Wednesday, January 24, 2007

For whatever its worth (32)

Early this month during a press conference in Putrajaya former PM Tun Dr Mahathir Mohammed briefly touched on the ongoing toll hike issue. Tun was reported to have said:

The cabinet is not made up of experts. They are made up by politicians and some politicians like myself can be very stupid. What happens when you have an agreement is that the officers make the agreement and the agreement is sent to the cabinet and usually the small print is not there.Cabinet merely passes on the basis of principle. They do not really study the implication of some passages in the agreement.I give you an example of the things that can happen when you leave it to the officers and the cabinet doesn’t study it very well.

I bring this issue up simply to convince myself that indeed we were once or perhaps are still being infested with cabinet members who are certainly stupid in light of todays headlines in the local mainstream papers.


Two former Tabung Hajis GMs will spend their remaining days in jail for cheating. The offence being (inter alia):

For cheating then ministers in the PMs Department Tan Sr Abdul Hamid Othman and Brig Gen (Rtd) Datuk Abdul Hamid Zainal Abidin between June 29 2000 and July 27 2001.

The presiding judge remarked that:

The two ministers involved would not have approved the investment (RM200 million) if they had come to know that material facts had been kept out of the knowledge of the board meeting.

We may question why didnt these ministers apply reasonable precaution before giving their approval as it involves a large sum of money. They could have checked and counter check with qualified personnel who are always available at their disposal.

But of course as Tun aptly put it:

Some politicians can be very stupid

In this unfortunate case, we couldnt but agree wholeheartedly with Tun that these two were surely stupid to allow themselves to be conned and as result RM200 million hard earned cash belonging to depositor were lost. Hamid Othman I believe is currently still the religious advisor to the current PM in Putrajaya while Hamid ZA is an MP.

If indeed the two GMs were guilty than they deserved the jail sentence but I wonder why no action were taken against these two stupid former ministers, and today they are still around stupidly earning salary and allowances from the taxpayers pockets!

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