred payment’s as profits in future rolled in- but never did, instead losses as PKFZ’s RM12 billion showed!

We can copy best current ideas and models for public management from the rest of developed world such as Mahathir’s Privatisation, Badawi’s PFI, Najib’s Blue Ocean but what is on paper that looks good cannot be translated into results if mindset & attitudes of those who implement are jaguh kampong and not that of developed world based on excellence, meritocracy, public accountability and governance…. The best ideas from global trend of public managerialism can easily be circumvented and subverted to bring about the worst results if implementation keeps being sullied, nay sabotaged by feudal laid back attitudes that prioritize looking good in form over delivering good in substance, and making use of private sector and public as a source of supplementing one’s income as part of the affirmative wealth transfer from haves to haves not. Ultimately, the best of ideas, systems and procedures won’t work if attitudes, work ethics and work ethos of people in charge of executing them are remote from any benchmark of “good” let alone best, and the bottomless pit persists turning as one commenter earlier said to the Black Hole! At macro level the British gave us institutions independent judiciary civil liberties parliamentary system under constitution monarchy but can these take root when cultural and feudal attitudes subvert circumvent and sabotage everything so that only form is there but not substance and spirit???

To correct wasteful, lackadaisical and corrupt prone attitudes, it is the government, which expression comprises leaders and decision makers, must take, and be pressured by their constituencies to take the lead. For that to happen, their constituencies, ie rakyat, must have a commonly shared value system placing importance on excellence integrity good governance and public accountability and united against wastage corruption and abuse of power. Only then can they collectively exert the requisite pressure on political elites/leaders and by extension the bureaucrats under them to deliver rather than pay lip service. However, this is not to be because rakyat themselves are deeply divided based on primordial loyalties to race, religion and culture which politicians – especially but not exclusively amongst those in power- could continually exploit for votes, keep bringing to the fore and force make comparisons and driving deeper schism and wedges between one racial/religious group as against the other groups.